First and foremost I gotta say that this is not a hate post but merely a design question, since 5e's balance seems to depend entirely from not picking the (obvious to veteran players) bad choices in character building. I've been playing 5e for some years now, and it was the first non-freeform system I tried back then, I grew enamoured with the possibilities in character creation but I gotta say it's real easy to build characters wrong.

Multiclassing feels like one of those options where the DM could simply say "no" and disallow it, the same case as with feats, but in all tables I've been in it wasn't even questioned wether it was allowed or no, it's always been "yes" which I kinda like. However this has always meant that noobs, at level up, get kinda crazy at the impressive amount of options and end up ditching an ASI or single-class level for more versatility, which ends up meaning that they get (again, obvious to veterans) trap options which would impede character progression for a while or dead levels.

Meet the 10th level martial, who put 5 levels in fighter and 5 into barbarian. Turns out they cannot get extra attack twice unless they go full fighter and wait until 11th. So.... what do they get instead? Nothing. I mean, it makes sense since if this were to happen, everyone would be multiclassing 5 levels into all martials and getting extra attacks BEFORE a full fighter and at level 20 they'd be getting a fifth attack which is absolutelly unheard of (!!!!).

Right then, why would cantrips and spell slots scale nigh perfectly with character level if that were an issue? Mind you I could simply take 1 or two levels into warlock for that gosh-darned Charisma heavy crossbow blast that people hype so much. In fact, why wouldn't I just pick two levels in warlock (meaning eldritch blast plus charisma to damage) and the rest in any kind of martial? I'd be getting extra attacks at assigned levels without a single care in the world about dead levels and minmaxing features for caps!

People do talk a bunch of shit about the martial/spellcaster power divide but excuse it all the moment we start talking about how spells are a limited resource per day. To these people I say they're living in a lie; plainly because cantrips exist and scale better than regular weapon attacks.

So what's a solution for this? In the current state of the game, there's none, since non-fighter martials aren't balanced to have more attacks than they actually have. Hell, Imagine a monk making 6 attacks per turn, all of them carrying a stunning strike save in them (which would make them way more entertaining to play but that's not the point). BUT, and this is a very big but, if you wanna go balls to the wall crazy and add more complexity to the game, here's some shitty homebrew I just cooked up:

INTRODUCING MARTIAL POINTS (Because Base Attack Bonus was already taken)

At first level and at every certain number of levels you acquire through levelling up, you obtain Martial Points, which grant the characters the feature Extra Attack for two, three, four and even five(!!!!) hits per turn when using the Attack action, because we're just that crazy.

An extra attack is acquired at 5, 10, 15 and 20 Martial Points.

The progression differenciates the following groups: Martial, half-martial and caster.

• Martials: Fighter, Barbarian, Monk, Paladin, Ranger
• Half-martial: Rogue, Artificer, Warlock
• Caster: Wizard, Cleric, Druid, Bard, Sorcerer

Martials get 1 point every level. Half-martials get 1 point every two levels. Casters get 1 point every three levels.

Anyways rant over. I just think that this could've been handled way better.