The Marshal Revitalized

[Deepbluediver]

Like spellcasters. They're always getting something new and exciting at every odd level. Fighter? Doesn't. Marshal? Doesn't. Paladin? All their cool stuff stops at levels 4-5 (depending). Monk? None of their stuff is cool enough to keep you going.

I assure you, this is most definitely a concern of mine. If you need proof- take a look at my revisions of the monk: http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showt...7-Monk-Fix-2-0
Specifically, the path abilities. Some things like unarmed damage, falling distance, feats, etc, you do just get more off, but you all get a brand new Path Ability every 4 levels. There are 15 abilities, each variety of monk gets the options of 10 of them, of which they pick 5 over the course of leveling up. So lots of room for variety and replay value.
They all scale with level and vary between such things as- letting your monk wear armor, have a healing touch, restore spell levels, use telekinesis, reverse time, etc.

I (vaguely) understand not wanting people to dip your class*; however, capping a bonus feels punitive.

It IS punitive, but only if you dip lots of classes very shallowly. By level 6 and up, or even earlier, the cap has basically started to go away. I've rarely, if ever, seen someone with a build that gets a +20 stat modifier to any stat, even temporarily. If it was for something critical to a build, like a Power-Attacking fighter, then I wouldn't cap it.

To use a metaphor, imagine that you were being paid some amount of money for the work you did, but then your boss said they could only give you some of that because you were in X position in the company. But when you get a promotion, more of that money will get to you! Don't you feel great?

I'm a contract employee, which means my firm charges the client a flat rate and then gives me some fraction of that. Your analogy pretty much exactly describes the way things work.

Base classes with anti-dipping measures like capping ability score modifiers feel very weird and out of place because the original classes were always designed to enable multiclassing.

I definitely want to keep things WORKABLE for multiclassing, but I'm wary of imbalancing things on the lower end of the scale. With stat-bonuses being what they are, someone who's going half-and-half, or even dividing between 3 separate classes, won't face much, if any penalty. I'm worried about someone taking 1 or 2 levels of 5 or 6 different classes to grab a whole bunch of early-level bonuses, or making a class that is appealing for EVERYONE to take 1 or 2 levels of.

The caps are rare, and only for things that I consider absolutely necessary. They would not show up on every class or even on MOST classes.

To address Seerow, rather than the off-topic argument I'm having with deepbluediver (which I feel like we've had before)...

I don't recall you having this specific discussion with me, but it sounds like the kind of thing that would be common to discuss.


Edit: Sorry, I didn't mean to go that off-topic- I just got a little caught up in the moment.