meant PoR

Man does this bring back memories, I remember loading up Pools on my 40mb hard drive in my Tandy 30+ years ago.

I loved these games, glad to see they are still somewhat popular.

Anyway my party consists of 2 fighters, a Mage, Cleric, Thief, and F/M.

Seem to remember a lot of wasted EXP in this game now and have read that is why a lot of players use multi class on a lot of their characters.

Oh well pretty pot committed have already got through the textile mill.

Might change things up in CoAB. Have not modded.

Another reason for multi-classed characters is the bigger arsenal of Sleep and Cure spells, as well as the Elves' +1 THAC0 when using Longbows and Long Swords.

My last party:
Human fighter
Human cleric
Elf fighter/mage
Elf fighter/mage/thief
Half-elf fighter/mage/cleric
Half-elf fighter/cleric

Everyone had a unique class, which was one of my goals. I also spent a lot of time customizing their sprites with unique color combinations and accessories. It was pretty fun.

Unfortunately, non-humans are mostly useless in the later games, so I had to replace all the multiclassed characters except the thief with a human. The triple-classed thief stayed quite useful most of the way through the saga. It wasn't until the mid-point of Pools of Darkness that I regretted having a triple-classed thief. By then, having mid-level mage spells was a gimmick.

But it's great fun having so many sleep spells in the first game, an extra fireball in the second game, and a backup mage in the third game.

Yea I think of my 6 Pools characters I may only keep the fighter/mage mage and cleric

In Pool of Radiance multiclassing may be fine, but for later games in the series, remember the level caps on non-human races. From Silver Blades onward you should probably go humans only and dual class them instead. Might be worth planning a game ahead also so you can switch class as soon as you load them into the next one.

Dual classed Paladin/Magic-User can be... potent.