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Message: <blockquote data-quote="arwink" data-source="post: 423962" data-attributes="member: 2292">Someone's using it?  Sweet.  Tonguez, what you're proposing is doable, even suggested in the DMG somewhere (towards the beginning, with vague guidelines).  Personally, though, I'm not a huge fan of messing with the rules to give classes extra stuff like feats or catch all skill bonuses.  In my mind, that's what Prestige Classes are for.  Within the rules 3e offers a great deal of scope for difining characters through different skill choices and feat choices.  Why give bonus feats and skill bonuses to the Knight of St Mike, when specifying people trained by the order take Ride and Skill Focus: Healing as their first two feats?  If I was going to change a class for this idea, I'd probably limit myself to swapping skills in and out of the classes skill set.   For me, it has the same effect without messing with the rules too much.One thing to keep in mind about this kind of thing is that people can walk out of an order.  What's to stop someone taking a Paladin of St. Mike to get the free feat and bonuses to skills, then deciding that's it, wandering off and joining a more militant order.  That's one of the reasons I used feat progressions for the schools - it doesn't matter at what level your character starts training, or when you leave.  There's no mechanical bonuses, just role playing ones.I do use organisations and academy's for every class in my game, written up in the same way as the fighter schools and for much the same reason you've outlined.  While I don't use a lot of free advantages in terms of mechantics, there's usually a host of Obligations, Role playing and campaign benefits associated with them (free lodging, free training, bonuses to checks in certain situations, access to certain types of information).  Choosing a school is purely optional, and most of them have very basic descriptions unless someone asks about them specifically, but they're there.  I like the fact that the PC's know where they come from, and it gives them a ready-made list of NPC's and locations their automatically familiar with.  For Players who aren't enthused about writing detailed backgrounds, this works to keep them involved in the world.  For people who love their backgrounds, it gives them a very solid base to work around and launch from.  Didn't mean to ramble quite so much on this, but you did ask for thoughts and this is what first came to mind.Peter.</blockquote>

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