D&D 5E Legends & Lore bits about prestige classes in 5e (and NEW playtest packet!)

[Li Shenron]

http://www.wizards.com/dnd/Article.aspx?x=dnd/4ll/20121217

Well the information is still a bit sparse, but at least now it seems confirmed that prestige classes will be in 5e, and what are the design goals about them. Let's hope it doesn't turn out to be just a design gimmick like in 3e...

Edit: the best-sounding part of the article is the hint at providing tools for the DM to make her own setting-specific prestige classes. This was actually the original idea of Monte Cook behind 3e PrCls, but then WotC found out that it was just economically better to fill books with countless PrCls, and forgot about providing the DIY tools.

The worst part about the article is the poll, because asking for favourite PrCls of the past... and almost none of those fit with the "setting-specific" idea of what 5e PrCl should be (and 3e PrCl should have been)! Sure, people are now going to vote the most generic stuff like Archmage and Duelist as "must-have". :/

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And make sure you stick your finger to F5 today, to get your new playtest packet without delay

 

[pemerton]

I'm not a big fano of this comment on Prestige Classes:

The interesting thing about this approach is that it casts prestige classes as a DM tool that helps bring a world to life by giving starting characters goals in the campaign.​

I prefer Prestige Classes (or Paragon Paths) as player tools to bring the gameworld to life and invest their PCs in it.

And if players only care about PCs/PPs from the point of view of power-ups, that is not going to change by putting the GM in charge of handing them out. It will just mean that some players will jump through the GMs story-hoops in order to get the power up.

 

[Sunseeker]

I hated, in fact you could say I loathed the Prestige Class system in 3.X. It was horrid. There was one, or two prestige classes that gave you incredible power in a very short frame, and then there were a million more that were creative, evocative and interesting...that did nothing more than gimp your character. What was worse is that base classes petered out around level 8-10, making taking on a new class or a PrC mandatory. Not to mention, entrance requirements meant you had to plan out gaining the PrC for several levels, if not from the very first moment of character creation, which often made it feel less like you were playing your character or your class, and instead were playing a "I'm not the class I really want to be yet" class.

I LOVED the way Paragon Paths fixed all those issues in 4e. All were fairly well balanced, all were fairly flavorful and tied in to the core elements of the base classes you could start out in. Entrance requirements were low, being simply your race, your class, or your diety and rarely requiring more than one of those, any of which were easy to meet, both for the optimizer and the role-player.

I am also fond of Pathfinder's solution, by enhancing the later levels of classes to make them desirable, and to making paragon paths both creative AND useful, or at least keeping the ones that were mostly flavorful but less useful short.

I read through the survey and found that I didn't like a single one of the PrC's they had listed. All of them were either horribly overpowered and the only real choice if you actually wanted to feel like you gained anything the rest of the game, or very flavorful but absolutely useless.

Lets learn from our mistakes and our successes. Balance PrCs, keep their entrance requirements low, make them ALL flavorful, and if they hold significantly more fluff than crunch, represent that by keeping the number of levels they take up small.

 

[Wepwawet]

If there is going to be prestige classes I don't want to spend too much game time questing for them.
1 or 2 sessions per character to gain a prestige class? That's boring and a waste of time for valuable story advancement...

Also, having to plan a campaign from level 1 to give your players their prestige classes is no change from each player having to plan their character's feats from level 1

(Yeah, I use prestige classes as power-ups for my character, and as extra customization options But the main objective is still the development of the campaign story we're telling)

 

[delericho]

3e's Prestige Classes, as originally conceived, seemed like a decent notion, but actually made no sense at all. They were supposed to be elite organisations in the campaign world for PCs to join.

Fair enough.

Problem is that you had to be 7th level or so before you could even consider joining such a group (and, indeed, only a tiny percentage of 7th level PCs could meet the entry requirements). The NPC demographics made it very clear that characters of the requisite levels were vanishingly rare. And yet, the setting was supposed to contain not just one entire organisation of such characters, but any number of them?

