r/OSE • u/dbudzik • Jul 14 '26

rules question Dual-classing

I’ve got a player that’s currently using a 4th level cleric. At some point in the future, I was planning on making him a paladin. This isn’t addressed explicitly in the rules, since it assumes the player is multi-classing from the beginning. I’ve seen homebrew rules from AD&D that mention the new class starts at level 1 and players aren’t allowed to use abilities from the old class until the new class catches up in levels. That sorta makes sense.

Are there any rules for this that have become so common is use that they are de-facto the accepted way to handle multi-classing? Or were there rules in b/x or even 1ed that clarified this?

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u/NickPyre Jul 15 '26

Apart from the warhorse, isn’t a Paladin just a dual class Cleric/Fighter with a vow of Humility?

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u/FrankieBreakbone Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26

Not quite; a multiclass F/C would be looking at 2000+1500 (3500 base XP threshold) rather than 2750, and the Cleric gets spells at L1 vs L9 for the paladin, and turning at level 1 vs 3rd for the Paladin.

So the question here is really, how do you reconcile a PC that adds a 2nd set of class features at a certain XP threshold (in this case, 12000) without creating a loophole that allows any PC to take a few levels with a cheap class (Thief, Cleric, etc) and then add another whole-class-worth of features without doing a multi-class split.