Multi-Class & Dual-Class
Most heroes pick one calling and master it. Some pick two — and the price they pay, and the power they earn, is the subject of this chapter. The game offers two distinct routes to a second craft, one for the demi-human folk and one for humans.
Multi-class: born to two crafts
Multi-classing is the demi-human road — open to elves, dwarves, gnomes, halflings, and half-elves, whose long lives and flexible natures let them train in two (rarely three) callings at once. An elf fighter-mage, a dwarf fighter-cleric, a halfling thief-mage — the compendium lists which combinations each race may carry.
How it works:
- Every drop of experience is split evenly between your classes, so you advance in all of them at once — but slower than a single-classed ally of the same total experience.
- Hit dice are averaged when you gain a level. A fighter (d10) and mage (d4) average to a d6, so you are tougher than a mage and frailer than a fighter, and you roll that average die each level.
- You keep the best of everything. Take the best THAC0, the best saving throws, and the usable abilities of each class. A fighter-mage fights nearly as well as a fighter and casts like a mage.
- The restrictions stack. Where the classes disagree about what you may do — most restrictive armour, strictest weapon limits — the stricter rule wins. A wizard half cannot wear the armour that would block its spells.
The trade is plain: you lag behind the party's curve for a long while, then surge past at the top when your single-classed companions hit their ceilings — because your two classes cover each other's weaknesses. Multi-classing is the campaign-minded choice, built for the player who thinks in months of sessions, not one fight.
Dual-class: the second life
Dual-classing is the human road — a human who has mastered one calling sets it down and begins another from first level. This is the story of the old soldier who takes up holy orders, the retired thief who learns the blade.
The gating is strict:
- You must have a 15+ in the new class's prime requisite (the ability score its work turns on), and a 17+ in the old class's — dual-classing is only for the exceptional.
- You stop advancing in the first class the moment you take up the second. Its level, hit points, and abilities are frozen as they are.
- You begin the second class at 1st level, fragile and humble all over again.
- You may not use your old class's abilities at all — no casting the old spells, no old combat mastery — until the new class exceeds the old class's level. Only when your second calling outgrows the first do you regain what you set down.
The price is real: a long stretch of being less than you were, a hero humbled to first level. The reward is a genuine second life — the depth and flexibility of two mastered crafts, welded into one character who earned both. (At some tables the first class requires a 15+ too; the referee's word on the exact numbers governs your table.)
The same question, two answers
Multi- and dual-classing are the same impulse — "I want to be more than one thing" — answered for two different folk. The demi-human multi-classes by splitting a single lifetime into parallel crafts; the human dual-classes by sequencing two whole lifetimes back to back. One grows sideways in lockstep; the other grows in chapters, each chapter complete.
Advising the would-be hero of two trades
Choose thoughtfully. Multi-classing asks for patience — you will feel behind the party for many levels, and you will need a combination whose abilities genuinely reinforce each other (the fighter's combat, the mage's magic; the cleric's healing, the thief's reach). Dual-classing asks for humility — you surrender what you built to build it again, and the surrender only pays off if you have the years (and the referee's permission) to climb back up. Both are among the most rewarding ways to play a hero, and both are entirely optional. The single-classed hero who does one thing superbly is never a lesser choice; the game is richer for both kinds of excellence at the same table.