If there's a place for the "PrC as organisations" model, then it is at the lowest levels. Basically, duplicate the careers system from WFRP, and make the "prestige classes"/elite organisations something that an interested character can join at second level.

FWIW, I also hated that PrCs were actually nothing more than a new form of power-up for PCs.

4e did the whole thing vastly better, with the Paragon Paths being, essentially, an individual path that the character chose to take, and something that was already baked in the character advancement (and so not a huge power-up).

 

[Li Shenron]

4e did the whole thing vastly better, with the Paragon Paths being, essentially, an individual path that the character chose to take, and something that was already baked in the character advancement (and so not a huge power-up).

I agree with most you wrote before this part, but here I think it makes no sense to say that paragon paths were better, because they were simply a completely different idea. As you say, they were essentially an individual path, while prestige classes were supposed to represent groups, pretty much the opposite.

I think a shortcoming of 3e PrCls for me was how the requirements were typically designed, which spawned hundreds of PrCl meant to work for 1-2 classes only. Other base classes could simply not qualify, or if by accident they could, then there was probably a non-intended class that could exploit the PrCl features too much.

If a PrCl is supposed to represent a group, them having some requirements (even mechanical reqs, as long as they fit with the concept... not "Sunder" as a requirement to become a Blackguard) makes sense and become a tool for the DM to establish what will be common to ALL members of such group. But then you couldn't have a single PrCl to represent a non-homogeneous group such as The Harpers... you needed a Harper Mage, a Harper Scout, a Harper Priest and so on and so on...

Then probably the biggest flaw of PrCl was, as usual, the gaming community, which started to demand "more, more!" but they had to be absolutely "balanced", which made the designers more motivated to release rigid/narrow PrCls, too standardized (insane how some design habits later became absolute must), and use requirements only to balance the "entry cost" with the gamers wanting "crunch" and not fluff even in requirements, so less focus on in-game control of PrCls access and more power in the hands of players who would just pretend to entry a PrCl from an obscure splatbook "because I have all the requirements". If it was going to end like this, PrCls should have probably stopped at the DMG examples.

 

[Starfox]

Having to plan a campaign from level 1 to give your players their prestige classes is no change from each player having to plan their character's feats from level 1

Which is a horrible state of affairs for feats and a strong reason to have less feat prerequisites.

3e's Prestige Classes, as originally conceived, seemed like a decent notion, but actually made no sense at all. They were supposed to be elite organisations in the campaign world for PCs to join. [...] The NPC demographics made it very clear that characters of the requisite levels were vanishingly rare. And yet, the setting was supposed to contain not just one entire organisation of such characters, but any number of them?

At least in the first playtest, NEXT did something similar with backgrounds, which seems a very nice idea and could be built on.

 

[JeffB]

God no, please no more 3e style prclasses.

 

[steeldragons]

God no, please no more 3e style prclasses.

Took the words right out from under my keyboard.

 

[pemerton]

3e's Prestige Classes, as originally conceived, seemed like a decent notion, but actually made no sense at all. They were supposed to be elite organisations in the campaign world for PCs to join.

<snip>

The NPC demographics made it very clear that characters of the requisite levels were vanishingly rare. And yet, the setting was supposed to contain not just one entire organisation of such characters, but any number of them?

<snip>

4e did the whole thing vastly better, with the Paragon Paths being, essentially, an individual path that the character chose to take

I'm not going to argue with you about 4e doing something right!

But on the organisation issue - here is my take on it for 4e:

Many Paragon Paths and Epic Destinies in 4e talk about organisations, past figures who have trod that path/realised that destiny, etc. If this was all taken literally it would suggest a campaign world and campaign history chock-full of these super-powerful characters. I therefore prefer to treat it all as suggestive and indicative: it tells the player what someone might look like who follws that path/destiny, but I'm not meant to treat it all as backstory for my campaign world. In a sense, only the paths and destinies my players choose for their PCs actually exist in the campaign world.

Can something like that approach work for Prestige Class organisations?