D20 ish new class progression

[stuartheath]

In the d20 system if you have played your class straight through to max level and want to start a new core class (no retraining) it costs a ridiculous amount of xp to start at level 1, yes you get lots of feats but most characters at max level would already have most of them, has anyone seen a system or homebrew that could help

[reddir]

A few options, depending on what you are looking for:

1) Just keep going in the same class, take it to level 40 or higher if you like. The Epic Level Handbook gives guidlines on how the class could progress.

2) Unofficially, you can try including class features of other classes by way of feats - for example start stacking Sneak Attack damage dice with new feats for each new increment. You have to watch for several things with this - first they go up with each new feat incrementally - can't take the SA of a level 20 Rogue on the first feat, need to build it up over many feats; second, how to determine the needed number of feats or prerequisites for Druid Wildshape which starts at level 5?

3) Much less supported... buy up levels in a new class as a sort of gestalt, where it runs next to your main class progression rather than on top of it. Lots of ways to do this, but look at Unearthed Arcana for one form of gestalt. You need to agree on an appropriate xp cost for this, from cost of next level in the main class to some fraction of cost of next level in the main class to the 'normal' cost of that level in the new class without regard for the main class level. Also, what Level Adjustment to use if it seems necessary?

[ExLibrisMortis]

I'm not sure what you're asking. Yes, wizard 20/cleric 1 is bad, but you can just not take the cleric level.

[tomandtish]

It has to be expensive, or else people would primarily multi-class, since you'd catch up much quicker in levels.

Case in point: It requires 19.000 more XP to go from level 19 - 20 as a wizard (or any class for that matter). But if XP started over based on level, you could add 6 levels of another class for that same XP (and be pretty close to 7). So for that 19,000 you can be wizard 20, or wizard 19/Class X 6.

This is magnified at epic levels, especially since direct class gains tend to decrease overall. Assume a 20th level wizard. It takes 245,000 more XP for that Wizard to reach level 30. For that same 245.000, they could be a 21st Wizard/21st something else.



Right or wrong, the system works under a default assumption: That characters of roughly the same total class level are roughly equivalent. The Fighter 5/Rogue 5 is supposed to be equivalent to a Wizard 10. In practice (and especially with any reasonable optimization) we know this isn't true But it is what the system is designed for.

And because of the XP penalty for multi-classing (not counting prestige and favorite classes), we can also assume that they expect multi-classing to be done as you go and roughly evenly, as opposed to maxing out something and then starting again.

Generally, the most common way to alter multi-classing is with Gestalt characters. Of course, if you're doing that then pretty much everyone multi-classes anyway.