Do prestige classes count toward XP penalties?

[Hypersmurf]

Sometimes, Prestige Classes are very similar to a base class and could be seen as an "extension" of that class, rather than actual multiclassing, but often, this is not the case, and there really is no difference between multiclassing into another base class or the prestige class then.

Well, no, the major difference is that with base classes, you can choose to keep your levels balanced. With prestige classes, you can't, because you can't take the first level of the prestige class until you already have several (unbalancing) levels in another class...

As I understand it, that's why PrCs don't have a multiclass penalty - the designers felt it wasn't fair to require unbalanced levels, then penalise you for them...

-Hyp.

 

[Thanee]

Yeah, that might be a reason, altho it usually only applies to 3 levels (2nd thru 4th).

And the no multiclassing penalty for PrC makes the favored class pretty pointless in 95% of the cases.

Anyways, this rule is surely not perfect in every sense, but the downsides are mostly minor stuff compared to what we like about it.

Bye
Thanee

 

[The Souljourner]

No offense, but I would hate to be in your games. I have never and will never incur an XP penalty due to unbalanced classes. Getting 20% less XP means you fall behind VERY quickly.

Making PrCs not incur the penalty definitely does not make favored classes pointless... maybe in your games no one dabbles in classes, like fighter 2 rogue 10, but it happens all the time in campaigns I'm in, so favored classes really make a big difference. For example, I made a Dwarven Paladin 3 Fighter x once, which I couldn't have done if he didn't have fighter (or paladin) as a favored class.

I pretty much never see anyone take two classes evenly above 4th level, it's almost always 1-3 of one class and the rest some other class.

So, yeah, the favored class thing impacts a lot of our campaigns. I remember a few times thinking of character ideas and then discarding them because I'd have incurred an XP penalty.

There's no PrC with good enough abilities that I would willingly take a 20% XP penalty for 6 of the 10 levels. It's just not worth being so far behind the rest of the party. It's not fun.

-The Souljourner

 

[robberbaron]

No, but I can see why people might rule that they do.
I wouldn't, but then I'm not allowing PrCs at all (at least initially - I want the players thinking about their characters, not what they'll be doing in 6 levels time).

 

[welby]

I'm going to side with thanee on this one. I think there are advantages to a multiclassing xp penalty. It certainly hurts the "I take 1 lvl of this, and 1 lvl of that" type of player. PrC are generally more powerful than base classes, so there should be some cost to taking one. The downside is it punishes the players that want to take a weaker PrC for flavor reasons.

Perhaps they should have included the xp penalty rules, and just made PrC more powerful across the board.

 

[Thanee]

Well, as I said, we do use (since FRCS introduced it) the proportional XP rule, which balances this somewhat. And as I also said, it doesn't have to work for everyone. If there was a player who had a serious problem with it, I'm sure we would drop that in favor of fun.

I have played a character with multiclassing penalties since level 4 or 5 once up to level 14 and never saw a problem with the -20%, really. It's fewer than one might think. It was still a very powerful character, and the 2nd class was mostly taken for flavor reasons (elven rogue/cleric).

But then again, I use Limited Wish all the time (1~2 times per evening), if I can cast it. Maybe I'm just careless?

Bye
Thanee