Do prestige classes curb creativity?

[Celebrim]

THen what is a description? Why have it in the rule book.

You answer your own question further on. The description is just a means for make the introduction to the class more newbie friendly. They are merely suggestions and not hard and fast rules.

It is a recommendation that if you awish to play such a character then this class is what you would pick.

A recommendation is not a requirement.

I don't think that there should be a giant arrow with a bold "rule" formatted to label it a rule.

There is no need for that. Most people are able to tell rules from discussion. But, for the record, the complete rules regarding Rogues are found here: http://srd.plush.org/rogue.html Note that they don't say anything at all about thieving or any other profession. They certainly have alot of skills that would make them better specialist burglers than any other class, but there is nothing that requires all burglers to be thieves much less all thieves in general (con artists, extortionists, blackmailers, cut purses, hookers (the Elizabethian kind, not the prostitute), muggers, robbers, bandits, pick pockets, and so forth) to be rogues. For instance, I might want to make a mugger or bandit who was a Ranger, or a pick pocket or con artist who was a bard. These classes are at least as well suited to that sort of thievery as rogues are. Note also that none of the Rogues skills is specifically about 'thieving'. You can pick pockets with sleight of hand, but that's not all its useful for. You can open locks to get into places you shouldn't, but an expert locksmith is probably pretty good at opening locks to.

What that paragraph tells me the reader is that this is a description of what a rogue is. And by description, I mean in this game this is what rogues are.

Usually. Not necessarily. A rule is something that is always true, for example that rogues have good reflex saves and a 1st level rogue has +0 BAB. There is no rule that all thieves have to be rogues, or that rogues have to be thieves. Many are, because the class is well suited to thievery in general and things like picking pockets and burgalizing homes in particular, but many is not all. If fact, its possible to make a rogue that isn't any good at stealing things at all. You know the classic nerdy professor/sage character who accompanies the hero because he knows all sorts of obscure things but isn't much good in a fight, who in the final climatic battle saves the hero by hitting the villian over the head with a vase or somesuch just when it looks like the hero is finished - arguably that's a rogue too. Or maybe not. It just depends on how you want to play the character.

 

[DonTadow]

You answer your own question further on. The description is just a means for make the introduction to the class more newbie friendly. They are merely suggestions and not hard and fast rules.



A recommendation is not a requirement.



There is no need for that. Most people are able to tell rules from discussion. But, for the record, the complete rules regarding Rogues are found here: http://srd.plush.org/rogue.html Note that they don't say anything at all about thieving or any other profession. They certainly have alot of skills that would make them better specialist burglers than any other class, but there is nothing that requires all burglers to be thieves much less all thieves in general (con artists, extortionists, blackmailers, cut purses, hookers (the Elizabethian kind, not the prostitute), muggers, robbers, bandits, pick pockets, and so forth) to be rogues. For instance, I might want to make a mugger or bandit who was a Ranger, or a pick pocket or con artist who was a bard. These classes are at least as well suited to that sort of thievery as rogues are. Note also that none of the Rogues skills is specifically about 'thieving'. You can pick pockets with sleight of hand, but that's not all its useful for. You can open locks to get into places you shouldn't, but an expert locksmith is probably pretty good at opening locks to.




Usually. Not necessarily. A rule is something that is always true, for example that rogues have good reflex saves and a 1st level rogue has +0 BAB. There is no rule that all thieves have to be rogues, or that rogues have to be thieves. Many are, because the class is well suited to thievery in general and things like picking pockets and burgalizing homes in particular, but many is not all. If fact, its possible to make a rogue that isn't any good at stealing things at all. You know the classic nerdy professor/sage character who accompanies the hero because he knows all sorts of obscure things but isn't much good in a fight, who in the final climatic battle saves the hero by hitting the villian over the head with a vase or somesuch just when it looks like the hero is finished - arguably that's a rogue too. Or maybe not. It just depends on how you want to play the character.

Ok perhaps rule is too strong a word, but certainly the paragraoh is certainlya strong guideline that thieves should be built around the rogue class. Again, yes you can have a ranger bandit. Heck give me two shakes and a pen and I'll give you a demonic souls stealer out of a ranger. The guidlines don't stime creativity, the offer the newbie player a sfare set of rules to play certain characters without having to write a background or delve into two pages of character history.

Dungeons and dragons, at least hte phb, is a great book for newbies. It gives you great guidelines for characters and, alone, is all you need as ap lyer to play the game. I agree, Arcana Unearthed is a better more realistic system but no where near what I would realiease as a base book for newbie gamers. Take the book at what it is a set of rules and guidelines for gamers new to the dungeons and dragons 3.5 system.

