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If you're running a gestalt game in 5e then it's actually simpler because of how the game plays. You challenge your party by increasing the hit points or grabbing creatures of 1-2 higher CR. Because a lot of the late game creatures are just piles of meat that you can beat all day, the gestalt idea works. There is no automatic win situation until your characters get ahold of wish consistently. So for about 17 levels you can seriously challenge players. So to give an example : Let's say your party starts at lvl 1. You would double the number of creatures that you would normally throw at them (excluding boss monsters they would be thrown at 1-2 CR higher) you can do really well with that combo till your party gets lvl 3 spells. Once your party hits level 5 you will need some meatier monsters. Lots of ogres, giants, and trained bullettes to give encounters more bang. Once your party hits level 11-13 you'll need to make sure to not be afraid to hit your party with 3-4 CR higher because most creatures will have tons of hit points and your players will be in the range to hit capstone traits in their class paths. So I have run gestalt campaigns (because it let's me get players through low level without hating it) and it's super fun
@@LecherousCthulhu if I'm honest with you this sounds like regular 5e since the characters are so op and the cr system so totally not a challenge that this would be ok for single class characters.
You guys have me for your kickstarter. As a DM that started out last year, this channel has helped so much, so a published book... yeah, I’ll pay that forward. The giveaway is just the icing on the cake.
My wife and I played a large sized, two-headed Dragonborn in a one shot. I was a Bronze Barbarian and she was a Red Sorcerer. Each of us had one dominant arm. I could rage while she still casted, but I controlled our movement when raging, which she didn’t always agree with. It wasn’t a full “gestalt” build, as it was still two players playing two characters, but it’s the most fun we ever had in a one-shot. I’d love to refine this character for play in a longer campaign.
DM who actually runs his games with gestalt here! In the first 5e campaign I ever DMed (which I did by the book), the party's valor bard decided to be a bro a step up and fill for the party's deficits and spent his level 4 in rogue (The party had no rogues), and the thanks he got for this he got a delayed ASI and a delayed second attack, kind of gimping him for levels 4-6. I saw this and decided "Never again". Since then, I have gestalt as the default multiclassing option for my campaigns. Gestalt multiclassing combined with permissive homebrew really enables PCs to make any kind of character they want, which is something I encourage. This obviously has implications for balance, but I firmly believe that heroes should feel powerful and cool and "unique", and their challenges should scale with their power anyway. As a DM, I like having powerful PCs because it means I get to use a wider range of challenges for them; more toys for the PCs to play with means more toys for the DM too! I don't force it on anyone, for example the nature paladin didn't want to multiclass at all but he was interested in having a bear as a mount and that helped him keep up in powerlevel quite a bit (It sort of "leveled up" with him and eventually got armor and equipment and got the stats a dire bear). But for my players who are interested, the ideal way I like to handle it is to sit down with them at character creation and whip up a customized leveling progression with them, which includes whatever class / subclass / homebrew features they're looking to get, and maybe occasionally revisiting it down the line if their character has some kind of changing moment or the player changes their mind or whatever. For dealing with MAD, I use a very permissive way to roll stats to begin with (7 times 4d6 drop the lowest, take any 6 for your stats), and that dovetails with my philosophy that heroes should be strong and special anyway. The biggest upside of all of this, in my mind, isn't a gain in mechanical power but freedom to make the exact character you want to make. Highlights I've had over the years include a monk + fighter with that homebrew gunslinger fighter subclass for a cool gun-monk, a monk/barbarian character whose personal progression centers around trying to control his anger problems and achieve tranquility even though the world around him seems hellbent on ruining that for him, a fighter who picked up underdark-specialized ranger after dedicating himself to the impossible task of ridding the underdark of evil, etc etc. That druid/monk you guys described sounds cool as hell and I'd gladly welcome one of those at my table
You know what? I like you I heard of Gestalt like 3 days ago and I was like "what! THIS IS INSANE but THAT'S THE POINT!" I would love to finally make the "Death knight" character fighter cavalier/ wizard necromancy school of magic
For me, Gestalt's the go to if you are playing a module solo along with additions for solo roleplay, otherwise youd be screwed. Kinda wish I joined a session manned by a DM who's as open to homebrew as you are.
@@rpgchronicler the coolest character I ever played was a Gestalt, with two homebrew classes, one class was based around cool magical martial arts that the Monk couldn't even imagine, and the other one was a half caster who got abilities that made themselves stronger the less health you had
I am talking to you now and not moving my mouth! I am very skilled and smart and they are calling my name, and the name they are calling is ABSEEERRRDDD!!
My first gestalt character in 5E was a half orc way of the open hand monk and battle master fighter. Urg Tzu was the king of battlefield control. Whirling about the fight leaving everyone prone while the assassin/shadow monk went full ninja by stabbing the prone enemies.
battlemaster/rogue (maybe swashbuckler for the sneak attack or arcane trickster for the little bit of magical utility?) you just always do tripping attacks, then activate sneak attack on that second. if they're prone, you have advantage to get that higher crit rate, while if theyre still standing, you have swashbuckler to get that sneak attack anyway
as someone who has DM's several Gestalt campaigns, that... depends on the class combo. While its true that characters that rely on action triggered abilities don't get that much more powerful overall, Classes that stack static automatically triggering effects or effects that trigger only AFTER an attack roll resolves become VERY overpowered, albeit for short bursts in most cases, Consider Hexblade warlock / Paladin uppon reaching level five and taking Eldritch Smite, the player can trigger BOTH smites on a single attack roll, as neither ability requires an action to activate. Further, the d&d wiki version of this allows normal MC within each "half" of the character build allowing you to also throw in say, Rogue for Sneak attack. this can result in a character that can BURST for rather Stupid amounts of damage. making most normal monsters with average Hitpoints relative to the CR for the party rather susceptible to on hit KO. and if you have some players with this sort of build and others with the 'many action options' build, the latter will likely become upset at that 100+ damage on a crit the lvl 5 palylock did. sure, he's burning 2 LVL 3 slots each round to do it, but all most players are going to see in that moment is that massive pile of d10s being thrown across the table.
@@daemosblack As someone who has also ran a few Gestalt campaign, definitely agree that it depends on the combo. I had a player who ran a Totem Barbarian/ Scout Rogue gestalt, no MCing, and it was an absolute terror.
@@cenauge yeah rogue barbarian is a pretty beastly combo - because the wording of sneak attack is such that while you need weapons that benefit from dex (ranged or finesse) to trigger the ability, you don't ACTUALLY have to attack with dex - thus with pretty much the same Stat set up as a normal Barbarian you get a guy running around doing sneak with rage every round. how do I know he's getting Sneak every round? why Reckless Attack of course, which gives him an at-will way to ensure he gets that advantage to trigger sneak attack. - current campaign im running has an ancestrial guardian/inquisitive rogue in fact
As long as Gestalt Characters take "averages" in exchange for accessing all abilities/feats from all classes. Then it will be on par with Multi Classing since Multi Classing do not take averages because on how Multi Classing works.
@@daemosblack If you keep the rule "to prepare spells per slots" and not allow spells be used outside of its spell pool, if any. Then, it's no different to Multi Classing.
When i was a teenager, all of our games were gestalt. Alot of the time players would simply dump one of there classes so they could play as some creature with a high ECL adjustment.
᛬ᚹᛁᛚᚺᛖᛚᛗ᛫ᛋᛖ᛫ᛚᛟᚱᚾᛁᛝᛣᚾᛁᛉᛏ᛬ I like Magnus and Alpharius as well, although Space Wolves (and Leman Russ) are probably tied with Imperial Fists (and Rogal Dorn) as far as loyalists goes.
Having recently run a gestalt campaign with four players, I gotta say that the PC's never felt overpowered (granted, my players had to pick which saving throws they got, they didn't get both). It was more that they had more options, more things they could do, and that made it more fun. Instead of the Barbarian seeing every problem as an excuse to draw his sword, since he was also a Bard he'd use his words or a spell to get around a messy situation. For combat, treating each PC as 1.5x their level really helped with balancing and making fights a challenge. It was great fun, and I'm looking forward to our upcoming West Marches Gestalt campaign.
I just learned about gestalt a month ago and I really wish dnd beyond would support it! I play 1on1 games with my wife and it'd be amazing having her character be gestalt with the organization of DnD Beyond.
Gestalt, to me, seems like it's all about versatility. Sure, the HP go up on average, and the saving throws are basically not functionally different than hanging out with a paladin, IME. The real benefit here is OUTSIDE combat. Your fighter can buff herself and go into a fight and that's cool, but after the fight is over she can also identify her own loot and cast ritual spells, crowd control, environmental control, etc. That's a neat feel. But does it really imact the per encounter power of a character? Not outside a few reactions.
Joe Auerbach A paladin with a full casting class would have access to the max damage their smite could deal quicker, and increasing the available spells increases versatility and can lead to interesting combos, like polymorph into a brass dragon while activating righteous might.
@@danielpryce7126 to be honest to me the part of "...you can expend one paladin spell slot to deal radiant damage to the target..." kinda implies that they anticipated that gestalt gameplay will come up and they wanted to make sure that you can only use the slots of the according gestalt side. because otherwise i kinda dont know why they even mention what kind of spellslot you have to use, if a regular character has only one type of spellslot and multiclassed characters have this mixed spellslot list... only with a gestalt character you can actually differentiate what kind of slot you are using to fuel a spell.
@@TheScarvig straight off of dnd beyond it sais Starting at 2nd level, when you hit a creature with a melee weapon attack, you can expend one spell slot to deal radiant damage to the target, in addition to the weapon’s damage. The extra damage is 2d8 for a 1st-level spell slot, plus 1d8 for each spell level higher than 1st, to a maximum of 5d8. The damage increases by 1d8 if the target is an undead or a fiend, to a maximum of 6d8.
