airwalkrr
Adventurer
This is one of the best articles I have ever seen on Wizards' site. Many players never stick to a single class, unless it is one of the new base classes. Multiclassing is the trend, and prestige classes are seen as practically necessary. When I look at many of the base classes, I can understand why. The only classes that I believe are truly worth playing to 20th are the barbarian, druid, and monk. Most prestige classes grant nifty abilities at every level, while the fighter has ten levels where he gains no special abilities! It is not as if the entry requirements for prestige classes are not worth the effort. Sometimes they are substandard choices, but usually not substandard enough to actually balance the huge shift in power the prestige class grants over the base class. If the designers of the game had followed a strict philosophy of giving classes with no spellcasting useful abilities at every level and giving spellcasting classes less useful abilities every level or actually penalizing characters for multiclassing or taking a level in a prestige class (and let's face it, losing turn undead ability or familiar abilities is not a significant penalty), then the base classes by themselves would probably be colorful enough to encourage people to play them more often.
I like Kolja's article, but I think we can improve upon it. What I want to do is talk about abilities we could give to the base classes that need it that would spruce them up. The idea is not to make the base classes inordinately more powerful, but to think up abilities that add to the flavor of the class.
Here is one idea. Let us assume the sorcerer and the wizard are different on a more fundamental level. The wizard practices techniques to make his spells better in all ways while the sorcerer takes better advantage of metamagic. The sorcerer could be offered abilities that slightly enhance his metamagic (until he receives his crowning 20th level ability that casting spells enhanced with metamagic no longer takes any extra time; I mean, at 20th level, who really cares). One ability could be that when he combines still spell with silent spell, it costs one spell level less. Or he could have an ability that gives him the ability to cast metamagic spells without increasing the casting time with one spell. Something like that. The crowning ability is nice, but it comes after gruelling through 20 levels of sorcerer, and that deserves a reward other than epic sorcerer levels (whoopee).
The wizard loses the ability to gain metamagic feats with his bonus feats, but in exchange, he gets faster access to wizard bonus feats and a few more choices. For example, add Spell Focus, Greater Spell Focus, Spell Penetration, and Greater Spell Penetration to his bonus feat list and give him feats that increase every 4 levels after 4th. Then, at every other 4th level (so at 2nd, 6th, 10th, etc.) he gains a different ability that is not necessarily as good, but still useful. Things like a floating +1 DC 1/day or floating +1 CL 1/day, small things that wouldn't heavily impact balance, but would still be worth looking forward to.
Edit: Let me say one other thing. A lot of the abilities Kolja suggests are fine, but the problem is they are not appropriate abilities to dangle in front of a 10th level character, and many, if not most, of the dead levels occur after 10th level. For instance, I think it would be entirely realistic to give the ranger his improved tracking abilities at low levels and advance some of his other abilities to higher levels, since many of them are not replicated with prestige classes and multiclassing.
I like Kolja's article, but I think we can improve upon it. What I want to do is talk about abilities we could give to the base classes that need it that would spruce them up. The idea is not to make the base classes inordinately more powerful, but to think up abilities that add to the flavor of the class.
Here is one idea. Let us assume the sorcerer and the wizard are different on a more fundamental level. The wizard practices techniques to make his spells better in all ways while the sorcerer takes better advantage of metamagic. The sorcerer could be offered abilities that slightly enhance his metamagic (until he receives his crowning 20th level ability that casting spells enhanced with metamagic no longer takes any extra time; I mean, at 20th level, who really cares). One ability could be that when he combines still spell with silent spell, it costs one spell level less. Or he could have an ability that gives him the ability to cast metamagic spells without increasing the casting time with one spell. Something like that. The crowning ability is nice, but it comes after gruelling through 20 levels of sorcerer, and that deserves a reward other than epic sorcerer levels (whoopee).
The wizard loses the ability to gain metamagic feats with his bonus feats, but in exchange, he gets faster access to wizard bonus feats and a few more choices. For example, add Spell Focus, Greater Spell Focus, Spell Penetration, and Greater Spell Penetration to his bonus feat list and give him feats that increase every 4 levels after 4th. Then, at every other 4th level (so at 2nd, 6th, 10th, etc.) he gains a different ability that is not necessarily as good, but still useful. Things like a floating +1 DC 1/day or floating +1 CL 1/day, small things that wouldn't heavily impact balance, but would still be worth looking forward to.
Edit: Let me say one other thing. A lot of the abilities Kolja suggests are fine, but the problem is they are not appropriate abilities to dangle in front of a 10th level character, and many, if not most, of the dead levels occur after 10th level. For instance, I think it would be entirely realistic to give the ranger his improved tracking abilities at low levels and advance some of his other abilities to higher levels, since many of them are not replicated with prestige classes and multiclassing.
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