When I first started I wanted to play someone highly intelligent with a skill for writing, my dm pointed me to the PHB and said bard. Nowdays I could probably write a great background and play any of the other classes. But if that guy was to tell me and give me so many options and hurdles, I would have probably shyed away.

 

[DonTadow]

I think I see where you're coming from, but then I have a looser definition of "D&D" than that. To me, Monte Cook's Arcana Unearthed is D&D. Most of the d20 Supplemental material out there is D&D. And to me taking a descriptive paragraph and using it to enforce that all Rogues must be one certain way is not even taking the rules to heart, because the PHB has the suggestion to change your characters' abilities to fit a concept if your DM permits.

It's also an alarming trend to me that many new players are taking ALL of the rules as literally as possible without taking into account group preference, common sense, and alterations to taste. I, having grown up in a looser atmosphere of D&D play, find it a negative thing which detracts from the game instead of enhancing it. It's one thing to opt to play by the book; it's another to have the general mindset that the game MUST be played by-the-book to be effective or viable, not to mention fun.

I"ve seen this trend too but its not a bad thing. It's a good thing because the game is growing. It's up to DM's to carefully guide newbie players and show them the common senses and alterations as thegame goes no. But these things can't be thrust to newbies or it will scare them away.

i didn't play first edition nor second edition and had invites. But the amount of rules and everything was boggling to my young teenage mind. When the 300 pg 3.0 handbook came out i was convinced to buy it and was playiing easily that evening. i was stricktly by the rules and when something wasn't done i was a bit miffed. But as time progressed I learned where to adapt, what made sense and heck... six months later I was playing completely diceless games of dungeons and dragons.

IN other words I think its up to the seasoned vets and players to instruct these nuances, not up to Wotc to recreate, complicate and expand the rules. Sure it will make us happy but it could drive away potential recruits.

 

[Felon]

If the primary purpose of a prestige class is customizing your character, then as we've already shown its completely redundant with the concept of feats.

I actually pointed out the flaws with that a couple pages back, though if your read them you opted not to respond. PrC's and feats are not completely redundant.

But, compared to the concept of feats, the Prestige Class is alot less flexible mechanic that limits player options significantly.

Which is a big reason why they're not redundant. Feats are modular enhancements tacked on to improve a character. A prestige class serves the same purpose as multi-classing with a base class, to set a character on an entirely new path, trading off old abilities for new. A shadowdancer's abilities actually come at the expense of some core rogue class features. As a DM maybe I am so sick of characters with obscene amounts of sneak attack dice that I want an off-ramp from rogue that allows a character to be a sneaky little thief without being a master death-dealer. And maybe a player--like yourself, perhaps--may desire the same, assuming they get a reasonable exchange for losing that awesome ability..

 

[Ranger REG]

I'll go out on a limb, and say that I liked 2e's kits more.

That is even worse. Character kits, while can be taken at 1st level, doesn't have much of a game balance, especially if you have a mixed party of kitted PCs and non-kitted PCs. I even laughed at most of the kits' Special Hindrances that were supposed to compensate for the Special Benefits thos kits offered. Kits didn't have a healthy trade-offs.

If kits have the same trade-offs as those Bloodlines in UA I might find that acceptable. But of course, you are then limited -- nay, restricted -- to just one kit per PC.

Now, I'm not saying it should be part of a standard ruleset and be placed in the Player's Handbook, but I find the prestige class to be a viable option if the DM want it in his game. Another good options are offering class variants or substitution levels.

 

[Insight]

Your observation should be "Poorly designed PrCs grant too many bonus feats." This is not an inherent flaw with PrCs. It is a flaw with poorly tested material. D20 has no meta-system with which you can emperically say X is a balanced spell/feat/class/race/monster. So complain that there are too many poorly designed PrCs.

THIS is the crux of the problem with balancing Prestige Classes. The best you can do is measure them against the PrCs presented in the SRD, but even then, it's wholly dependent on the original designers to make sure those PrCs were balanced to begin with.

 

[The Shaman]

I’d like to start off with a thought:

There's never a such thing as a pointless debate. Debate's are not ot change people's opinion but to present a view.

Arguably, a debate is intended to change an opinion, but I think I understand your broader point. IMX discussing ideas and sharing views is a valuable tool for improving as both a GM and a player. It makes me sad when such discussions are dismissed as whining or griping, as I’ve picked up some really helpful advice and insight from threads like this. I’d like to think that we can disagree about specifics in games.

With that in mind, this thread touches on a number of things that have been on my mind lately. To begin...

I have plenty to do with the core classes. Your character is only as unique as you roleplay her.

I suggested this a few days ago and got jumped on like a trampoline at an 8-year-old’s birthday party, to the point where one poster said...

If it's a distinction that actually makes a difference, then it must be reflected in the rules or it doesn't mean a thing.

