Cross Classing in D20 Games - At What Cost?

During a game of "Conan" recently an interesting debate arose concerning Cross-Classing.

Cross-classing is the D20 mechanism by which (mostly) players earn levels in more than one character class, giving them the benefits of each at the levels they have earned. This allows, for example, a Fighter to also dabble in Druidic matters, or a Cleric to become (for whatever reason) particulalry sensitive to the ways of the Ranger.

The altruistic reason for allowing this is so that the rather artificial boundaries set by the D20/D&D "class" mechanic are blurred into a more "natural" model. The real reason is so players get buff in skills and natural abilities they otherwise would stand no chance of having at all.

It also buggers up the designed-in "nerfing" that each character class has to impose some limits on how players can behave in the game. Players, naturally, desire their characters to be renaissence men, women and werecreatures, able to turn their hands/paws to anything their little hearts desire without any hindering considerations of character background. Character classes are (partly) designed to build in reasonable limitations to character abliities (in the general sense rather than the specific D20 sense of that word). A Fighter cannot cast spells because he/she has been too busy learning to fight to pick up the knack, or has no latent ability with The Art. Cross-class that Fighter by giving him/her a level or two of Sorcerer and we have the beginings of a DM headache. Go to the cross-classing lengths some people do and that escalates into a migrane.

Which is not to say it shouldn't orta be. Cross classing makes otherwise boring character classes fun again. Of course, it does spread the perception that some classes, such as "Fighter" exsist solely to be used as a springboard for cross classing, which makes seeing a vanilla Fighter in D&D a rare thing. But with a bit of thought and a firm DM hand to keep it from getting stupidly daft, cross-classing is a bedrock part of D20 that I for one wouldn't want to see gone from the game.

The debate on Sunday arose in part because Conan encourages players to cross class. D&D has built in penalties for cross classing, but Conan removes those penalties and replaces them with benefits accrued from choosing a so-called racial "favoured class". Cross-classing incurs no penalties a-la D&D, and is much cheaper for the player in terms of Experience Point (XP) cost.

What the debate centered on (and it became quite heated I can tell you) was the XP cost that should be incurred for the new class levels.

D20 family rules that allow for cross classing usually (I don't know of one that diverges from this model, but I'm not widely read in D20-based rulesets) have it that your next character level costs whatever it costs to go to the "next level".

I'll explain that.

If you are, say, a 5th level Barbarian, and you've earned enough XP to ascend to 6th level barbarian but instead elect to "buy" a level of Thief, it costs 15,000 Experience Points (XP) according to the D20 escalation of XP costs per level. If you had bought that level of Thief for your inital character build at first level, it would have cost you 0 XP. If you had bought it for your third level it would have cost 3,000 XP. These costs are laid out in the Conan rulebook on page 40 (I think) and the D&D 3.5 Player Manual on page 9 (I think). In short, you pay the cost of the aggregate level you have achieved, but you buy the lowest "next level" you are entitled to.

One of the players felt this was monstrously unfair. He was buying a "first level", it should cost what a "first level costs" (that would be 0 XP of course, but he was under the impression it was 1000 to be fair). The DM was undecided on the matter. I felt, and still do, that it is a no-brainer. If you apply the cheaper costs, you invite hyper-characters skilled in everything under the sun, because although the maximum a player can gain is one level, the rewards at the character's other class suggested challenge rating (which is what the DM uses to set the reward levels) virtually guarrantee levels of XP remuneration that exceed the "Levelling Cost" for those low levels by many times. The rule is that a player may gain one level and retain enough XP to carry him/her to within one point of the next level. all other XP are lost. So far, so what? A player will end up earning 12 zillion XP and only being able to use 1000 of them. What's the big deal?

Consider the high-level player character who now goes out and about slaughtering otherwise puny enemies so he/she can level up in cheaper cross classes. The high levels of destruction the player can command far exceed anything an appropriate challenge for a low level character can bring to bear, making for a meaningless dice-fest.

Consider also the high-level Sorcerer who earns a bajillion XP, then asks Ron Innocent, unsuspecting DM if he may "burn some XP" as wishes for better stats, then buys a cheap low level in a cross class. The minmax potential is considerable.

I don't believe the D20 rule on this is in any way "broken". A level costs what a level costs. It is an abstraction anyway, and the extra class features that spring into being when a cross class is taken more than make up for any perceived "overcharging". But far more importantly, the "costs what it costs" version is easy to keep track of and reduces the anti-cheataccidental slip of the pen bookkeeping the DM must do to keep the game on track.

I would be interested in hearing what others think though.

Unfeasible Deck Size

Another game I have that suffers from this "Oversize Deck" problem is Munchkin.

I don't mix'n'match Munchkin games. I have the original and the Cthulhu variant, and never the twain shall meet. I do, however, have six expansions added to the basic Munchkin game, making for a Door Deck climbing towards 5 inches tall. This poses two major problems:

Firstly, the largest deck, the Door Deck (Munchkin calls for two decks, the so-called "Door" and "Treasure" decks), threatens to collapse all over the playing area as the players get more animated.

Secondly, the decks are impossible to shuffle in one go. They have to be broken down into four or five smaller packages in order to shuffle them.

Short of investing in a motorized card shuffler (and don't think I haven't thought about it) the shuffling problem is par for the course. But I think I can do something about keeping the decks propped up.

Two Ideas suggest themselves. The first is a simple box in which the cards are dropped in an upright manner so that they sit on one of their short edges and lean back against the back of the box. This has the problem that the deck is thicker than a card is tall, so I'll either have to break the deck in pieces and only stack one piece at a time in a smaller box or put up with the cards slumping into a larger box once enough have been removed during play. Not optimal.

The second idea involves having the cards in a spring-fed shoe, rather like the ones seen in the Sean Connery "Bond" movies. The design could be different. A box open on one of the short sides with a spring-tensioned base and a slotted lid would do the same job.

But then there's the problem of the discard pile. It has to be looked after too since some cards allow players to root though it looking for particular cards.

Back to the drawing board.

Arkham Horror Space Woes

The New "Innsmouth Horror" expansion set has finally been distributed.

Like each of the <Blahblah>Horror expansions for this game, it is packaged in a box of about the same dimensions as the original game, and contains several additional cards for the existing decks as well as a fan of entirely new decks of cards to add to the game along with a board expansion of around 1/3rd the size of the base game board.

Put four people round a table to play this game and the problem becomes one of finding enough space for the player cards, status display sheets, various tokens that indicate money, sanity and health and I don't know what-all else, The card display for the big monster, the board, the extra board and the two dozen card decks now required to play the blasted game.

I've said elsewhere that FFG could have gone the "Formula One" route with the player displays and made them gust-of-air proof either using dials or pegs to keep track of the various customizable settings each character has. That would, of course, have driven up the cost but would also have made for one component that could be stood upright to save space. Ditto the main monster display.

But the board aside, the biggest consumers of table real estate are the card decks.

The cards vary in size. Some are the size of Pinochle cards, some about half that.

If only some way could be found to stack them in such a way that they use less space while still being easy to reach and draw cards from.

I'm working on this, but the old brain is not co-operating (as usual). I'm thinking that some sort of stand in which decks of cards can be stood on end at an angle would work. I originally thought of a slotted wooden stand, but the slots would have to be very wide to accomodate some of the decks, and there are no two decks of the same thickness, leading to more wasted space. Not only that, these bolt-on expansions always add a few inches to the overall deck thickness. Whatever it ends up looking like, the stand must be able to cater for this factor.

It's a puzzler and no mistake.