@@TheScarvig cool I had thought it said paladin slots before at one point to and remembered looking it up and seeing it was any plots. Probably trying to not restrict paladins multiclassing which instead just made them some of the best multiclasses in the game
The first "true" campaign I ever played in back in the days of 3.5, our DM Gestalted us.. still stands as the pinnacle of all games I ever took part in. We were powerful but man did he know how to keep the fear in us! Began the game as normal.. wrote up PCs etc.. started playing. and like 4-5 sessions in the event happened so we had to decide how to Gestalt the character we already had.. kept the power level down and made for interesting combos
Gestalt Pathfinder (1st edition) is hands down my favorite method of character creation. In my experience, it allows for the most unique concepts in post 3rd edition d&d style games. If your group is considering it, I recommend trying it out, especially if you have a particularly small or creative group. It's true that the many options and abilities of gestalt characters do outweigh their slightly improved statistics, though some discretion is advised as a player could create a nuke of a character with the right combination of abilities if they were so inclined. That's why I'd also recommend that a player first think of a base concept that a gestalt build could achieve before looking at specific ability combinations. My favorite gestalt build (again in Pathfinder 1st edition) was a gnome Alchemist/Barbarian (ragechemist) focusing on combing mutagens with raging. Basically Bruce Banner in d&d. A really fun concept but not without its drawbacks as he fell to the mist common obstacle that gestalt builds face: action economy. He usually had to spend 1 or 2 rounds buffing himself before he was truly firing on all cylinders. But once Bull Strength and the proper mutagen kicked in, he was a lot of fun.
why would you go beserker? go bear totem and take something like polearm master to get that bonus action attack. but now you're hella tanky on top of having all the damage.
@@coolnamebro7363 the battlemaster version is way more consistent; gwm's -5 to hit means nothing when you have both Reckless Attack and Precision Attack
Remember that GWM feat already gives a bonus action attack if you crit, so I would choose a different path for the barbarian. I played a lvl 18 champion/2 barbarian for a lvl 20 one-shot once which was already increadable.
You asked--"did anybody ever actually play like this?" We did. Not a ton, but a few campaigns of it--we even had a setting built around it. It was a blast! We never heard about gestalt characters until the end of 4e, with the advent of other things like hybrid characters, themes, backgrounds and all that other great stuff that folks don't remember because they're so caught up in how much the powers system sucked (and...yeah it kind of sucked but the rest was great). Our experience with gestalt wasn't so much that the characters were more powerful, so much as that you had so many more colors to paint with. I had a dragon samurai (Paladin + Druid) that could actually transform into a dragon and a halfling freedom fighter (Warlord + Bard) that was great at commanding and swaying the hearts of people. All the characters we got from gestalt were so flavorful--and there was so much diversity because of the freedom to swap different things together that you almost didn't feel like you weren't bound by classes. It was like, take a concept you like, find the two halves that could make that happen, and you could do it within the bounds of D&D. It was a heap of fun. We still pull the setting out and play it now and then.
That is a huge Give away, holy hell. Obviously I entered. :D Just wanted to congratulate you on your success in our sphere and wish you the best of luck for your Kickstarter. Keep DM'ing. :)
The creator had a mental breakdown a few years ago, after winning the court case against his psycho ex-wife. The art went downhill for a time and then ceased completely. But his sons and his new wife remained awesome, so the creator finally started drawing again. The comic recovered. There are still a few pages from that time period that are missing full color shading, but the comic now has a professional colorist. And the comic *appears* to be nearing its climax.
@@WisdomThumbs Oh man... I can't remember when I stopped reading it, but that breakdown must have happened after I stopped since he was still keeping a decent schedule. Wow.... I'm glad he's recovered and is doing well now. I'll have to see if I can donate to him for all of his great work considering it was the very first online comic series I really got into (after Nuklear Power's 8-Bit Theater). I'll have to start over again since I only have vague mixed memories of the story (I think the crazed Perma-Barkskin Ranger was finally killed when I stopped, though I can't be sure because of the different storylines going on). Thanks for the info!
I DM'd a 3/3.5 gestalt game with the paladin-monk taking vow of poverty from Book of Exalted Deeds. That did not last beyond one session for many reasons. Honestly though, gestalt characters can be nice for running games with only 1 or 2 players. 3 is pushing. It does allow for the DM to throw more stuff at the PC's, but be aware you're going to have to up your game as a DM.
My biggest wish list is to play a 3x Gestalt as Eldritch Knight Fighter/Arcane Trickster Rogue/Battle Mage Wizard. Inspired by Fighter/Mage/Theif from 2e.
Im really surprised i didnt see a rogue/monk combo come up. I am currently playing in a gestalt game as a kobold rogue(assassin)/monk(way of shadow) and its amazing. I dumped my str and went full dex. Monks can use shortswords and they count as finese for rogue sneak attack. Im mega stealthy. At 6th i have a 11 stealth with out pass with out trace so i can practically never be seen. Flurry of blows can trigger off of my finese shortsword and because an ally is usually within 5ft i have advantage on all 4 attacks. Kriv is a damage dealing behemoth and he is only 3 feet tall.
i'm a bit surprised you guys didnt mention gestalting the same class since there's subclasses in 5th. have a light and forge cleric or some other weird combo
@@Zh337a When you think about it. Gestalt Characters is just its own Class from lv1 to lv20 with a few more feats/proficiency(s) but average everything. Multi Class is the same but you have to dip and there is no averaging to be done. Both versions still have to prepare their spells/spell pools in slots.
A great discussion of Gestalt, really interesting to listen to your thoughts I ran a 3 session long Ravenloft themed campaign with Gestalt characters (With pathfinder 1E) where all characters had one of their classes as either Cleric, Paladin, or Inquisitor, to really run home the idea of the Churches uniting to drive back Count Strahd von Zarovich. We had an Inquisitor/Wizard, Inquisitor/Monk, Alchemist/Cleric, and a Rogue/Paladin The characters are of course incredibly powerful, and with characters that all have some sort of bonus versus the undead they lent on that heavily however, it was really great in expanding on how a Wizard could be part of a church, and to see my players try and balance the RP of being X class as part of a religious order, was really fun to watch
Lots of great characters are gestalt. Such as Geralt of Rivia, The Dragonborn of Skyrim, the Hero of the Fable games, the guy from Dishonored, the hero from the Darksouls games...
Lorgar Bearer of the Word only one of those is actually a character. The rest are voiceless, personality-less, player inserts for power fantasy. Geralt is solid though.
@@Michael-bn1oi Same with DND characters. They only gain a personality if we give it to them, and most of the time gestalt characters are an exercise in power fantasy...
I don't agree that Gerald of Rivia has necessarily to be a gestalt character. At most it would be required to develop a subclass tailored to reflect what the books/games show about his powers, but I'm not certain this would actually even be required to model Gerald precisely.
And Darksouls are CLEARLY not gestalt. The handicapped snail progression alone kills this notion. And in DS you never gain two benefits for the price of one when leveling up.
A couple years ago, I was the GM for what I called a Divine Superheroes campaign. In this case, a gateway that had portals to all of the elemental planes and the material plane (the gateway was located on the material plane) was under attack by Devils and Demons. The Blood War had spilled onto this poor continent and both sides wanted control of the gateway. So our Divine Superheroes were called from their cryostasis to go and intervene. There were 4 players, using the Pathfinder system, and they triple gestalted while using an overpowered stat system: 18-18-18-18-14-12. The class combos broke down like so: Druid-Hunter-Cleric Fighter-Rogue-Barbarian Bard-Wizard-Sorcerer Summoner-Wizard-Hunter With regards to the animal companions/familiars, the players could either have multiple critters, each with their own class-based progression, or they could stack them for a more powerful critter. This resulted in the DHC having three animal companions (Wolf, Snow Leopard, Woolly Mammoth), while the SWH had a single, nearly indestructible eidolon/familiar/critter that started out as a large constrictor snake and eventually morphed into a dragon-like creature of unbelievable power. The BWS just had an overpowered familiar that gave massive bonuses to his saving throws and initiative. The campaign started off at Level 1 and progressed to around Level 15 or 16. To make it a challenge, everything they fought had class levels, even if they didn't make sense (though it did with the story). Imagine fighting an invisible Black Pudding Rogue (from Greater Invisibility) along with its Gelatinous Cube Bard, at level 5. Boss fights usually involved mooks that needed at least two Fireballs ore more to take them out, and the Boss would have a handful or more Mythic Tiers. The campaign ended "successfully" in that they managed to stop both the Devilish and Demonic incursions, but the King of Fire (an Elder Fire Elemental with 20 levels of Shaman and 10 Mythic Tiers) set off an arcane explosion that set the atmosphere on fire, initiated rapid climate change, and caused arcane ripples to reach out into space that woke up Cthulhu (that's an entirely different campaign). Overall, it was super fun, combats would take a loooooong time to play out, and were usually decided by crits on either side (the FRB 'died' a lot and got resurrected a lot). 10/10, would do again.
I'm not sure if this would be considered Gestalt, but I had a character concept where a young tiefling had seemingly split personality to the naked eye. She is a Grave Cleric that if they got too worked up or something too emotional happened (i.e. a party member dying) she would essentially lose consciousness and another personality would take over. I haven't gotten to test the character or talk with DM's too much about it but the other personality was originally supposed to be a soul who bound with the original to keep her sane, prevent her from seeing too much of the bad in the world and such. I tossed around the idea with a friend that the bound soul was either a different class entirely, or just a different cleric archetype. After a bit, the soul would give control back to the original. I figure since it's such a drastic need before the change can happen, as well as the only things that carry over through the switch is: spell usage and hit point max and loss as well as stats from the original. Class features from say, the soul being a barbarian for example, would not carry over when the original regains control and vice versa. Is that putting too much thought into character design? Or would that even be allowed?
