Multiclassing and starting levels

[Lascivious Goat]

A reply by Levity to a post in the Hello forum has prompted this post. To quote Levity:

But you can switch back and forth freely. I'm rather an odd one for only being on my second adventure class after nearly 2 years playing (though technically it's my 5th). The penalty is "Adventure Rating" -- you have to kill monsters high enough level to match your rating, so if you are 100 in one class and start another one from the beginning, you have to go for critters around level 50, which can be impossible to kill. But that's my own poor mismanagement at work *laughs* I should have gone back and forth if I wanted to min-max.

My question is: do you start at lvl 1 in a new school? My main started as a Scout with a view to becoming a Ranger, which involves switching to Druid as an intermediate step. As soon as the minimum reqs for Druid were met I switched from Scout to Druid. Then to go from Druid to Ranger involved getting the Druid school up to lvl 20. When I switched to Ranger my starting level was 20. Currently my main's lvl is Ranger 25. If I were to now switch to, say, Cleric, would I start at lvl 1?

[oneirosuchus]

If you picked up cleric, you would start back at level 1, but your rating would be greater -- I never made a point of remembering the forumla, so I couldn't tell you what. Most hybrid and prestige classes start at level 20, but the base classes start you back at 1.

[Varangaard]

To turn this into a simple rule, all adveture classes having skill prerequisites will start at 20 (because to gain that much skill, you need 20 levels in one or two base classes). The rest start at 1.