I suppose an approach that takes the general intention of your design but is a bit omre mechanically rigorous could be to separate out subclass levels? You level up in one class as always, and every few levels the thing you get on levelling up is a subclass level. Subclasses then only get four or so levels, so you could be a warlock 11 (archfey 1 / fiend 2)
The difference is pretty minor either way. I’ve never had more issues balancing this than I have with sorcerer burst damage or creation bards collapsing economies.
I have actually personally done a subclass multiclass for a player in a game I run, but it was a very ad-hoc “okay it makes sense for your character to do this, so you’re just getting the level 3 feature from that subclass and the level 7 from this one, and this is how they interact” deal
I suppose I’m trying to think of how I would present it for games that I’m not involved in or don’t know the other players in. Something worded cleanly enough to stand up (at least a little) to situations when you can’t necessarily fall back on trust between the people at the table
I suppose an approach that takes the general intention of your design but is a bit omre mechanically rigorous could be to separate out subclass levels? You level up in one class as always, and every few levels the thing you get on levelling up is a subclass level. Subclasses then only get four or so levels, so you could be a warlock 11 (archfey 1 / fiend 2)
The difference is pretty minor either way. I’ve never had more issues balancing this than I have with sorcerer burst damage or creation bards collapsing economies.
I have actually personally done a subclass multiclass for a player in a game I run, but it was a very ad-hoc “okay it makes sense for your character to do this, so you’re just getting the level 3 feature from that subclass and the level 7 from this one, and this is how they interact” deal
I suppose I’m trying to think of how I would present it for games that I’m not involved in or don’t know the other players in. Something worded cleanly enough to stand up (at least a little) to situations when you can’t necessarily fall back on trust between the people at the table