This sounds like a fun character.

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.

I actually did this once, only the good personality was a pacifist healer who was a liability in combat due to her aforementioned pacifism and her oath to help anyone who asks for it occasionally helping our enemies, and the evil personality was a sociopathic battle hungry sorcerer who just wants to cause as much mayhem as possible. Mechanically speaking, the evil one surfaces in high stress situations (I have to fail a con save for it to take effect) and I automatically revert to the good one upon falling asleep or otherwise losing consciousness in some way. I ran all of this by my dm to make sure it wouldn't screw over the party too much or be too powerful. It was my favorite character thus far.

Did your party feel the need to knock out your character from time to time?

At lower levels, this problem was quickly resolved by a simple sleep spell. By the time sleep fell off in terms of usefulness, character development had left my evil side with a sort of begrudging respect for my allies. (though I still didn't care if they just so happened to be within splash damage rage) By that point it was more of a mixed bag type of deal. The evil form was undeniably effective at nuking whatever threatened us, but couldn't be trusted to handle delicate negotiations. The good side would outright refuse to help in battle, but was a superb utility party member. Because of how the mechanics worked, being evil was only a temporary problem that would resolve itself as soon as I take a rest, which obviously I would need to do to get my health and spell slots back. So to answer your question: yes at first, but eventually no.

So... Everyone is John? Dnd players keep reinventing the wheel and patting themselves in the back for it.

Yeah, either give both the level or—IMO the better option—the GM can just give them level-ups twice as often. More work for the GM of course.

> Also, to further reduce the chance of one player holding the character too long If two players want to copilot a character that shit is on them to figure out. If they're disagreeing often enough about who should pilot when then it's gonna be a drag and shouldn't be done.

Just have two character sheets. Share equipment and at least the same constitution score so you can share hit points. It's a few extra hit points than the Warlock should have but also it's a pretty unique scenario. As long as they aren't trying to cheese the system it would work fine.

I actually went to a session zero for a planned astrology-themed campaign where there were two antagonists who alternated between being controlling a PC and being the DM. The players wanted neither of them to achieve their goal, so whichever demiurge was in flesh mode would be helping the other PCs to counteract the places of the other pc/dm. We tried to figure out how to actually make it work and said "yeah nah".