Freezing everything but features past level 10?

[TyGuy]

Hypothetical. Everything is normal to level 10. Level 10 is the "max" but PCs continue to unlock features, i.e. things in the features column of the class table.

So things that are multipliers of level are frozen at 10 and extra columns like rage damage, sneak attack dice, and even spell slots are frozen at 10.
Features like brutal critical and extra attack(3) along with subclass features continue to progress.

Who's the biggest losers and winners in this? I see warlock getting a huge leg-up over full casters with mystic arcanum. Rogue gets poor damage scaling into the phantom levels past 10.

[Anonymouswizard]

Dedicated casters lose out big, because so much of their power is tied up in spells known and spell slots. They get a ton of dead levels while martial characters keep gaining abilities. The casters who have it best are Warlocks, because they still get the encounter ending spells.

Stopping levels at 10 isn't bad though, and you could probably package several high level features into Feats. Then just give characters a new ASI every YXP in an E10 deal. You'd need to play around with it to find out what's balanced and what needs to be limited to certain classes, but some things should transition to Feats without much in the way of alterations.

[MoiMagnus]

Freezing spell remove the main reason for people to want to continue be a full spell-caster after level 10.
I'd 100% multiclass rather than playing the level 11-20 of a (non-warlock) full spellcaster without its level 6+ spells, which would be underwhelming and boring.

I'd happily take the features of the fighter class, even if I don't use any weapon, over the level 11-20 of wizard without its high level spells. (And I'm saying fighter as that's the first thing that come to my mind, but I'm sure there is way better).

[sithlordnergal]

Hmmm, Warlocks would benefit a ton from this, since they basically get to keep their high level spells, and become the only class able to get high level spells. All of the other full casters lose out though. Monks also end up screwed over big time by this, as their Damage Dice and Ki Points are on separate columns. They'll be stuck dealing 1d6 damage with their unarmed strikes and only get to have 10 Ki Points to use, which isn't really enough at higher levels. The Ranger also loses out quite a bit since they only get to have 6 spells known, and are stuck with 4/3/2 spell slots.

This won't really change certain classes, such as Paladins or Moon Druids. In fact, its kind of funny, this sort of change would do almost nothing to a Moon Druid since their Wild Shapes are not determined by a separate thing. Sure they lose out on 6th level spells and higher, but outside of that they still gain literally everything.

All in all, probably a poor idea. It weakens full casters sure, but it hits the Monk so hard that I can't imagine anyone would ever want to bother with them under that set of rules. Even full casters would be able to do something with their 5th level spells, but Monks don't have anything they can really do.

[Greywander]

This sounds a lot like a houserule I have that allows you to spend epic boons to take extra class levels at 20th level. Your character level stays locked at 20, which mostly only affects HP and proficiency bonus, but you can pick up additional class features. Your caster level also can't exceed 20, so you don't get any extra spell slots from stacking two full casters.


So things that are multipliers of level are frozen at 10 and extra columns like rage damage, sneak attack dice, and even spell slots are frozen at 10.
Features like brutal critical and extra attack(3) along with subclass features continue to progress.
This seems like a strange rule to me. From my point of view, those extra columns are class features. In fact, most of them are literally written into a class feature and say that they scale with level. I understand that you want to lock certain aspects of progression at 10th level, but this way of doing it is weirdly asymmetric. These things depend on your class level, not your character level. If you only lock the character level, then HP and proficiency bonus will stop scaling, as well as anything that explicitly depends on your character level (like cantrip scaling), but anything that scales with class levels would continue to scale normally.

What you're trying to do and my houserule above are a bit different, and that difference makes it tricky to compare them or find a solution. With my houserule, all I had to do was figure out a way to keep taking class levels without affecting your character level. For your thing, it's different because the rules expect your character level to be at least as high as your class level. For example, I have another homebrew for a gestalt-multiclass hybrid where only your highest level in a single class counts towards your character level, and it works pretty well. This is because you never get a class level that is higher than your character level, even though the sum of all your class levels might be higher.

The problem is allowing someone to take a class all the way to 20 while only letting them be 10th level. If they could only take a class to 10th level, but could still take a total of 20 class levels (e.g. raising two classes to 10th level), then a lot of the weirdness goes away. Otherwise, you're left having to decide if things like spell slots, sneak attack, ki, etc. continue to scale after 10th level.

I'm not really sure what you're trying to accomplish, though. Is it enough for you to simply cap HP and proficiency bonus at 10th level? Or do you specifically want to cap certain features like spellcasting? Why do you want to cap things at all? What problem is this meant to solve?

As far as winners and losers, fighters and warlocks seem to get off pretty easy, while almost everyone else gets kneecapped. It's not just casters, monks lose their speed increase, martial arts die increase, and ki gains; barbarians don't do too badly but do miss out on extra rages and rage damage; rogues of course miss sneak attack; ranger and paladin cap out at 3rd level spells have have dead levels at 13th and 17th level (when they would normally gain 4th and 5th level spells). This also begs the question: how does multiclassing work? Can I take two classes to 10th level and get the full benefits, or would I only get the benefits from one class?