A D&D Confessional: I Still Don’t Understand Multi-classing

At my core, I am a living confluence of contradiction. I am a nonbinary, biracial technical writer. I literally am compromised of non-standard, disparate, and contradictory components. My resume is a hodgepodge of endeavors from engineering degrees and pop culture multimedia critique, and I am a firm proponent of a STEAM educational framework. And yet, running further contrary to an already contrarian existence is a single truth that I hold dear: I do not understand 5e multi-classing. I caution my players to avoid multi-classing. I never multi-class my own characters as though delving into a separate class would somehow doom their existence. I get visibly confused when someone mentions that they have mutli-classed. This has not gotten better with the recent release of Baldur’s Gate, where several guides explain the so-called benefits of multi-classing in various builds as a way to leverage new and exciting combinations of skills and class features, and my brain just ends up short circuiting after seeing the backslash.

And the thing is I didn’t always have this mentality. When I was first learning how to play Dungeons and Dragons with their 3.5e, the idea of multi-classing was significantly less detracting to me, although that was due to the fact that I wasn’t viewing multi-classing as a means to increase my range. Instead, I was viewing multi-classing as a means to unlock the true power that I wanted my PC to have. One of the prominent features of D&D 3.5e was the incl…