This really sums up for me a number of problems I have with the current iteration of D&D.

Back in the day, when a fighter was a fighter was a fighter, we expressed our creativity by more subtle means. We generally started off with some differences, of course: ability scores were rolled rather than generated by point-buy, so a certain amount of variability was built-in. Race selection was an obvious point of difference, and occasionally class and abilities would be put to novel uses (such as a Dex-based fighter who specialized in ranged weapons) but the way in which we really differentiated our characters was through role-play.

One group with which I played included two fighters in the party: one character (played by a good friend of mine) was a knight (he would’ve played a paladin but he didn’t have the ability scores for it...1e, when balance was a wink-and-a-nod) and the other (mine) was former gladiator escaped from the slave-pits. As luck would have it, we both concentrated on melee over ranged combat and both characters had 16 Str. However, no one ever had a hard time telling one character from the other: the knight was courtly and chivalrous, preferring single-combat (often calling out the leader of the bad guys) – the gladiator fought using every dirty trick I could think of, from ambush to bull-rush. The knight fought in plate armor and large shield, a sword or a lance in his hands – the gladiator wore studded leather and carried a small shield and short sword, relying on quickness and mobility. The knight would give quarter, did charitable works, was beloved by the NPCs – the gladiator drank and whored himself into the gutter every time we were in town and was usually considered a menace to society.

The fact that these characters were nearly identical in terms of mechanics made absolutely no difference in terms of playing the game: they were as distinct and as different as could be in terms of outlook, tactics, and so on, but they rolled to hit on the same chart, had the same hit dice, and the same abilities aside from those which we presumed by roleplay, such as the knight’s extensive knowledge of the nobility and the gladiator’s intimate knowledge of taverns and brothels – we didn’t need ranks in Knowledge (nobility) or Knowledge (streetwise) to make this distinction. It was simply the outcome of our imaginations brought to life in the course of the game, and sadly, my recent experience tells me that this is less common than it once was among D&D players.

Before everyone gets riled up, consider that this is simply my personal sample of the gaming community: I’m sure that everyone here at ENWorld can improvise a Shakespearean tragedy or comedy (or both) using nothing more than a blank piece of paper and a coin to flip. However, the last couple of times I’ve played D&D, the experience wasn’t a positive one, and it was brought home to me again the other night when we brought a new player into our Mutants and Masterminds game, a friend of one of the regular players. I spoke with the new guy (hereafter “the FNG”) a few days earlier: yes, he’d played M&M before and could pre-gen a character before Friday, which was great for me as it meant less time sitting around and more time gaming – I painstakingly explained the setting to him, described a couple of the characters’ powers as examples and so forth, and gave him my little spiel about the importance of role-play to our group. The FNG showed up with a standard brick, a character that had no relationship at all to the setting and that specifically ignored my prohibition against Super-Strength. When I explained to him why the character wouldn’t work, he complained that he generated it “by the rules” and that therefore it was “legal” to play. Once again I walked him through the setting while the rest of the players watched a movie on HBO or Starz or something, until after more than an hour of wrangling we managed to come up with a character that was mutually acceptable so that we could finally get the game underway.

In talking with the player later that night, after our abbreviated game session broke up for the evening, the FNG spoke about his D&D group, and the characters he likes to build: this base class from this book, that feat chain from that book, those PrCs from those books. I explained that when I ran a 3.0 game, I’d allowed nearly every PrC printed, but that if I ran a 3e game again in the future I would limit the number of PrCs and encourage multi-classing instead. The FNG complained again that that would be too limiting in terms of his character “concepts” – I countered with a class combo that could meet most of the requirements of his concepts, but when I pressed him for details each time he came back to some mechanical ability as key to the “concept” without which the character would be “boring.” After he was gone my sister-in-law, one of my regular players, looked at me and said, “He’s not playing with us anymore, is he?” – the next day the player who invited the FNG called to apologize.

I’d love to say that this was a unique occurrence, but it seems that every D&D group I’ve played with since 3e was released has included one or two or even three examples of the FNG’s style of play. None of them have been kids, none of them have been noobs – all of them see the mechanics as dictating the character concept. When I picked up 3.0, I was generally happy with the changes, including the addition of prestige classes – as time has gone on, as splatbooks brimming with “options” appeared, most of which seemed to exist primarily to nerf the restrictions imposed by the previous splatbooks or the core rules (“this ability does not provoke an attack of opportunity”; “this ability is not affected by energy resistance”; et cetera), I’ve seen how for many players have substituted mechanics for imagination.

Apparently I’m not the only gamer to notice this phenomenon...

