@JeremyECrawford Why Ability score improvement is based on each class level and not the total level of character? hurts multiclassing 😢
— shahriyar (@Shahriyar_Osuli) May 2, 2017
@armando_doval @Shahriyar_Osuli Ability Score Improvement is intentionally a class feature. It is not a feature of your character level.
— Jeremy Crawford (@JeremyECrawford) May 2, 2017
That… doesn’t… answer…. the question.
Does “for balance” answer it any better?
A little better, but it’s still a short flippant answer. Why bother answering the question at all unless you’re are going to provide a full answer?
Players *like* to know the game designers’ reasoning. Curiosity about how something works or why it was designed a certain way is natural. Shutting down that natural curiosity is off-putting and frustrating.
Seconding your posts. While a number of JC’s posts are very useful/helpful, ones like these are so backhandedly useless it’s positively infuriating. His not-an-answer-answer comes across as dismissive, regardless of his intent.
It puts a small dampener on level dipping, which is enough. It’s enough of a disadvantage that lets you choose a captstone, instead of multiclassiong.
Given how terrible most capstones are, it makes sense.