I can’t speak for what your DM might allow, but one of my players once used the “Dual Soul” background from D&D Beyond’s homebrew list. Basically he was a half orc that switched between personalities. The main personality was the even tempered Grint, a Battlemaster Fighter. But, when Grint got knocked out (or sometimes just woke up after a night’s rest), the other personality would be in control: The trigger happy Gunsmith (a homebrew class), Burger. Not only did it as some fun variety to combat and character interactions, but it was really easy to do mechanically. Basically when he had a different character sheet for each personality. Their physical stats (HP, AC, Speed, Str, Dex, and Con) were shared, but mental stats and Proficiencies were unique between the personalities. And when ASI’s came up, he could either increase a physical stat, or increase one personality’s mental stat. That campaign (a pirate themed game) only ever got up to level 6 before it just kinda fizzled out, but for the time we did play it, I had fun seeing how my player would use the switching personalities and he had fun doing it. TL:DR; I don’t think you’re overthinking it, and it can be a really fun concept to play with.
@@charlottefurre1819 I appreciate the input. That does sound like it could be a pretty fun concept. The main soul would be calm and almost motherly, but the other soul while not being inherently evil, would want to get rid of whatever caused the switch by nearly any means neccessary; hes not a murderer, but if anything happens to main soul, he will kill everything in the room and then himself.
Paladin/Sorcerer both doubles down on strengths AND diversifies. Extra health from Dragon Bloodline if you take it, Charisma based spells on both sides, flight, haste, armor, hits hard from close up AND from far away, and possibly even casting Paladin spells with Sorcerer slots.
Favorite Gestalt character I've ran in a campaign was a couple of months ago using the sorcerer warlock Unearthed Arcana. Aberrant Mind and The Lurker In The Deep Sorlock Gestalt. A sorcerers apprentice that had come into contact with a very powerful trapped Aboleth after falling into a underground river system through a ruined well, instead of enslaving him a pact was formed to provide him with an agent capable of venturing back out into the world. Made for quite the interesting play experience, the two sub classes blended very nicely into this dark Cthulhu vibe.
This is reminding me a lot of a wizard subclass I wanted and tried to make where it's a muscle wizard, essentially Armstrong from Fullmetal Alchemist in a way where it's basically a strength based Monk combined with a Wizard and they can cast spells through their unarmed strikes and get unarmored defence and such, but I could never figure out exactly what abilities should be there or how to balance them. I wonder if creating a gestalt strength monk wizard combo would be a good exercise to get ideas
As someone who DMs a Gestalt game, I really like it, for one main reason: Can't find quite what you're looking for with the classes and want the mechanical support for an archetype? GESTALT. As you guys have mentioned in other videos, the "fluff" AND "crunch" of the mechanics and RP/Flavor for an archetype are very easy to have without sacrificing something (or having to wait a long time to get a normal multiclass online) with a gestalt character. I personally use a variation of Gestalt I found in PDF form for slightly more normal characters (power-wise) , such as giving them their choice of saving throws of the ones listed in both classes, such as two of STR, CON, WIS, and CHA. For skills, You get the largest number of skills between the two classes, and pick between both class' lists. Stuff like that; if anyone is interested, the version I'm talking about is a modified version of the one listed on the D&D wiki and its been a lot of fun to run (want to actually play in one though; gotta convince my crew to run a game gestalt so I can play in lol)
To me a gestalt build is a pair of builds fine tuned to each other for a single strong setup, but still able to run seperately Like a Cavalier fighter & Moon druid for bear cavalry, mounted combatant + sentinel = guaranteed opportunity attack
I like to offer warlock and sorcerer as a way of offering the gestalt option, I lean very heavy on the patron for the warlock, and for some of the bloodlines of sorcerer as a way of balancing it
Gesalting is actually a lot of fun. Once we found it in 3.5 we never played without it. Our DM just ramped up the monsters and the encounters. We just got to fight more awesome stuff all the time. We only took ASI's from one class. But the flexibility of the characters, especially in a small party is wonderful in trying to fill out roles for the party.
Gotta say gestalt sounds really fun as someone who's currently trying to make a warlock/sorcerer/paladin work. Honestly just the ability to come online sooner would be nice, it makes me wonder if there might be a further way to vary the idea of a gestalt so that you could make a more like multiclassing all at once rather than the flat out 2 in 1.
Take hexblade and you can hit with your Charisma, so you can be a super Intimdating grandfather yelling get of my lawn whilst wielding a Greataxe 2 Times your size Pure rage !
And because you dont have to max strength, you can max con or Take a feat. Hexblade also gives you hbc and shield proficiency If you dont want to Fight two handed.
Love Web DM. Entered your competition, and want to wish everyone luck! A win would be a fantastic for a lot of people who love the hobby or those that are struggling
Um... guys? I may have accidentally done this without knowing there was rule support for it. Just to fill in gaps in the party, I’m playing a half elven ranger/war wizard. I’m only level two at the moment, but it’s going well so far. Thanks for this one. It certainly answered some questions.
I'm normally a DM, but after dming for a year long campaign I finally have a chance to be a character I chose dragonborn sorcerer. so far and expanded spell list just seems to screw with their power progression. and I had trouble picking with spell I'm going to grab every level because I have so few, but I have a strong theme and with that in mind the sorcerer class has been a real blast. Pun intended because I'm all about explosive electrical magic But I'm sure wizard plus sorcerer is the bomb
I am currently running a game with Gestalt character's. Their second class required to be divine (Cleric, Druid or Paladin) and they are all apostles of an emerging pantheon. The game plot revolves around the faiths. Its actually worked quite well so far. The climactic battle of their first adventure resulted in them winning with one hit point left amongst the entire party of four characters. In other words, one person standing with one HP left. It was at that point that the players realised that they were not the super hero's they expected to be.
I’ve run several Gestalt games in 3.5 with the release of Unearthed Arcana back then and migrated it over to 5e upon its early conception. The game was amazing! All my players had tons of fun. As far as balancing goes, I just treated them as if they were 1.5x their actual level and it worked beautifully. Love that people are starting to talk about this again and I just might do another Gestalt game after my current campaign concludes itself!
My favorite gestalt character was a Hill Dwarf Eldritch Knight/Abjurationist Wizard with the Resilient(Dex) and Tough Feats. He basically had all the saves but CHA, the hp of a Barbarian, Heavy armor and Shields and defensive spells out the wazoo, the man was hands down the tankiest tank I've ever managed to build. He was also a full on Utility Wizard with all the in combat destructiveness and out of combat shenaniganry that implies.
I started running my girlfriend through Lost Mine of Phandelver and I helped her build a Druid/Ranger Gestalt character. I kind of mashed it together, giving her both hit dice but limiting selection of skills and only allowing three of the four saves that the two classes would allow for. I was sort of shooting from the hip on that, but she had a fair challenge and enjoyed the game. I'll have to rework her character at some point though.
After making a few gestalt characters I think what I like the most is the ability to have utility spells like Light without it taking away from my ability to do damage. You can have a decent list of damaging spells/effective martial attacks and have room to know and prepare utility spells that make non-combat interesting.
As a DM I played support character that was a Gestalt Cleric/Sorcerer in 3.5 . The party was combat only, this support character had 8 for every stat except WIS and CHA. It was only a caster, but it was a great caster.
I didn't know this concept even existed. Now I want to play a Bard/Warlock and make a cult of myself. My players will love doing one/two shots with this concept.
In 3e, I allowed gestalt with the primary class being single class, 1-20, and the second class could prestige. For 5e, I would only allow 1 class to multiclass, the other would be your primary from 1 to 20. I would limit saves and ASI to the primary class only.
(my spelling sucks) One of the online games I'm playing in has taken several interesting twists I feel fit into this. Started as an arcane trickster Stout Halfling rogue that went to level six before a serious event. DM played it off well having us suspend and start a second one. Played a vengeance pally fallen aasimar to level six to a convergence. Both combind but have to choose which to play (a lot of rp intended, and has been done over this.) Chose the halfling. Heavy ongoing character RP over present characters, memories, multiple personality disorders. The mechanics we were given: character has all ability scores (highest not combind,) skills, class, racial.....and everything else I'm failinging to remember combined besides HP(lvl6 rogue.) Still have to level as you would for the char you wished to so: 9 rogue (took lucky at 8)/6 pally. Stout halfing/Fallen Aasimar 9rogue/6pally..heavy burst...hard to hit, hard to effect, can reroll often...with self heals damn near unkillable; rapier HE(story,) +2 studded, +2 shield. Backed up by Pally/Warlock(who luck random rolled SG STR belt,) double healer, and three DPS that will take care of the field as long as I and the warlock provide distance; and I evade the 2-3 fireball like attacks they send me. That said it has been a roller coaster as we are mostly glass cannons with the HP. I love what my DM has done to make me, through my chracter, feel truly powerful while still making many moments feel like we are still gripping between life and death.
I love the idea of running a gestalt campaign by one of the classes have to be from monstrous hero’s . Make it a bad batch kind of deal . While the traditional hero’s ( human paladins, elven rangers, etc) are fighting the glorious battles in the daylight, the gritty monster hero’s do the dirty but necessary work to keep the world safe . The black watch from overwatch lore. Armorer artificer Minotaur, psi knife vampire , zealot barbarian black dragon. I’d love to dm that kind of group
Oh gestalt characters started in AD&D 2nd , they called it multi-classing then. But you were a member Of 1 or more character at the same time, you split the experience you earn evenly between both classes, which meant that you often were lower than monoclasses, and you averaged your HP gains, (so wizard fighter would have (1d10+1d4)/2)
Talking of crazy optimisation multiclasses in 3e, I once saw a halfling optimised for AC, with the taunt feat. He was almost completely unhittable, but dealt very little damage, but he'd just tumble all around the battlefield, taunting foes to make them attack and chase him, driving enemies insane.
A DM I played with for over a year implemented a kind of Gestalt ssytem of his own design around level 3 of our game. I wound up becoming a Ranger/Sorcerer, and for plot reasons later a Ranger/Warlock-Sorcerer, with most of my levelups going into the Warlock and Sorcerer classes instead of Ranger. It was a weirdly OP time.
