Training Before Gaining New Class Abilities

I’ve been discussing my idea for merging the rules for changing classes and nonhuman multiclassing in a couple other places, and there may be a need to further limit having more than one class. As it stands, it takes longer to add a level if advancing in more than one class, and hit dice or hit points can be much lower than you’d expect for a given number of experience points. But some people have expressed the worry that making it easy to add a second class and keep the benefits of both means that players will always choose to add a second class, regardless of which classes are available.

One possible solution: require more in-game roleplay challenges to truly use an added class. For a character’s first class under standard rules, it’s assumed that:

• Fighters know how to use all weapons
• Magic-Users know all 1st level spells (or have a free spellbook containing multiple spells)

When adding these classes as a second class:

• New Fighters have higher combat ability with any weapon they already know, but must train with other weapons they want to learn
• New Magic-Users must locate spells to add to a spellbook before they can cast spells

New Thieves aren’t as limited, but you might require some training before picking up the class abilities. New Clerics might require locating spellbooks or not, depending on how you interpret cleric spells.

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