For some reason or another, I recently found myself thinking about (of all things) Skill Powers, in 4th Edition. These are essentially universal Utility powers, with the prerequisite that you need to have training in the associated skill; you are then able to take the skill power in place of one of your Utility powers, in the normal manner within character progression.
For those unfamiliar, your attack powers were either at-will, encounter, or daily powers, and were given out a prescribed levels -- this was uniform for all classes, until Essentials. Utility powers, however, were simply doled out at specific levels, but whether they were at-will/encounter/daily could vary; it was sort of a way of tuning more useful powers up or down. The first problem with utility powers is one of "scope creep."
The example I use off of the top of my head is that a "heroic tier" Ranger utility power from the first PHB would do something like, say, let you add your WIS modifier to an ally's skill check. Later on, the Invigorating Stride utility power was added for Rangers, which allowed you to move up to your speed (typical of a move action) and to spend your 2nd Wind (typically a Standard Action) all as a single move action. This basically made it too good to pass up, but it also demonstrates the shift in scope; utility powers started off as feeling like more of a replacement for spells, with regards to non-combat applications. Eventually they ended up as just "stuff you do in combat, that isn't attacking." I think this is important to point out, because for all the talk of how "4e nerfed my wizard!" at one point it did seem like there was an attempt within the designs to keep the wizard's... well, utility, by having utility powers.
Getting back to skill powers, the problem with the design of these is that because they were universally available, their effectiveness seems to have been deliberately tuned downwards. It's bad enough when something overpowered is available to only one party member, now imagine if ALL party members had it. The result is that skill powers ended up being a bit tepid, and no one really used them; as someone who played healers a lot, the option to take a Religion skill power for that one extra heal per day was nice to have... But sometimes less is more, and I think this whole mechanic probably could've been done without, or just done better.
In a lot of ways, the design of 4e is an attempt to reign in the worst excesses of 3.x D&D -- in particular caster supremacy, and multiclass monstrosities. The other thing is that by making 4e's combat be expressly about HP attrition, you necessarily end up having to make every character class function within the realm of HP damage. Now, you do get controllers and support characters and such that focus more on zones and debilitating effects and so forth... but at the end of the day, the intimidate option was basically non-functional, the result in gameplay is that "dead" was the only status effect that won fights. So, though 4e took away the spellcaster's ability to rewrite the laws of the universe, or just turn themselves into a better fighter than the Fighter, between utility powers and other considerations (like Ritual spells -- which mechanically are the polar opposite of rituals in 5e...) casters were still meant to be able to use magic to contribute meaningfully, inside and outside of combat. That seems fair enough, to me.
As for multiclassing, 4e didn't do away with it entirely... but it ends up with the same problem that skill powers have. There was a sense that multiclassing was overpowered, and also statistically it would basically be impossible to ever balance all of the millions of combinations that were possible. So what 4e did was make it so that you could spend a feat to swap one of your powers, for one power from another class. Now, specifically, you could only do this with Encounter, Daily, and Utility powers (each one costing their own feat) but you're essentially paying 1 power slot and 1 feat slot, to gain... 1 power. It should be obvious to anyone why this was almost never a good trade. (And for completeness, I should mention that if you took all 3 feats, you could unlock the option to swap one of your at-will powers too... if memory serves, and without going to my books to verify.)
Now to be sure, there was always the possibility that One Weird Trick would unlock a broken or overpowered build this way, but... for all intents and purposes, I feel like 4e's version of multiclassing was a token gesture, which was never meant to be actually good. (As an aside to this whole aside, my understanding is that multiclassing in 13th Age originally put your character behind the curve to the tune of losing +1 to attack, as its balancing mechanism -- which is obviously a lot more punishing in the long run than the cost of a few feats. I can't recall if this was changed, later...)
The other thing 4e did was essentially eliminate "dead levels." Between feats, powers, ability score boosts, and even just half-level scaling being applied to everything, every character is gaining something at just about every level. This also is a point in favour of not needing multiclassing in the designs; a lot of times (in my 5e experience, anyway) the best timing for a multiclass dip is when the next level of your current class doesn't really give you anything. If one of the big complaints against multiclassing is that thematically or narratively you end up with characters that make no sense, then one workaround is to design your character progression such that it incentivizes keeping to one class -- because then, your flavour remains consistent.
One of the other benefits is that 4e can do things like let Rangers pick their fighting style at level 1, and shower them with bonus feats that reinforce that style, without any worry of 5th level Fighters dipping 1 level into Ranger and just getting that boatload of benefits for themselves. I think for all the attempts at hamstringing multiclassing, 5e doesn't really get around the core problems; Fighter and Rogue are still the go-to 1- or 2-level dips, precisely because all of their key mechanics are still frontloaded, with no allowances to prevent poaching them via multiclassing. Indeed, 3rd party designers of 5e classes often specify that you cannot use their classes to multiclass.
This "no multiclassing" ethos from 4e does two things in my mind, which are sort of inter-related. First, if we take the frontloading of features to its logical conclusion (such as by also paring down dead levels) it seems obvious to me that the result should be a scaling down of character levels. Particularly when you go from the ethos of feats being bite-size (4e) to being a suite of features (5e) you can more easily compress progression into fewer levels -- probably less than 20, but certainly not 30. The second, related thing is how this makes characters more closely resemble pre-built ones, like you would see in games I've mentioned before, on the blog: Warhammer Quest: Cursed City, Eldritch Horror, and Betrayal at Baldur's Gate.
It's interesting to me how despite being introduced to those games long after getting into D&D, the character design for TNP essentially picks up where 4e left off, but arrives at something so closely resembling the board games' characters.
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Well, I hope that was an interesting trip down memory lane, and that I managed to paint a picture of why 4e was the way it was, and where I think that design ethos was taking the genre.
The next post is planned to be up sometime between September 19th-21st, so check back then!