My favorite Gestalt, tbh, is a Circle of the Moon Druid / Path of the Totem Warrior Barbarian. Raging while being transformed into a T-Rex or a Fire Elemental is very fun.
The true Mage, Cleric and Wizard, both divine and arcane magic at your fingertips, no longer shall petty gods or mortals restrain your access to cosmic power! Mithral no longer seems to affect weight or proficiency req, instead it just eliminates Dex disadv and Str reqs, so besides being able to wear it under your clothes, a Mithral Breastplate is the same as a normal Breastplate. Mithral Halfplate however is just as sneaky and can have +1 higher AC than Fullplate with MAM. However Mithral Fullplate is just as sneaky, doesn't require Str, and with HAM gives you 3 DR vs non-magic blunt/cut/pierce.
I ran a fast Pathfinder, mythic, gestalt campaign; it was fun the party was leveling quickly but I stayed on top of it. People tend to forget that when you build NPCs with levels they are also expected to be gestalt, and you treat save based enemies go down 1 CR. I do try to challenge my players but I also want to see how powerful they can get. If I see something amazing I do share with the players.
there are some gestalts in 5e that are absolutely insane, my personal favourite: Rogue Wizard. specifically Abjurer wizard. at level 11 reliable talent affects counterspell and dispel magic rolls, meaning with +5 intelligence you automatically dispel 9th level spells. with any level dispel magic/counterspell. at 11. its lovely
Had a Gestalt in 3.5. Two players. I had a cleric monk bugbear and the other player was a barbarian sorcerer cat person. They were crazy strong but usually you need time to prepare yourself for a fight. It’s hard to utilize both sorcerer magic and barbarian melee together without wasting combat rounds buffing yourself. So we planned more to use our powers to full effect. Also tried a Goliath monk battle mage. Which just meant half his punches also contained lightning bolt or some other brutal range spell that battle mages can cast when hitting with a weapon attack
Hmmm... I really like the idea of Paladin/Warlock. Especially in a roleplaying aspect. You're a paladin finding that the powers bestowed upon you by your faith isn't quite enough, and you wish for more power to better serve your god, so you seek out options and come across a pit fiend that convinces you to form a pact with it. And you slowly find the pact is far more costly to your faith. You have to try to find your balance between the two. Serve your god while serving your patron. That kind of struggle would make for some incredible dilemmas to navigate through. I love it.
I actually played gestalt in a solo game from level 1 - 5. I played Ranger - Paladin in 5th ed. I was going for a sort of Solomon Kane character concept, with a holy wanderer and tracker. It worked really well in a solo game, because I needed to be able to do everything myself. It was a lot of fun, but I don't think it would work well for parties larger than 2 players. You'd probably end up with a ton of overlap. Also at higher levels, I expect just the amount of abilities to keep track of would probably get overwhelming.
I can do you one better for an alpha strike. 3 Rogue(Assassin)| 3 Ranger(Gloom Stalker) 1-3 Paladin (Devotion)| 3 Fighter (Brute) 4-7 Paladin | 1-4 Mystic First round of combat, we get Divine Smite + Lethal Strikes + Brute Damage + Sneak Attack, 3 Attacks which Auto Crit, Action Surge for 6 Total. (4/8 If dual wielding). Almost all of our damage sources are dice so get multiplied by the crits. Devotion channel divinity gives a hefty boost to accuracy which will make us very happy very often.
I'm currently doing this to build a Gestalt PC based on Sephiroth (but not the same) mostly just for myself to enjoy, never to really play with anyone. Might even write stories eventually but who knows.
29:00 Kenseis actually can use two-handed weapons, just no heavy weapons. But there is only 1 melee weapon that applies to: the greatclub. Which means you won't get GWM and neither a d12 or 2d6 weapon, but the martial arts feature eventually increaases the greatclub's damage from 1d8 to 1d10. Honestly, if gestalted with fighter, only reason to pick it is a) flavor b) great weapon fighting style. I would prefer dueling fightings style over that, though
Last Gestalt game I played we were in Tamriel, 150 years after Skyrim. I've also played a Final Fantasy Job style Gestalt, where you had your main class at full strength and your secondary class would be half of what it would normally be as you level; ergo, at level 20 Fighter you'd also have 10 levels of X class.
a buddy of mine ran a level 10 gestalt one-shot and i played a mastermaker artificer/way of the open hand monk, and honestly? it felt great, i didn't feel over powered compared to the other melee characters and the spellcasters didn't have anything that upset the power balance.
That book you mentioned was the 3.5 unearthed arcana by wizards of the coast. It has gestault characters rules on page 72. Add well as the racial Paragon classes and many other fun things like bloodlines, totem barbarians, and non-LG paladins,
I've actually played in a gestalt game. Two players, both of us Fighter rogues. We made two completely different characters and we had a lot of fun. Gestalt chars don't fully count as two-separate characters since you;re still limited by your action economy.
huh, these seem interesting, what I've done instead is raising the level cap. So you can go to 23-25, but any individual class caps at 20, I usually say that character level progressions keep going after their usual trend. hit dice and how keep going up, prof goes to +7, +8 if you get to 25. spell slots are more difficult, I have a table for levels 21-25 I use, and of course half and third casters just follow the normal setup.
Been looking into ways to make a summoner gish type character for a while. Started off trying to make a homebrew ranger subclass, but then Swarmkeeper came out and covered all the bases except a few spells from the wizard spell list that fit the theme. But looking at it again, a gestalt echo knight/war wizard with the echos reflavored as summoned beasts rather than shadow clones would be an all around better route.
Man, I love gestalt. I play with my buddy in Texas over Skype, and it’s just the two of us (everyone we played with either have no attention span or don’t play any more. XD) He plays a PC NPC and I sort of end up co-DMing. It’s good times, but we learned about gestalt and once we tried it things have never been the same. We’re both min-maxing powergamers to a certain extent, so this ends up being perfect for us. You joke about triple-gestalt, but we’ve gestalted up to 10 (which was fun but ungodly unwieldy and virtually unmanageable), usually stick to 4 or 5. We play Pathfinder (neither of us like 5e or Pathfinder 2.0) and there are a lot of fun synergies that can be cooked up. Honestly, our games take on more of an overpowered anime quality with us doing ridiculous things while the normal “Experienced” adventurers look on, slack-jawed as their reality (and minds) slowly crack and break. It leads to more role-play and becomes less about surviving combat. Especially when we start adding Mythic. :P
Currently hosting a gestalt campaign for my players, its pretty high powered but so far allows my players to be creative with their builds and more versatile, instead of deciding between what level to take next and how long they would be waiting for their class to come online through multiclass.
This is so weird, my game group is literally working on converting the old 3.5e rules for gestalt characters to 5e. We have played a few one-shots to test out the rules and it was a blast!
I played against stalled character in a one shot or rather I ran a game with dished old characters and it was so successful were talking about basing the campaign on it and it was an absolute blast although I don't know if I played by the rules as their put forth I kind of came up with it on my own I hadn't heard of it before but it was so much fun
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If you're running a gestalt game in 5e then it's actually simpler because of how the game plays. You challenge your party by increasing the hit points or grabbing creatures of 1-2 higher CR. Because a lot of the late game creatures are just piles of meat that you can beat all day, the gestalt idea works. There is no automatic win situation until your characters get ahold of wish consistently. So for about 17 levels you can seriously challenge players.
So to give an example :
Let's say your party starts at lvl 1. You would double the number of creatures that you would normally throw at them (excluding boss monsters they would be thrown at 1-2 CR higher) you can do really well with that combo till your party gets lvl 3 spells. Once your party hits level 5 you will need some meatier monsters. Lots of ogres, giants, and trained bullettes to give encounters more bang. Once your party hits level 11-13 you'll need to make sure to not be afraid to hit your party with 3-4 CR higher because most creatures will have tons of hit points and your players will be in the range to hit capstone traits in their class paths. So I have run gestalt campaigns (because it let's me get players through low level without hating it) and it's super fun
You can also get past the stat problems by allowing the use of 3.5 40 point buy
@@LecherousCthulhu if I'm honest with you this sounds like regular 5e since the characters are so op and the cr system so totally not a challenge that this would be ok for single class characters.
You guys have me for your kickstarter. As a DM that started out last year, this channel has helped so much, so a published book... yeah, I’ll pay that forward.
The giveaway is just the icing on the cake.
I joined Twitter to sign up for this, and I’m pretty hyped to win this thing (if I can). Otherwise, I guess there’s always PDF’s and scans.
Rogue palidan swashbuckler of vengeance "Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father; prepare to die."
Haha brilliant
My wife and I played a large sized, two-headed Dragonborn in a one shot. I was a Bronze Barbarian and she was a Red Sorcerer. Each of us had one dominant arm. I could rage while she still casted, but I controlled our movement when raging, which she didn’t always agree with.
It wasn’t a full “gestalt” build, as it was still two players playing two characters, but it’s the most fun we ever had in a one-shot. I’d love to refine this character for play in a longer campaign.
That does sound really fun XD, did she control the movment while you weren't raging?
How did HP work?
DM who actually runs his games with gestalt here!
In the first 5e campaign I ever DMed (which I did by the book), the party's valor bard decided to be a bro a step up and fill for the party's deficits and spent his level 4 in rogue (The party had no rogues), and the thanks he got for this he got a delayed ASI and a delayed second attack, kind of gimping him for levels 4-6. I saw this and decided "Never again". Since then, I have gestalt as the default multiclassing option for my campaigns.
Gestalt multiclassing combined with permissive homebrew really enables PCs to make any kind of character they want, which is something I encourage. This obviously has implications for balance, but I firmly believe that heroes should feel powerful and cool and "unique", and their challenges should scale with their power anyway. As a DM, I like having powerful PCs because it means I get to use a wider range of challenges for them; more toys for the PCs to play with means more toys for the DM too!
