A whole new arena for janky Dungeons and Dragons builds has opened up: taking levels in the same class twice. DnD Beyond lets players create characters using both the 5th edition version of a class, and the version from the new 2024 Player’s Handbook, and at time of writing it’s happy to let you build a multiclass character that takes levels in the same class from different editions.
This is going to work better for some DnD classes than others. It’s easiest to get an advantage from the 5e multiclassing rules when all you want is a class’ proficiencies and first level features: we wrote about a busted Bard build yesterday which starts with a single level in Fighter to grab DnD Weapon Mastery, a fighting style, and constitution save proficiency. The scope to snatch and grab an armful of great level one features is much smaller when you’re multiclassing a Wizard 5e variant on top of the DnD 2024 Wizard.
But most classes in DnD have low-level features that can be combined in exploitable ways. For example, the DnD Fighter 5e variant can pick a Fighting Style at level one, while the DnD 2024 Fighter can pick a Fighting Style DnD feat. These are similarly-named abilities are all but identical in function but come from different sources, and so their effects can be stacked: +4 damage from double duelling, +2 armor from double defense, and so on.
This also allows you to unlock two subclasses instead of just one, and this is definitely exploitable. Any Wizard that uses spells that make attack rolls would benefit from unlocking the Divination Wizard subclass, which lets you pre-roll and store two dice results each long rest, to substitute in whenever you like. That’s particularly nice now that the Lucky ability to manipulate dice rolls isn’t tied to the Halfling DnD race, but is instead bundled with both the Merchant and Wayfarer DnD backgrounds.
Subclasses that grant you a resource pool, like the Fighter Battle Master’s Mastery Dice, or the Rogue Soulknife’s Psionic Energy Dice, might even be worth doubling up on: you’ll double the starting pool of dice, and gain access to additional ways to use them if the two versions of the class differ.
This is more of a theoretical exercise than anything practical, of course, as your Dungeon Master would have to agree to this rather liberal interpretation of the rules. For the DM’s out there, check out our guide to the DnD release schedule to find out when the new DM’s guide will arrive, hopefully with new tricks and traps to put any particularly egregious character builds in their place.
Source: Wargamer
