Limiting skills and abilities to only one class of a multiclass character at a time is going make them fall behind very quickly.
As a DM that is my only concern, love everything else!
That and the changing every in-game hour. I’m rarely tracking time down to the hour, so it would either slow things down if they try to make any kind of scene out of it, or we’re just going to gloss over multiple changes, potentially making the whole thing moot. Then you get into a dungeon and someone might be locked out of “their” character for a large chunk of playtime.
Tracking who controlled for longer to determine the next level up sounds pretty tedious too, but I guess that would be the players’ problem to sort out, not the DM’s. I would worry that it may be an unforeseen detriment to their enjoyment though.
Wouldn’t that character get super nerfed fast? Even at an even split of class levels you’ll be half the class level of the rest of the party, with only hp/proficiency keeping up.
Sometimes it’s just about having fun.
Eladrin, basically
I ran a game for my kiddo and their friends and my kiddos character was similar, they had found a bunch of bottles that had different colored liquids in them.
Character was an artificer/warlock who was a refrigerator repair man named Sam Sung. Self built mechanical armor that was a mini fridge and they stored the bottles inside. Each bottle was the essence of a divine or demonic being that became the “patrons” that were constantly fighting over the character. Basically the character ways had 12 different voices telling them what to do. Best part was kiddo was constantly drinking from the bottles.
So… Everyone is John? Dnd players keep reinventing the wheel and patting themselves in the back for it.
Reminds me of the twins from Kingmaker.
Is there a name for this trope of cramming really wacky, difficult, high spotlight, stuff into a game like DND that doesn’t especially support it?
I usually feel bad because I want to encourage creativity, but I also don’t want this guy to have 80% of the table attention while Bob the Fighter and Joy the Rogue are playing by the numbers.
Main Character Syndrome
I actually went to a session zero for a planned astrology-themed campaign where there were two antagonists who alternated between being controlling a PC and being the DM.
The players wanted neither of them to achieve their goal, so whichever demiurge was in flesh mode would be helping the other PCs to counteract the places of the other pc/dm.
We tried to figure out how to actually make it work and said “yeah nah”.
I encourage you to try Everyone is John then.
That sounds like a blast
This sounds like a fun character. They even balance it out by not allowing the two classes to operate at the same time so it’s not OP.
It sounds like the character has the same total level as the rest of the party, but can only use features from half of those levels, so it’s going to be underpowered to the point of unplayability.
Yeah, either give both the level or—IMO the better option—the GM can just give them level-ups twice as often. More work for the GM of course.
Just have two character sheets. Share equipment and at least the same constitution score so you can share hit points. It’s a few extra hit points than the Warlock should have but also it’s a pretty unique scenario. As long as they aren’t trying to cheese the system it would work fine.
This level of fuckery in Rifts:
I actually did this once, only the good personality was a pacifist healer who was a liability in combat due to her aforementioned pacifism and her oath to help anyone who asks for it occasionally helping our enemies, and the evil personality was a sociopathic battle hungry sorcerer who just wants to cause as much mayhem as possible.
Mechanically speaking, the evil one surfaces in high stress situations (And even then, I have to fail a con save for it to take effect) and I automatically revert to the good one upon falling asleep or otherwise losing consciousness in some way. I ran all of this by my dm to make sure it wouldn’t screw over the party too much or be too powerful. It was my favorite character thus far.
So would the character have to carry two sets of gear and change with each personality switch? Would the warlock even have the strength to haul around a paladin’s armor and sword?
On edit: And how about changes during combat? Even with a bag of holding, the paladin would have to either fight without armor and a proper weapon or fall back and equip. The warlock would be immobile until he could drop the paladin gear. In either case, they’re dropping loot on personality changes during battle. Disclaimer: I’m going off old-school Baldur’s Gate and I’ve never played table-top, so I could be completely wrong about all of this.
In 5e, if they took their first level as Paladin, they would gain Heavy Armor Proficiency. Having proficiency in heavy armor would allow a normal Lockadin to cast their Warlock spells in armor just fine. They also both heavily favor Charisma, and if the Warlock took Pact of the Blade or Hexblade, they wouldn’t even need strength for melee.
That’s a normal Paladin/Warlock though, with this weird hotseat play they want to do, their self-imposed rules might not let them even use the other class’ passive features, which could get awkward.