I don't force it on anyone, for example the nature paladin didn't want to multiclass at all but he was interested in having a bear as a mount and that helped him keep up in powerlevel quite a bit (It sort of "leveled up" with him and eventually got armor and equipment and got the stats a dire bear). But for my players who are interested, the ideal way I like to handle it is to sit down with them at character creation and whip up a customized leveling progression with them, which includes whatever class / subclass / homebrew features they're looking to get, and maybe occasionally revisiting it down the line if their character has some kind of changing moment or the player changes their mind or whatever. For dealing with MAD, I use a very permissive way to roll stats to begin with (7 times 4d6 drop the lowest, take any 6 for your stats), and that dovetails with my philosophy that heroes should be strong and special anyway.
The biggest upside of all of this, in my mind, isn't a gain in mechanical power but freedom to make the exact character you want to make. Highlights I've had over the years include a monk + fighter with that homebrew gunslinger fighter subclass for a cool gun-monk, a monk/barbarian character whose personal progression centers around trying to control his anger problems and achieve tranquility even though the world around him seems hellbent on ruining that for him, a fighter who picked up underdark-specialized ranger after dedicating himself to the impossible task of ridding the underdark of evil, etc etc. That druid/monk you guys described sounds cool as hell and I'd gladly welcome one of those at my table
You are the perfect DM. Your group is so lucky.
You know what? I like you
I heard of Gestalt like 3 days ago and I was like "what! THIS IS INSANE but THAT'S THE POINT!"
I would love to finally make the "Death knight" character fighter cavalier/ wizard necromancy school of magic
For me, Gestalt's the go to if you are playing a module solo along with additions for solo roleplay, otherwise youd be screwed.
Kinda wish I joined a session manned by a DM who's as open to homebrew as you are.
@@Necroscrow Am one of his players, can confirm. Best DM I've ever had
@@rpgchronicler the coolest character I ever played was a Gestalt, with two homebrew classes, one class was based around cool magical martial arts that the Monk couldn't even imagine, and the other one was a half caster who got abilities that made themselves stronger the less health you had
"They will be calling out the NAME Of their HEEERO! And the name that they will be CALLING, is ABSEEEEERRRRD!!!"
I see you too are a man of culture
I am talking to you now and not moving my mouth! I am very skilled and smart and they are calling my name, and the name they are calling is ABSEEERRRDDD!!
I was going to make that comment, but you beat me to it.
This comment is absurd.
fucking rights
Can't forget the classic Fighter/Wizard/Thief/Bard character Gestalt of Rivia. Sometimes being a Meredith Susan can be fun!
Hahahahha! Great name!
"Meredith Susan"
Wow.
My first gestalt character in 5E was a half orc way of the open hand monk and battle master fighter. Urg Tzu was the king of battlefield control. Whirling about the fight leaving everyone prone while the assassin/shadow monk went full ninja by stabbing the prone enemies.
battlemaster/rogue (maybe swashbuckler for the sneak attack or arcane trickster for the little bit of magical utility?)
you just always do tripping attacks, then activate sneak attack on that second. if they're prone, you have advantage to get that higher crit rate, while if theyre still standing, you have swashbuckler to get that sneak attack anyway
ultimate paladin sorcerer.
ALL SMITES ALL THE TIME. As well as I love the idea of the pally in full plate summoning meteor swarm
TLDW: Action economy is still king, Gestalt = 1.4 characters.
as someone who has DM's several Gestalt campaigns, that... depends on the class combo. While its true that characters that rely on action triggered abilities don't get that much more powerful overall, Classes that stack static automatically triggering effects or effects that trigger only AFTER an attack roll resolves become VERY overpowered, albeit for short bursts in most cases, Consider Hexblade warlock / Paladin uppon reaching level five and taking Eldritch Smite, the player can trigger BOTH smites on a single attack roll, as neither ability requires an action to activate. Further, the d&d wiki version of this allows normal MC within each "half" of the character build allowing you to also throw in say, Rogue for Sneak attack. this can result in a character that can BURST for rather Stupid amounts of damage. making most normal monsters with average Hitpoints relative to the CR for the party rather susceptible to on hit KO. and if you have some players with this sort of build and others with the 'many action options' build, the latter will likely become upset at that 100+ damage on a crit the lvl 5 palylock did. sure, he's burning 2 LVL 3 slots each round to do it, but all most players are going to see in that moment is that massive pile of d10s being thrown across the table.
@@daemosblack As someone who has also ran a few Gestalt campaign, definitely agree that it depends on the combo. I had a player who ran a Totem Barbarian/ Scout Rogue gestalt, no MCing, and it was an absolute terror.
@@cenauge yeah rogue barbarian is a pretty beastly combo - because the wording of sneak attack is such that while you need weapons that benefit from dex (ranged or finesse) to trigger the ability, you don't ACTUALLY have to attack with dex - thus with pretty much the same Stat set up as a normal Barbarian you get a guy running around doing sneak with rage every round. how do I know he's getting Sneak every round? why Reckless Attack of course, which gives him an at-will way to ensure he gets that advantage to trigger sneak attack. - current campaign im running has an ancestrial guardian/inquisitive rogue in fact
As long as Gestalt Characters take "averages" in exchange for accessing all abilities/feats from all classes. Then it will be on par with Multi Classing since Multi Classing do not take averages because on how Multi Classing works.
@@daemosblack
If you keep the rule "to prepare spells per slots" and not allow spells be used outside of its spell pool, if any. Then, it's no different to Multi Classing.
A gestalt of all the classes together, it's a really abserd build
Abserd, how to be jacked with all trades.
They will call the name of their hero, and that name will be abseeeeeeeeeeerrrrrd!
Reminder that it's impossible to cast when raging, be sure to ask DM.
@@Stavol2Dual yeah I know
ABSSSSSSSSEEEEEERRRRRRRRDDDDD jack of all trades.
When i was a teenager, all of our games were gestalt. Alot of the time players would simply dump one of there classes so they could play as some creature with a high ECL adjustment.
Lorgar Bearer of the Word
Love your avatar he’s my favorite Primarch.
᛬ᚹᛁᛚᚺᛖᛚᛗ᛫ᛋᛖ᛫ᛚᛟᚱᚾᛁᛝᛣᚾᛁᛉᛏ᛬
I like Magnus and Alpharius as well, although Space Wolves (and Leman Russ) are probably tied with Imperial Fists (and Rogal Dorn) as far as loyalists goes.
Better not be any heresy going on in here.. 🤨
@@mhDarkWolf "I cannot say"
Having recently run a gestalt campaign with four players, I gotta say that the PC's never felt overpowered (granted, my players had to pick which saving throws they got, they didn't get both). It was more that they had more options, more things they could do, and that made it more fun. Instead of the Barbarian seeing every problem as an excuse to draw his sword, since he was also a Bard he'd use his words or a spell to get around a messy situation. For combat, treating each PC as 1.5x their level really helped with balancing and making fights a challenge. It was great fun, and I'm looking forward to our upcoming West Marches Gestalt campaign.
I just learned about gestalt a month ago and I really wish dnd beyond would support it! I play 1on1 games with my wife and it'd be amazing having her character be gestalt with the organization of DnD Beyond.
Gestalt, to me, seems like it's all about versatility. Sure, the HP go up on average, and the saving throws are basically not functionally different than hanging out with a paladin, IME. The real benefit here is OUTSIDE combat. Your fighter can buff herself and go into a fight and that's cool, but after the fight is over she can also identify her own loot and cast ritual spells, crowd control, environmental control, etc. That's a neat feel. But does it really imact the per encounter power of a character? Not outside a few reactions.
Joe Auerbach
A paladin with a full casting class would have access to the max damage their smite could deal quicker, and increasing the available spells increases versatility and can lead to interesting combos, like polymorph into a brass dragon while activating righteous might.
@@danielpryce7126 to be honest to me the part of
"...you can expend one paladin spell
slot to deal radiant damage to the target..."
kinda implies that they anticipated that gestalt gameplay will come up and they wanted to make sure that you can only use the slots of the according gestalt side.
because otherwise i kinda dont know why they even mention what kind of spellslot you have to use, if a regular character has only one type of spellslot and multiclassed characters have this mixed spellslot list...
only with a gestalt character you can actually differentiate what kind of slot you are using to fuel a spell.
@@TheScarvig straight off of dnd beyond it sais Starting at 2nd level, when you hit a creature with a melee weapon attack, you can expend one spell slot to deal radiant damage to the target, in addition to the weapon’s damage. The extra damage is 2d8 for a 1st-level spell slot, plus 1d8 for each spell level higher than 1st, to a maximum of 5d8. The damage increases by 1d8 if the target is an undead or a fiend, to a maximum of 6d8.
@@shadowgear7032 yeah just looked it up...
seems they had it changed via errata at least since Version 1.21 @2016
@@TheScarvig cool I had thought it said paladin slots before at one point to and remembered looking it up and seeing it was any plots. Probably trying to not restrict paladins multiclassing which instead just made them some of the best multiclasses in the game
The first "true" campaign I ever played in back in the days of 3.5, our DM Gestalted us.. still stands as the pinnacle of all games I ever took part in. We were powerful but man did he know how to keep the fear in us! Began the game as normal.. wrote up PCs etc.. started playing. and like 4-5 sessions in the event happened so we had to decide how to Gestalt the character we already had.. kept the power level down and made for interesting combos
Gestalt Pathfinder (1st edition) is hands down my favorite method of character creation. In my experience, it allows for the most unique concepts in post 3rd edition d&d style games. If your group is considering it, I recommend trying it out, especially if you have a particularly small or creative group. It's true that the many options and abilities of gestalt characters do outweigh their slightly improved statistics, though some discretion is advised as a player could create a nuke of a character with the right combination of abilities if they were so inclined. That's why I'd also recommend that a player first think of a base concept that a gestalt build could achieve before looking at specific ability combinations.
My favorite gestalt build (again in Pathfinder 1st edition) was a gnome Alchemist/Barbarian (ragechemist) focusing on combing mutagens with raging. Basically Bruce Banner in d&d. A really fun concept but not without its drawbacks as he fell to the mist common obstacle that gestalt builds face: action economy. He usually had to spend 1 or 2 rounds buffing himself before he was truly firing on all cylinders. But once Bull Strength and the proper mutagen kicked in, he was a lot of fun.
