Originally Posted by Taril
Originally Posted by Buba68
How about dumping ESL?
I really see no reason why my Bard 6/Cleric 2 should have access to lvl4 spells. There should be a price for multiclassing ...

There is a price. You don't progress a class' spell levels when you multiclass.

Your Bard 6/Cleric 2 has level 4 spell slots, but no actual level 4 spells. You can upcast your level 1-3 spells to level 4, but you don't get actual level 4 spells.

The only time you can bypass this is with Wizard. Since they can learn any spell to the level of their spell slots from scrolls. So a Cleric 11 Wizard 1 can have their Wizard learn level 6 Wizard spells (Of course, they'll have very few spaces to memorize Wizard spells and each class uses their own casting stat so in this case the Cleric spells will use WIS while the Wizard spells will use INT)

Wizard 1 gives you exactly 1 + Int modifier Wizard spells on the bar, doesn't it? I'd also say that the fun from and the price of multiclassing comes from making weird things work. Among the above mentioned penalties there are also resource management penalties. Full Wizards can restore some of their spell slots, if you only have one or two levels in Wizard, you can only restore one level 1 spell slot and you might have fewer resources of the special resource of your other class as well. You'll have to long rest or drink angelic slumber more often .... or go through the above mentioned reskill game, which I'd personally would not want to do on a multiclass.