I'd like to add some thoughts about experience and monster levels. At this moment, the type of monsters you meet automatically adjust to your level. This has a number of consequences:

1. The player cannot fight monsters below or above his level (except in the wilderness and in towns), eliminating a lot of player choice.
2. Gaining levels means your character get stronger, but monsters get equally much stronger (or worse). Therefore, you do not benefit from levels.
3. Because of 2, gaining experience is no longer a reward. Also, experience penalties are no longer a penalty.

In conclusion, as long as the monster adjustment keeps working the way it does, experience penalties cannot be effectively used as an incentive. In fact, they are an extra reason to multiclass, because it means you can gain more weapon marks and find more items before you gain a level and have to face stronger monsters.

So I propose to drop that system and tie monster types / strength to dungeon depth, as before.

I fully agree with grobblewobble about level scaling (monster difficulty). Games that make heavy use of level scaling system tend to have that problem: there's really no point in levelling, because enemies level with you, so why bother. Sometimes this completely ruins a game, as with unmodded Oblivion, where often people actively avoid levelling because it's more efficient not to level if you want to win.

Apart from what grobblewobble says, heavy use of level scaling also has another problem: it's bad for immersion. A game world feels much more realistic if there are easy and hard places to go to. It's great when you go to a difficult dungeon and flee in panic at level 5, and then you return at level 20 and you storm through it. It's not so great when it doesn't matter what dungeon and what depth you dive too, because you're in the character level where you get trolls, so you'll always get trolls.

I liked the level scaling in ADOM I, because although there was level scaling, it was quite light (except for the uberjackal bug). It was marked enough to ramp up the challenge, but it was light enough to keep the singular features of each place so that you shivered when going into DH at character level 12 and you sighed when you emerged again at the CoC.

I think it would be good for ADOM II to get back to the level scaling system of ADOM I, where the enemies you got were mostly determined by the dungeon's danger level, and only slightly influenced by character level.

About multiclassing, I don't know. I think other aspects of the game need to be balanced before we really know if multiclassing is unbalanced or not. At the moment my most successful games have been with single-class warrior monks, so I don't really see multiclassing as too powerful even if you can get different class powers, but time will tell.

@Al-Khwarizmi: I think the problem is that right now, monks are probably the strongest class. If you're playing a thief or something, you're probably going to get slaughtered unless you pick up at least enough levels in monk to get disarm weapons. This is partly just due to lots of classes/abilities not being fully implemented yet, so there are no other really good options of dealing with, for example, brute monsters who can take 200+ HP off of you in a single hit.

This does present a problem when tied with the level scaling too, of course. It is entirely possible to just reach a wall where every dungeon level is going to have monsters that are too strong for your character, and there's nowhere to go. This could be really badly exacerbated as effects like dooming and equipment destruction start to come into play. I don't know that there is a good option though, if you want to keep the game fairly sandboxy and let the player go where they want.

I think no or slight level scaling is a good option. In the last decade, there is this fad that every RPG must have heavy level scaling to "let the player go where they want". Why? The best 80's and 90's RPG's with large worlds (the early Ultimas, Might & Magic, etc.) had no level scaling, and no one thought that was a problem. You learned by doing, or by asking NPC's, or by finding tough monsters and running away. If you found out the enemies at the dragon's lair were too tough for you at level 5, you tried back at level 25.

OK, in a game with permadeath it can be too rough to expect players to learn by doing because they can die and lose the whole game. But there are many ways in which one can hint at a dungeon's danger level. It can be a description when you see the dungeon in the wilderness ("a dangerous-looking cave"), or the NPC's in nearby towns could inform you, or it could be affected by the type of wilderness (dungeons in the mountains more dangerous), or by how far they are from Terinyo, or by how north/south they are, or by wilderness encounters getting slightly more and more dangerous when you approach a dangerous area so you have time to decide to retreat, etc. I think there are many ways of doing it without introducing heavy level scaling with all of its problems (I have yet to see a game with level scaling where players didn't end up applying unnatural strategies to avoid levelling or to level selectively... except ADOM I, which had very light level scaling).

As I said in another thread, multiclassing should not remove intrinsic abilities from your main class. For example, you should not lose the bonuses you get from true berserking as a barbarian if you take one level in another class...

How it is vice versa? ...if you have another class and you get one level in barbarian, should you also get the true berserking?
More general question: what bonuses are bound to first class only and what bonuses you get if the class is just a second, third, etc class?

In my point of view, the multiclassing is well balance, if it is optimised for 2-4 classes. However, I do not like to limit the number of classes...there should just be some (heavy?) penalties if you use more classes.

The way it is currently set up, you are supposed to get (some) weaker bonuses if you take levels in another class. For example, a barbarian get 3x damage (IIRC) for mighty blows, whereas a multiclass barbarian only gets 2x damage. Thieves get 100% searching power; multiclass to thief and you get 30% searching (although this power does not appear to be implemented yet). A lot of the class powers don't have this effect though, and apply equally well to all classes.

As it is, the multi-classing "penalty" is extremely beneficial, since weapon marks gained are merely dependent on the difference between your level and the enemy's level.

The autosearch is definitely implemented for multiclass thieves (or do you mean that multiclass thieves search on 100% of steps instead of 30%? This I have no way of knowing).

Bugger all this - let people multiclass freely and without an imposed penalty. If you stay single class, you should get powerful capstone abilities - if no-one ever goes single class, make the capstone abilities better until single classing becomes viable.

That's a much cleaner way to implement things and it'll be far easier to balance in the long run, vs. adding some kludge where different combinations of classes give you different rates of this that and the other.

The danger levels scaling strictly with level is a distinct issue which also needs to be fixed, but this is a late-alpha I wouldn't worry about TB getting any of the numerics tuned just yet.

I think this is an interesting idea. If expanded (see below), it could be used to replace the whole experience penalty concept.

Let me start out by saying that I do not like experience penalties. I have seen experience penalties for multiclassing in other games and I didn't like them. Let's forget about the specific interference with the problems with experience scaling in ADOM II at this moment. Let's say these are solved. Even then, experience penalties are still not a satisfying solution in my opinion. For players very good at powerlevelling, who know the ins and outs of the game and tricks (like wishing for an AKW or whatever), it will not be much of a penalty. At the same time, there is a risk it will lead to endless grinding for experience points.

So, how about this idea... Say that you started the game as a barbarian. Now you want to learn magic and you spend your next level-up on the wizard guild. Instead of directly becoming a level 1 wizard, you become a wizard apprentice (3). The (3) means that you need to gain 3 more apprentice levels before you become an actual wizard. You do not gain any wizard abilities yet. You still have a very hard time reading books, etc. You do gain hitpoints normally for your apprentice level, as well as skillpoints (based on the barbarian guild).
On your next level-up, if you choose wizard again, you become a wizard apprentice (2). If you're a wizard apprentice (1) and spend another level on wizard, you finally become a level 1 wizard. Now you become better at reading spellbooks, and gain any other advantages that come with being a wizard (skills, etc).

The number of apprentice levels that you need to "pay" can be different for every guild. This provides a simple way to vary the difficulty of multiclassing between guilds. You could say that the extra apprentice levels are still a sort of experience penalty, since you need to gain extra experience for those levels. However, the major difference is that, because of the level cap at level 50, the cost is permanent. If you want to join many guilds, you will spend many (most?) of those levels on apprenticeships and you will be left with few levels to gain actual abilities.

I really like Sam Handelman's idea of making powerful capstone abilities so that making 'pure' classes is a more viable option. This seems like it has some good potential to me.