When you forget it’s Wednesday until you see Web DM...
Happy Wednesday!!!
Same! I should be sleeping one hour ago...
Web DM uploading is my weekly calender
Same here! Hahaha
Berserker barbarian+champion fighter
All the attacks all the crits
why would you go beserker? go bear totem and take something like polearm master to get that bonus action attack. but now you're hella tanky on top of having all the damage.
@@sillyking1991action 4 attacks
bonus action 1 attack
reaction to damage 1 attack
instapass charm and frighten focus all asi on strength dex con
@@coolnamebro7363 the battlemaster version is way more consistent; gwm's -5 to hit means nothing when you have both Reckless Attack and Precision Attack
@@kilroy6806 It was the first thing that came to mind, im sure someone smarter could super optimize barb/fighter
Remember that GWM feat already gives a bonus action attack if you crit, so I would choose a different path for the barbarian.
I played a lvl 18 champion/2 barbarian for a lvl 20 one-shot once which was already increadable.
For all the gestalt spellcaster, have fun not forgetting CONCENTRATION!
You asked--"did anybody ever actually play like this?"
We did. Not a ton, but a few campaigns of it--we even had a setting built around it. It was a blast!
We never heard about gestalt characters until the end of 4e, with the advent of other things like hybrid characters, themes, backgrounds and all that other great stuff that folks don't remember because they're so caught up in how much the powers system sucked (and...yeah it kind of sucked but the rest was great).
Our experience with gestalt wasn't so much that the characters were more powerful, so much as that you had so many more colors to paint with. I had a dragon samurai (Paladin + Druid) that could actually transform into a dragon and a halfling freedom fighter (Warlord + Bard) that was great at commanding and swaying the hearts of people. All the characters we got from gestalt were so flavorful--and there was so much diversity because of the freedom to swap different things together that you almost didn't feel like you weren't bound by classes. It was like, take a concept you like, find the two halves that could make that happen, and you could do it within the bounds of D&D.
It was a heap of fun. We still pull the setting out and play it now and then.
how was your paladin/druid samurai able to transform into a dragon? sounds really interesting
Gestalt sounds like a deity that players make a pact with when they have played in so many games
That is a huge Give away, holy hell. Obviously I entered. :D
Just wanted to congratulate you on your success in our sphere and wish you the best of luck for your Kickstarter. Keep DM'ing. :)
Thank you! Good luck!
2:10 is when the video begins
Everything before that is just funny stuff and also a give away.
1/11 of every class isn't "Mister Saving Throw." It's *Señor Vorpal Kickass'o.*
Man I loved that comic series!... might go back to read it again sometime soon. :)
The creator had a mental breakdown a few years ago, after winning the court case against his psycho ex-wife. The art went downhill for a time and then ceased completely. But his sons and his new wife remained awesome, so the creator finally started drawing again.
The comic recovered. There are still a few pages from that time period that are missing full color shading, but the comic now has a professional colorist. And the comic *appears* to be nearing its climax.
@@WisdomThumbs Oh man... I can't remember when I stopped reading it, but that breakdown must have happened after I stopped since he was still keeping a decent schedule. Wow.... I'm glad he's recovered and is doing well now. I'll have to see if I can donate to him for all of his great work considering it was the very first online comic series I really got into (after Nuklear Power's 8-Bit Theater).
I'll have to start over again since I only have vague mixed memories of the story (I think the crazed Perma-Barkskin Ranger was finally killed when I stopped, though I can't be sure because of the different storylines going on).
Thanks for the info!
I see you are a man of culture
I DM'd a 3/3.5 gestalt game with the paladin-monk taking vow of poverty from Book of Exalted Deeds. That did not last beyond one session for many reasons.
Honestly though, gestalt characters can be nice for running games with only 1 or 2 players. 3 is pushing. It does allow for the DM to throw more stuff at the PC's, but be aware you're going to have to up your game as a DM.
yeah, I'd only run it with 2 PC's
as DMs we should always, constantly be trying to up our game
My biggest wish list is to play a 3x Gestalt as Eldritch Knight Fighter/Arcane Trickster Rogue/Battle Mage Wizard.
Inspired by Fighter/Mage/Theif from 2e.
Im really surprised i didnt see a rogue/monk combo come up.
I am currently playing in a gestalt game as a kobold rogue(assassin)/monk(way of shadow) and its amazing.
I dumped my str and went full dex.
Monks can use shortswords and they count as finese for rogue sneak attack. Im mega stealthy. At 6th i have a 11 stealth with out pass with out trace so i can practically never be seen.
Flurry of blows can trigger off of my finese shortsword and because an ally is usually within 5ft i have advantage on all 4 attacks.
Kriv is a damage dealing behemoth and he is only 3 feet tall.
A note for the new players:
The gestalt button on your keyboard is located next to the any key.
i'm a bit surprised you guys didnt mention gestalting the same class since there's subclasses in 5th. have a light and forge cleric or some other weird combo
... But then you only get extra features at archetype levels... Might be ok for roleplaying purposes but versitility wise youd fall way behind
@@Zh337a
When you think about it. Gestalt Characters is just its own Class from lv1 to lv20 with a few more feats/proficiency(s) but average everything. Multi Class is the same but you have to dip and there is no averaging to be done. Both versions still have to prepare their spells/spell pools in slots.
Soul knife and assassin could be fun.
A great discussion of Gestalt, really interesting to listen to your thoughts
I ran a 3 session long Ravenloft themed campaign with Gestalt characters (With pathfinder 1E) where all characters had one of their classes as either Cleric, Paladin, or Inquisitor, to really run home the idea of the Churches uniting to drive back Count Strahd von Zarovich. We had an Inquisitor/Wizard, Inquisitor/Monk, Alchemist/Cleric, and a Rogue/Paladin
The characters are of course incredibly powerful, and with characters that all have some sort of bonus versus the undead they lent on that heavily however, it was really great in expanding on how a Wizard could be part of a church, and to see my players try and balance the RP of being X class as part of a religious order, was really fun to watch
These intros have cracked through the stratosphere and entered into the astral sea
Lots of great characters are gestalt. Such as Geralt of Rivia, The Dragonborn of Skyrim, the Hero of the Fable games, the guy from Dishonored, the hero from the Darksouls games...
Lorgar Bearer of the Word only one of those is actually a character. The rest are voiceless, personality-less, player inserts for power fantasy. Geralt is solid though.
@@Michael-bn1oi
Same with DND characters. They only gain a personality if we give it to them, and most of the time gestalt characters are an exercise in power fantasy...
@@lorgarbeareroftheword5836 I love when RPGs let me be a pyromancer knight. The coolest thing ever
I don't agree that Gerald of Rivia has necessarily to be a gestalt character. At most it would be required to develop a subclass tailored to reflect what the books/games show about his powers, but I'm not certain this would actually even be required to model Gerald precisely.
And Darksouls are CLEARLY not gestalt. The handicapped snail progression alone kills this notion. And in DS you never gain two benefits for the price of one when leveling up.
A couple years ago, I was the GM for what I called a Divine Superheroes campaign. In this case, a gateway that had portals to all of the elemental planes and the material plane (the gateway was located on the material plane) was under attack by Devils and Demons. The Blood War had spilled onto this poor continent and both sides wanted control of the gateway. So our Divine Superheroes were called from their cryostasis to go and intervene. There were 4 players, using the Pathfinder system, and they triple gestalted while using an overpowered stat system: 18-18-18-18-14-12. The class combos broke down like so:
Druid-Hunter-Cleric
Fighter-Rogue-Barbarian
Bard-Wizard-Sorcerer
Summoner-Wizard-Hunter
With regards to the animal companions/familiars, the players could either have multiple critters, each with their own class-based progression, or they could stack them for a more powerful critter. This resulted in the DHC having three animal companions (Wolf, Snow Leopard, Woolly Mammoth), while the SWH had a single, nearly indestructible eidolon/familiar/critter that started out as a large constrictor snake and eventually morphed into a dragon-like creature of unbelievable power. The BWS just had an overpowered familiar that gave massive bonuses to his saving throws and initiative.
The campaign started off at Level 1 and progressed to around Level 15 or 16. To make it a challenge, everything they fought had class levels, even if they didn't make sense (though it did with the story). Imagine fighting an invisible Black Pudding Rogue (from Greater Invisibility) along with its Gelatinous Cube Bard, at level 5. Boss fights usually involved mooks that needed at least two Fireballs ore more to take them out, and the Boss would have a handful or more Mythic Tiers.
The campaign ended "successfully" in that they managed to stop both the Devilish and Demonic incursions, but the King of Fire (an Elder Fire Elemental with 20 levels of Shaman and 10 Mythic Tiers) set off an arcane explosion that set the atmosphere on fire, initiated rapid climate change, and caused arcane ripples to reach out into space that woke up Cthulhu (that's an entirely different campaign). Overall, it was super fun, combats would take a loooooong time to play out, and were usually decided by crits on either side (the FRB 'died' a lot and got resurrected a lot). 10/10, would do again.
I'm not sure if this would be considered Gestalt, but I had a character concept where a young tiefling had seemingly split personality to the naked eye.
She is a Grave Cleric that if they got too worked up or something too emotional happened (i.e. a party member dying) she would essentially lose consciousness and another personality would take over.
I haven't gotten to test the character or talk with DM's too much about it but the other personality was originally supposed to be a soul who bound with the original to keep her sane, prevent her from seeing too much of the bad in the world and such.
I tossed around the idea with a friend that the bound soul was either a different class entirely, or just a different cleric archetype. After a bit, the soul would give control back to the original.
I figure since it's such a drastic need before the change can happen, as well as the only things that carry over through the switch is: spell usage and hit point max and loss as well as stats from the original. Class features from say, the soul being a barbarian for example, would not carry over when the original regains control and vice versa.
