Character development
How a character grows: what skill points cost, and how experience is earned faster or slower than by the character standing next to you.
Skill points
What a rank costs is decided by the class you are taking at that level, not by your best class. A skill that is a class skill for the level you are taking costs one point per rank; anything else costs two. Take a level of Wizard on a Fighter and Discipline is briefly expensive; take a Fighter level next and it is cheap again. Ranks already bought are never lost.
You do not have to spend the points when you get them. They can be banked indefinitely, so a character can save every point across a run of levels and spend the lot at a level whose class makes the skills they want cheap. Nothing forces the decision at the moment you level.
Experience
Two separate things change how fast you earn.
Your favored class. Every race favours a class, and here that is a reward rather than the absence of a punishment. Stay single-classed in your race's favored class and you earn +5% experience, or +10% if your race is one of the ones that costs tokens. The bonus ends the moment you take a level of anything else. Some races favour a different class for male and female characters - see Races.
The multiclass penalty, which is separate and is not only about the favored class. Two of your ordinary classes more than one level apart, with neither of them your favored class, costs you 20% experience. Two such pairs cost 40%. Prestige classes are left out of that comparison entirely, so taking one never triggers it.
Extra levels. Some races count as one or more levels higher than they are for anything that measures your level, experience included, so they level more slowly. Each race page states its own.
Pure class
Some systems - the item set bonuses above all - ask whether a character is pure, and the answer is not the same for a base class and a prestige class.
- A base class is pure when every level you have is in it.
- A prestige class is pure at 30 levels in that one class. The set bonus for it begins earlier, at character level 20 with at least 10 levels of the prestige class, and keeps counting as long as you take no other class, up to 40.
One class is deliberately outside that rule: God's Eye Scout at 10 levels counts towards either total - base or prestige - when a set bonus is working out whether you are pure. It counts for nothing else.
Your major class
Several systems ask which class is yours rather than what you have levels in - the on-hit save DC of an item set is the clearest case. The answer is the class you have the most levels in, and a prestige class wins a tie. If that still ties - two prestige classes, or two base ones - the class you took first is the one that counts.
Staying pure
A number of abilities pay more to a character who is pure in a class - an extra attack on the Elite Guard's Crossbow Precision, the better of the two shapes on the Northern Templar's Guardian of Krisaldimun, and the set bonuses on gear. What counts as pure:
- A base class is pure when its levels are all your levels - all 40 of them, once you are there.
- A prestige class is pure when it holds every level you have past the tenth: 10 of a base class and 30 of the prestige class.
- Ten levels of God's Eye Scout do not break it. They are counted as though they belonged to the class you are pure in - the only class that works that way, and the class caps at exactly those ten levels.
- Dropping from 40 to 39 does not cost you the status, deliberately.