 This video is sponsored by NordVPN. Stick around after the video for a special offer. The ancient philosopher Mick Jagger once said, I can't get no satisfaction. And nowhere does that seem truer than in tabletop character creation. Your character concept of retired naval officer who lost her pension and has to provide for her ailing husband by taking levels in gunslinger and hiring out of marksmanship, that's awesome. But is it actually better than your other super amazing idea of adjusting Harold, who takes a side job as an auctioneer and combines the resulting talents of inspiration and speed to become the world's first rap battle bard? The choices. If only you could play both at the same time. Well, lucky you, because in Pathfinder, there's rules for that. Welcome to the concept of Gestalt characters, a variation on multi-classing where you take a level and two separate classes all at once instead of one after the other. As a caveat, I said before that there are rules for this in Pathfinder, but that's not exactly true. This is a totally optional rule set that first appeared in a D&D 3.5 source book called Unearthed Arcana. Sound familiar? Anyway, Gestalt rules are still completely compatible with Pathfinder, no changes needed, but as we'll go over a little bit later, they so fundamentally change the power expectations of a campaign that you shouldn't bet on your GM letting them fly unless they've explicitly designed the experience to match. Now let's get to it. How exactly does this Gestalt thing work? The good news is the process is deceptively simple. Anytime you get in a level, including at level one, you pick two classes, pick the highest level up stat increase of each kind from either and take all of the class features of both. That's really it. As an example, let's look at Garbthak's The Orcish Librarian. He's always furious, but he's always real quiet about it. So he'll become a level one barbarian slash rogue. To determine his starting hit die, skills per level, base attack bonus and bonuses to fortitude, reflex and will saves, we compare the level one stats for both barbarian and rogue, then take the higher of the two. To determine his class skills, weapon and armor proficiencies and actual class features, we again look at what both barbarian and rogue get for level one, but this time we take it all. So Garbthak's here ends up with a D12 hit die, eight plus his obviously high int skills per level, full BAB, strong progressions in both fortitude and reflex, proficiency and light and medium armor and simple martial and rogue weapons, rage, fast movement, trap finding, one D6 of sneak attack damage and all these class skills. All that study obviously paid off. There are also a few finer points to keep in mind, but they're pretty intuitive. First, in the case of a character who gestalts into two spell casting classes, treat everything relating to those classes spell casting as separate. That's to say you'd have two spell lists, two different numbers of spells known as spells per day, two different safe DCs, all that jazz. Next, any class that has specific restrictions like druids and metal armor, a wizard's arcane spell failure chance, barbarians needing to be unlawful, anything like that, those restrictions still apply their penalty even if your other class like gives you an proficiency in it or whatever. Lastly, if you would gain the same class feature from both classes, like how both barbarian and rogue eventually pick up uncanny dodge, you take it from whichever class gives it earliest and ignore it entirely from the other one. Now that's all very exciting, but what do we actually do with it? As a very general guideline, there's two main ways to benefit from gestalt. Either you use one class to show up another classes as weak points, or you pick two classes that together give you a huge variety of options. An example of the first might be a wizard slash barbarian mix that shores up the wizard's typically delicate HP and saves with the barbarians d12 and strong fort. For the second, you might have a sorcerer slash oracle who wants to make sure they always have the right kind of spell for the job and seems to never run out for the day. If you're looking to play a character built around a specific feed chain, you can always add fighter to any other class and get all the feeds you need and enjoy full BAB while you do it. One last way is to consider picking one class for in combat needs and another for out of combat situations. Many classes, like the barbarian and the gunslinger, are utter powerhouses when it comes to murderizing, but really fall short on ways to affect the story without violence. Others, like the investigator in Bard, are ribbing with narrative agency tools, but wouldn't mind a little bit of a extra pow to their power. Obviously, gestalt PCs are much more of a force to be reckoned with than your average single class adventurer, so a GM really needs to plan for how their NPCs and encounters are going to rise to the challenge. Encounters facing a gestalt party should have a CR that's one or two higher than what a typical party would expect for the same difficulty. And don't be afraid to have any or all of your NPCs with class levels go gestalt too. Fair is fair. The biggest limitation a gestalt PC has is that while they may have all the abilities of two classes, they still only have one standard action to use those abilities per turn. They also only have one set of ability scores and the usual number of feats to divide between the two classes. So it's likely that neither of them will be quite as fully developed as if they only had one. All the same, a gestalt party is rarely less than a completely kick-ass team with explosive stats and the personalities to match. They'll feel like they can do anything. And you know what? They probably can. Hey guys, coming to you from my quarantine bunker. I built it out of D&D stuff and Cowboys memorabilia. Okay, well it's mostly D&D stuff in my laptop. Hey, speaking of my laptop, the internet's become more important than ever during these trying times. Are you browsing securely with NordVPN? Well, you should be. With NordVPN's military grade encryption, you can stop all those companies from selling your information every which way and sending you toilet paper ads because you just looked up some articles about the toilet paper shortage. You got plenty of toilet paper. Anyways, also right now is the best time to get the most from your streaming services. That's right. Have you ever seen Australian Netflix? 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Most of the comments you had involved the restriction that you are not allowed to jump further than your movement speed per round. And then how that kind of broke what we talked about. That is true. So there are two main ways to rule this. And I admit I kind of fall on one side and if you fall on the other side, it's a bit of a problem. The way I rule it is that if you start a jump that goes further than your movement speed, that just locks you into the rest of that jump through your movement speed next round. Like if you can only move 30 feet around and you do a 60 foot jump somehow, you start that you move 30 feet this round because it just takes you six seconds to clear that much. And we just pause with you hanging in the air and it's fun and it's dnd it's whatever. And then you just complete the jump on this the next round. If your GM does not rule like that, then admittedly these tips might not work for you. However, a bunch of you had other suggestions that could help. For instance, the step of the windmunk allows you to dash as a bonus action. And if you do that, which I think it takes a key point, you also double your jump speed. And since we've already tripled our jump speed, that means that all your jump measurements are times six instead. So that's pretty cool. To backseat, as we pointed out, also get a 40 feet of movement just right off the bat. And they can use their next round's movement this round once per day. So that's pretty cool. If you would like to see the Gestalt rules I just talked about in action, feel free to check out our Gestalt campaign, Altered Egos, which I run on this channel. It is a bunch of superheroes, let loose in a city. My rules are that everybody has to be Gestalt vigilante one half and the other half is whatever makes their coolest superhero they think. Everybody's coming up with really awesome ideas, things I would've never thought of. And it's super neat, so check it out if you like. Until next time, not next week, like I said last time, because who knows. Next time, there's rules for that.