Is that putting too much thought into character design? Or would that even be allowed?
I can’t speak for what your DM might allow, but one of my players once used the “Dual Soul” background from D&D Beyond’s homebrew list. Basically he was a half orc that switched between personalities.
The main personality was the even tempered Grint, a Battlemaster Fighter. But, when Grint got knocked out (or sometimes just woke up after a night’s rest), the other personality would be in control: The trigger happy Gunsmith (a homebrew class), Burger.
Not only did it as some fun variety to combat and character interactions, but it was really easy to do mechanically. Basically when he had a different character sheet for each personality. Their physical stats (HP, AC, Speed, Str, Dex, and Con) were shared, but mental stats and Proficiencies were unique between the personalities. And when ASI’s came up, he could either increase a physical stat, or increase one personality’s mental stat.
That campaign (a pirate themed game) only ever got up to level 6 before it just kinda fizzled out, but for the time we did play it, I had fun seeing how my player would use the switching personalities and he had fun doing it.
TL:DR; I don’t think you’re overthinking it, and it can be a really fun concept to play with.
@@charlottefurre1819 I appreciate the input. That does sound like it could be a pretty fun concept.
The main soul would be calm and almost motherly, but the other soul while not being inherently evil, would want to get rid of whatever caused the switch by nearly any means neccessary; hes not a murderer, but if anything happens to main soul, he will kill everything in the room and then himself.
That thumbnail tho. Do you guys have identical twin beards?
We have a very talented Producer. Travis Boles.
Paladin/Sorcerer both doubles down on strengths AND diversifies. Extra health from Dragon Bloodline if you take it, Charisma based spells on both sides, flight, haste, armor, hits hard from close up AND from far away, and possibly even casting Paladin spells with Sorcerer slots.
Favorite Gestalt character I've ran in a campaign was a couple of months ago using the sorcerer warlock Unearthed Arcana. Aberrant Mind and The Lurker In The Deep Sorlock Gestalt. A sorcerers apprentice that had come into contact with a very powerful trapped Aboleth after falling into a underground river system through a ruined well, instead of enslaving him a pact was formed to provide him with an agent capable of venturing back out into the world. Made for quite the interesting play experience, the two sub classes blended very nicely into this dark Cthulhu vibe.
This is reminding me a lot of a wizard subclass I wanted and tried to make where it's a muscle wizard, essentially Armstrong from Fullmetal Alchemist in a way where it's basically a strength based Monk combined with a Wizard and they can cast spells through their unarmed strikes and get unarmored defence and such, but I could never figure out exactly what abilities should be there or how to balance them. I wonder if creating a gestalt strength monk wizard combo would be a good exercise to get ideas
I shall make a rouge/fighter and call myself a ranger
Betteranger
go scout rogue for subclass too!
Unless you *really* want to play as makeup. Then go full __rouge__
We call that the Drizzt Build.
Don't bully the rangers please
Ive been part of a gestalt pathfinder game thats been going on for several years.
I am in one right now Paladin Sorc Tiefling with abyssal bloodline
As someone who DMs a Gestalt game, I really like it, for one main reason: Can't find quite what you're looking for with the classes and want the mechanical support for an archetype? GESTALT. As you guys have mentioned in other videos, the "fluff" AND "crunch" of the mechanics and RP/Flavor for an archetype are very easy to have without sacrificing something (or having to wait a long time to get a normal multiclass online) with a gestalt character.
I personally use a variation of Gestalt I found in PDF form for slightly more normal characters (power-wise) , such as giving them their choice of saving throws of the ones listed in both classes, such as two of STR, CON, WIS, and CHA. For skills, You get the largest number of skills between the two classes, and pick between both class' lists. Stuff like that; if anyone is interested, the version I'm talking about is a modified version of the one listed on the D&D wiki and its been a lot of fun to run (want to actually play in one though; gotta convince my crew to run a game gestalt so I can play in lol)
To me a gestalt build is a pair of builds fine tuned to each other for a single strong setup, but still able to run seperately
Like a Cavalier fighter & Moon druid for bear cavalry, mounted combatant + sentinel = guaranteed opportunity attack
I like to offer warlock and sorcerer as a way of offering the gestalt option, I lean very heavy on the patron for the warlock, and for some of the bloodlines of sorcerer as a way of balancing it
Gesalting is actually a lot of fun. Once we found it in 3.5 we never played without it. Our DM just ramped up the monsters and the encounters. We just got to fight more awesome stuff all the time. We only took ASI's from one class. But the flexibility of the characters, especially in a small party is wonderful in trying to fill out roles for the party.
Gotta say gestalt sounds really fun as someone who's currently trying to make a warlock/sorcerer/paladin work. Honestly just the ability to come online sooner would be nice, it makes me wonder if there might be a further way to vary the idea of a gestalt so that you could make a more like multiclassing all at once rather than the flat out 2 in 1.
Barbarian Warlock: Armor of Agathy and rage!
Take hexblade and you can hit with your Charisma, so you can be a super Intimdating grandfather yelling get of my lawn whilst wielding a Greataxe 2 Times your size
Pure rage !
@@aldoushuxley5953 Rage is kinda wasted/damage bonus doesnt work when using Hexblade.
@@ANDELE3025 the Bonus damage isnt much anyways. The important Part is the resistance
And because you dont have to max strength, you can max con or Take a feat.
Hexblade also gives you hbc and shield proficiency If you dont want to Fight two handed.
More criticals is very important, because of the brutal critical Feature from barbarian
Love Web DM. Entered your competition, and want to wish everyone luck!
A win would be a fantastic for a lot of people who love the hobby or those that are struggling
I'm actually going to be running a gestalt campaign soon! This was well timed for me
Um... guys? I may have accidentally done this without knowing there was rule support for it. Just to fill in gaps in the party, I’m playing a half elven ranger/war wizard. I’m only level two at the moment, but it’s going well so far. Thanks for this one. It certainly answered some questions.
Straight up wizard+divine soul for more spells known... what is it to play a sorcerer with more than 6 spells
I'm normally a DM, but after dming for a year long campaign I finally have a chance to be a character I chose dragonborn sorcerer.
so far and expanded spell list just seems to screw with their power progression. and I had trouble picking with spell I'm going to grab every level because I have so few, but I have a strong theme and with that in mind the sorcerer class has been a real blast.
Pun intended because I'm all about explosive electrical magic
But I'm sure wizard plus sorcerer is the bomb
Literally playing a rogue warlock gestalt character in my weekly game
Unerthed Arcana was my favorite book in all third edition.
Champion Ftr Totem Bar *_* ooh my god I need to play that
That giveaway is fucking crazy, guys. I'm so glad D&D Beyond loves you that much! And19k entries already!? Holy Bahamut Pruitt! Love you guys
Thank you! We love D&D Beyond too and they're excellent partners.
Lots of entries, but keep in mind you can enter up to 5 times!!
I am currently running a game with Gestalt character's. Their second class required to be divine (Cleric, Druid or Paladin) and they are all apostles of an emerging pantheon. The game plot revolves around the faiths. Its actually worked quite well so far. The climactic battle of their first adventure resulted in them winning with one hit point left amongst the entire party of four characters. In other words, one person standing with one HP left. It was at that point that the players realised that they were not the super hero's they expected to be.
I’ve run several Gestalt games in 3.5 with the release of Unearthed Arcana back then and migrated it over to 5e upon its early conception. The game was amazing! All my players had tons of fun. As far as balancing goes, I just treated them as if they were 1.5x their actual level and it worked beautifully. Love that people are starting to talk about this again and I just might do another Gestalt game after my current campaign concludes itself!
My favorite gestalt character was a Hill Dwarf Eldritch Knight/Abjurationist Wizard with the Resilient(Dex) and Tough Feats. He basically had all the saves but CHA, the hp of a Barbarian, Heavy armor and Shields and defensive spells out the wazoo, the man was hands down the tankiest tank I've ever managed to build. He was also a full on Utility Wizard with all the in combat destructiveness and out of combat shenaniganry that implies.
I started running my girlfriend through Lost Mine of Phandelver and I helped her build a Druid/Ranger Gestalt character. I kind of mashed it together, giving her both hit dice but limiting selection of skills and only allowing three of the four saves that the two classes would allow for. I was sort of shooting from the hip on that, but she had a fair challenge and enjoyed the game. I'll have to rework her character at some point though.
After making a few gestalt characters I think what I like the most is the ability to have utility spells like Light without it taking away from my ability to do damage. You can have a decent list of damaging spells/effective martial attacks and have room to know and prepare utility spells that make non-combat interesting.
As a DM I played support character that was a Gestalt Cleric/Sorcerer in 3.5 . The party was combat only, this support character had 8 for every stat except WIS and CHA. It was only a caster, but it was a great caster.
I didn't know this concept even existed. Now I want to play a Bard/Warlock and make a cult of myself. My players will love doing one/two shots with this concept.
That Idea is pure Genius
I will Play a gloomstalker Assassin and be Batman :D
A 'Gestalt Character"? *instantly thinks of Devastator from Transformers* :)
Keep up the good work!!!
Can we just take a moment to appreciate the epic bro high five accuracy here?
28:20 Looking forward to the Way of the Managerie Monk on DM's Guild
In 3e, I allowed gestalt with the primary class being single class, 1-20, and the second class could prestige. For 5e, I would only allow 1 class to multiclass, the other would be your primary from 1 to 20. I would limit saves and ASI to the primary class only.
