That’s … actually a pretty good pitch. I think I would also split the character in combat to avoid having one player be idle for several hours or even sessions in case a very long boss fight happens.

I ran a game for my kiddo and their friends and my kiddos character was similar, they had found a bunch of bottles that had different colored liquids in them.

Character was an artificer/warlock who was a refrigerator repair man named Sam Sung. Self built mechanical armor that was a mini fridge and they stored the bottles inside. Each bottle was the essence of a divine or demonic being that became the “patrons” that were constantly fighting over the character. Basically the character ways had 12 different voices telling them what to do. Best part was kiddo was constantly drinking from the bottles.

Agreed, give a chance to flip at the beginning of every turn, since that’s when reactions and a lot of 1-turn effects end.

Also, to further reduce the chance of one player holding the character too long and to add a little fun tension: instead of a coin flip, in order to take over, the player not presenting makes an unmodified DC10 check that decreases by 1 with every failure and resets on a success.

Also makes sense that in higher stress situations like combat, they’d be fighting for control more frequently than when they’re chilling in camp.

So would the character have to carry two sets of gear and change with each personality switch? Would the warlock even have the strength to haul around a paladin’s armor and sword?

On edit: And how about changes during combat? Even with a bag of holding, the paladin would have to either fight without armor and a proper weapon or fall back and equip. The warlock would be immobile until he could drop the paladin gear. In either case, they’re dropping loot on personality changes during battle. Disclaimer: I’m going off old-school Baldur’s Gate and I’ve never played table-top, so I could be completely wrong about all of this.

Is there a name for this trope of cramming really wacky, difficult, high spotlight, stuff into a game like DND that doesn’t especially support it?

I usually feel bad because I want to encourage creativity, but I also don’t want this guy to have 80% of the table attention while Bob the Fighter and Joy the Rogue are playing by the numbers.

Limiting skills and abilities to only one class of a multiclass character at a time is going make them fall behind very quickly.

As a DM that is my only concern, love everything else!

Reminds me of the twins from Kingmaker.

I encourage you to try Everyone is John then.

Might be fun to add a check to it. Maybe something akin to a concentration check that they have to roll when they take damage to hold on to their connection to their patron. Failure means they flip.

That sounds like a blast

Wouldn’t that character get super nerfed fast? Even at an even split of class levels you’ll be half the class level of the rest of the party, with only hp/proficiency keeping up.

Main Character Syndrome

Sometimes it’s just about having fun.

French rpg bloodlust is famous for God Weapon having their own urges but not being able to indulge them without a human bearing the weapon.

Leading to the poor human getting some power based on what the weaponk let them do, while having a weapon begging them to indulge in violence, lust or any other awful sin.

Having a player having the weapon and another one the bearer open the road to pretty interesting roleplay

That and the changing every in-game hour. I’m rarely tracking time down to the hour, so it would either slow things down if they try to make any kind of scene out of it, or we’re just going to gloss over multiple changes, potentially making the whole thing moot. Then you get into a dungeon and someone might be locked out of “their” character for a large chunk of playtime.

Tracking who controlled for longer to determine the next level up sounds pretty tedious too, but I guess that would be the players’ problem to sort out, not the DM’s. I would worry that it may be an unforeseen detriment to their enjoyment though.

This sounds like a fun character. They even balance it out by not allowing the two classes to operate at the same time so it’s not OP.

It sounds like the character has the same total level as the rest of the party, but can only use features from half of those levels, so it’s going to be underpowered to the point of unplayability.

In 5e, if they took their first level as Paladin, they would gain Heavy Armor Proficiency. Having proficiency in heavy armor would allow a normal Lockadin to cast their Warlock spells in armor just fine. They also both heavily favor Charisma, and if the Warlock took Pact of the Blade or Hexblade, they wouldn’t even need strength for melee.

That’s a normal Paladin/Warlock though, with this weird hotseat play they want to do, their self-imposed rules might not let them even use the other class’ passive features, which could get awkward.