(my spelling sucks) One of the online games I'm playing in has taken several interesting twists I feel fit into this. Started as an arcane trickster Stout Halfling rogue that went to level six before a serious event. DM played it off well having us suspend and start a second one. Played a vengeance pally fallen aasimar to level six to a convergence. Both combind but have to choose which to play (a lot of rp intended, and has been done over this.) Chose the halfling. Heavy ongoing character RP over present characters, memories, multiple personality disorders. The mechanics we were given: character has all ability scores (highest not combind,) skills, class, racial.....and everything else I'm failinging to remember combined besides HP(lvl6 rogue.) Still have to level as you would for the char you wished to so: 9 rogue (took lucky at 8)/6 pally. Stout halfing/Fallen Aasimar 9rogue/6pally..heavy burst...hard to hit, hard to effect, can reroll often...with self heals damn near unkillable; rapier HE(story,) +2 studded, +2 shield. Backed up by Pally/Warlock(who luck random rolled SG STR belt,) double healer, and three DPS that will take care of the field as long as I and the warlock provide distance; and I evade the 2-3 fireball like attacks they send me. That said it has been a roller coaster as we are mostly glass cannons with the HP. I love what my DM has done to make me, through my chracter, feel truly powerful while still making many moments feel like we are still gripping between life and death.
I love the idea of running a gestalt campaign by one of the classes have to be from monstrous hero’s . Make it a bad batch kind of deal . While the traditional hero’s ( human paladins, elven rangers, etc) are fighting the glorious battles in the daylight, the gritty monster hero’s do the dirty but necessary work to keep the world safe . The black watch from overwatch lore. Armorer artificer Minotaur, psi knife vampire , zealot barbarian black dragon. I’d love to dm that kind of group
"It encourages me to make a new subclass rather than play one of these monstrocities." My sentiments exactly
Gestalt was a real mechanic in 4e too. It was in PHB 3 and to this day is one of my favorite takes on the concept.
Oh gestalt characters started in AD&D 2nd , they called it multi-classing then. But you were a member Of 1 or more character at the same time, you split the experience you earn evenly between both classes, which meant that you often were lower than monoclasses, and you averaged your HP gains, (so wizard fighter would have (1d10+1d4)/2)
Talking of crazy optimisation multiclasses in 3e, I once saw a halfling optimised for AC, with the taunt feat. He was almost completely unhittable, but dealt very little damage, but he'd just tumble all around the battlefield, taunting foes to make them attack and chase him, driving enemies insane.
A DM I played with for over a year implemented a kind of Gestalt ssytem of his own design around level 3 of our game. I wound up becoming a Ranger/Sorcerer, and for plot reasons later a Ranger/Warlock-Sorcerer, with most of my levelups going into the Warlock and Sorcerer classes instead of Ranger. It was a weirdly OP time.
My favorite Gestalt, tbh, is a Circle of the Moon Druid / Path of the Totem Warrior Barbarian. Raging while being transformed into a T-Rex or a Fire Elemental is very fun.
The true Mage, Cleric and Wizard, both divine and arcane magic at your fingertips, no longer shall petty gods or mortals restrain your access to cosmic power!
Mithral no longer seems to affect weight or proficiency req, instead it just eliminates Dex disadv and Str reqs, so besides being able to wear it under your clothes, a Mithral Breastplate is the same as a normal Breastplate. Mithral Halfplate however is just as sneaky and can have +1 higher AC than Fullplate with MAM. However Mithral Fullplate is just as sneaky, doesn't require Str, and with HAM gives you 3 DR vs non-magic blunt/cut/pierce.
I ran a fast Pathfinder, mythic, gestalt campaign; it was fun the party was leveling quickly but I stayed on top of it.
People tend to forget that when you build NPCs with levels they are also expected to be gestalt, and you treat save based enemies go down 1 CR.
I do try to challenge my players but I also want to see how powerful they can get. If I see something amazing I do share with the players.
there are some gestalts in 5e that are absolutely insane, my personal favourite: Rogue Wizard. specifically Abjurer wizard. at level 11 reliable talent affects counterspell and dispel magic rolls, meaning with +5 intelligence you automatically dispel 9th level spells. with any level dispel magic/counterspell. at 11. its lovely
Had a Gestalt in 3.5. Two players. I had a cleric monk bugbear and the other player was a barbarian sorcerer cat person. They were crazy strong but usually you need time to prepare yourself for a fight. It’s hard to utilize both sorcerer magic and barbarian melee together without wasting combat rounds buffing yourself. So we planned more to use our powers to full effect. Also tried a Goliath monk battle mage. Which just meant half his punches also contained lightning bolt or some other brutal range spell that battle mages can cast when hitting with a weapon attack
I'm DMing a gestalt with 6 players, starting at lvl16, and going to 30. It's definitely a challenge, and relies HEAVILY on encounter generators.
Hmmm... I really like the idea of Paladin/Warlock. Especially in a roleplaying aspect. You're a paladin finding that the powers bestowed upon you by your faith isn't quite enough, and you wish for more power to better serve your god, so you seek out options and come across a pit fiend that convinces you to form a pact with it. And you slowly find the pact is far more costly to your faith. You have to try to find your balance between the two. Serve your god while serving your patron. That kind of struggle would make for some incredible dilemmas to navigate through. I love it.
I actually played gestalt in a solo game from level 1 - 5. I played Ranger - Paladin in 5th ed. I was going for a sort of Solomon Kane character concept, with a holy wanderer and tracker. It worked really well in a solo game, because I needed to be able to do everything myself. It was a lot of fun, but I don't think it would work well for parties larger than 2 players. You'd probably end up with a ton of overlap. Also at higher levels, I expect just the amount of abilities to keep track of would probably get overwhelming.
I can do you one better for an alpha strike.
3 Rogue(Assassin)| 3 Ranger(Gloom Stalker)
1-3 Paladin (Devotion)| 3 Fighter (Brute)
4-7 Paladin | 1-4 Mystic
First round of combat, we get Divine Smite + Lethal Strikes + Brute Damage + Sneak Attack, 3 Attacks which Auto Crit, Action Surge for 6 Total. (4/8 If dual wielding). Almost all of our damage sources are dice so get multiplied by the crits. Devotion channel divinity gives a hefty boost to accuracy which will make us very happy very often.
I'm currently doing this to build a Gestalt PC based on Sephiroth (but not the same) mostly just for myself to enjoy, never to really play with anyone. Might even write stories eventually but who knows.
29:00 Kenseis actually can use two-handed weapons, just no heavy weapons.
But there is only 1 melee weapon that applies to: the greatclub. Which means you won't get GWM and neither a d12 or 2d6 weapon, but the martial arts feature eventually increaases the greatclub's damage from 1d8 to 1d10.
Honestly, if gestalted with fighter, only reason to pick it is a) flavor b) great weapon fighting style.
I would prefer dueling fightings style over that, though
My first Gestalt was an elven Fighter/Magic-Use/Thief in AD&D. After that I only did it once, in 2e (Fighter/Magic-User). Good times :).
Last Gestalt game I played we were in Tamriel, 150 years after Skyrim. I've also played a Final Fantasy Job style Gestalt, where you had your main class at full strength and your secondary class would be half of what it would normally be as you level; ergo, at level 20 Fighter you'd also have 10 levels of X class.
a buddy of mine ran a level 10 gestalt one-shot and i played a mastermaker artificer/way of the open hand monk, and honestly? it felt great, i didn't feel over powered compared to the other melee characters and the spellcasters didn't have anything that upset the power balance.
That book you mentioned was the 3.5 unearthed arcana by wizards of the coast. It has gestault characters rules on page 72. Add well as the racial Paragon classes and many other fun things like bloodlines, totem barbarians, and non-LG paladins,
Licensed therapist here. Somewhere out there Fritz Perls is laughing, playing DND with an empty chair DM.
I've actually played in a gestalt game. Two players, both of us Fighter rogues. We made two completely different characters and we had a lot of fun. Gestalt chars don't fully count as two-separate characters since you;re still limited by your action economy.
Okay, guys. Your art guy on the thumbnails is starting to get scary. =P
the thumbnail is truly ascendant
huh, these seem interesting, what I've done instead is raising the level cap. So you can go to 23-25, but any individual class caps at 20, I usually say that character level progressions keep going after their usual trend. hit dice and how keep going up, prof goes to +7, +8 if you get to 25. spell slots are more difficult, I have a table for levels 21-25 I use, and of course half and third casters just follow the normal setup.
I like the idea of gestalt NPC characters so they really get their point across or do their trick and the players get it
Been looking into ways to make a summoner gish type character for a while. Started off trying to make a homebrew ranger subclass, but then Swarmkeeper came out and covered all the bases except a few spells from the wizard spell list that fit the theme.
But looking at it again, a gestalt echo knight/war wizard with the echos reflavored as summoned beasts rather than shadow clones would be an all around better route.
Man, I love gestalt. I play with my buddy in Texas over Skype, and it’s just the two of us (everyone we played with either have no attention span or don’t play any more. XD) He plays a PC NPC and I sort of end up co-DMing. It’s good times, but we learned about gestalt and once we tried it things have never been the same. We’re both min-maxing powergamers to a certain extent, so this ends up being perfect for us. You joke about triple-gestalt, but we’ve gestalted up to 10 (which was fun but ungodly unwieldy and virtually unmanageable), usually stick to 4 or 5. We play Pathfinder (neither of us like 5e or Pathfinder 2.0) and there are a lot of fun synergies that can be cooked up. Honestly, our games take on more of an overpowered anime quality with us doing ridiculous things while the normal “Experienced” adventurers look on, slack-jawed as their reality (and minds) slowly crack and break. It leads to more role-play and becomes less about surviving combat. Especially when we start adding Mythic. :P
Gestalts are fun and satisfying. Great for small groups.
Currently hosting a gestalt campaign for my players, its pretty high powered but so far allows my players to be creative with their builds and more versatile, instead of deciding between what level to take next and how long they would be waiting for their class to come online through multiclass.
This is so weird, my game group is literally working on converting the old 3.5e rules for gestalt characters to 5e. We have played a few one-shots to test out the rules and it was a blast!
I played against stalled character in a one shot or rather I ran a game with dished old characters and it was so successful were talking about basing the campaign on it and it was an absolute blast although I don't know if I played by the rules as their put forth I kind of came up with it on my own I hadn't heard of it before but it was so much fun
About time Someone covered it I have been gastalting for about a year
What classes did you fuse?