It's also an alarming trend to me that many new players are taking ALL of the rules as literally as possible without taking into account group preference, common sense, and alterations to taste. I, having grown up in a looser atmosphere of D&D play, find it a negative thing which detracts from the game instead of enhancing it. It's one thing to opt to play by the book; it's another to have the general mindset that the game MUST be played by-the-book to be effective or viable, not to mention fun.

There are a couple of interesting suggestions as to why this happens...

If you start looking at the world as if every X is defined by a shared set of abilities and not a shared concept, then yes it is limiting creativity.

I think a big problem with all this is the paradigm that you are your class name.

Change the name "fighter" to samurai, knight, cavalier, legionaire, etc. and you can have a new feel with the same mechanics. Call your character an "elementalist", say he gets his powers from a connection with the elemental planes, choose spells based on the elements, and don't tell your fellow Players that the actual class is sorcerer.

This is especially true with mutliclassing. Think "pirate" instead of "rogue/fighter". Or "skald" instead of "bard/barbarian".

So many prestige classes and new core classes are merely role playable names with a new mechanic.

These ideas fit very closely to my 1e example above: both characters were “fighters” in terms of class mechanics, but that’s where the similarities ended. We didn’t have or need a “knight” or “pit fighter” prestige class for either character: we role-played the differences and while it may seem inconceivable to some players ( ), we had a lot of fun doing it.

The FNG and other players with a similar mindset see the mechanics underpinning their concepts as part of their self-expression, and while I may not agree with it, I do understand it: I’m not suggesting in any way that my way is better or their style of gaming is inferior to mine. In fact, there are times when I’ve agreed with them...

Any class & level system, by its nature, does constrain creativity, relative to a system like HERO, M&M, GURPS, etc....Using HERO, or for those who prefer the D20 style, the slightly more limited Mutants & Masterminds, you can create a character with full arcane spellcasting in armor...A PC who is permenently incorporeal...a human who is 8' tall with its attendant game effects with reach, etc...

When I ran a pulp-adventure game a year or two ago, I used Mutants and Masterminds instead of Pulp Heroes, for many of the same reasons I’m using M&M for our current “Darkest Africa” game instead of d20 Modern – while I love d20 Modern like a fat kid loves cake, for these games I didn’t like the constraints of the Vancian magic system or psionics in Modern on the genre. I didn’t want either game to “feel like D&D,” so I chose a system that is more open-ended, more customizable, to step away from those constraints.

Back in the day, before PrCs, we customized our D&D characters as well: in the campaign I ran I had a “weapon specialization” house rule long before the original Unearthed Arcana was released, a necromancer could sub certain spells and gain a small bonus while accepting a penalty to casting other kinds of spells, and so on. I allowed the players to personalize their characters in small but interesting ways – the skill and feat system of 3e appealed to me instantly as a result of that experience, as did prestige classes, which is one of the reasons I loaded up on them for my 3.0 campaign-world. However, in actual play with 3e over the years, the problem of mechanics-oriented thinking has crept up and up to the point where it interferes with the fast and heroic style of play that I look for in a fantasy RPG, that which appealed to me most about D&D compared to other systems I’ve player over the years since I first made the transition from wargaming in 1977. IMX too often characters stopped being characters and started being collections of stats – the concept was the mechanics.

Again, please let me stress that that’s not a criticism: it is just my personal preference for a game that is less dependent on mechanics like class abilities and one that is more free-flowing, more personal.

I’ve also noticed another consequence of PrCs over the years...

PrC might add options... but only at first level. Most characters that shoot for a PrC are pretty much written in stone from then on till they reach it, and PrC usually aren't very flexible either - the story, in my experience, does not affect the Class selection of characters with PrC on their mind. This isn't necessarily uncreative, but it certainly demands that all creativity is applied during initial character creation.

There is a rigidity in character concepts that depend on mechanics that tends to make players somewhat inflexible over the course of the game, dictated by pre-requisites and feat trees and skill ranks. Instead of being able to evolve based on the events of the game, the character follows a set path without deviation, effectively ignoring the results of a career spent adventuring on the development of the character’s personality, outlook, relationships, and so on.

I played a dwarf fighter, my longest-running character, with my high-school gaming group. Following an adventure where we explored a mummy’s pyramid, he gave up his hammer and axe for a scimitar and a wickedly curved dagger, took to wearing a turban and flowing robes over his armor, and even arranged for a custom saddle so that he could ride a camel. This was not something that I’d considered before creating the character: it was the direct result of the adventures in the desert. My gut feeling tells me that a player who is too locked into the mechanics of his character wouldn’t be willing to make that sort of transition: how many 3e players would give up their character’s primary weapon if access to Weapon Focus was at stake? how many 3e player would give up on a prestige class toward which they’d been building over several levels to take a different class because of something that happened during the campaign?

For me, prestige classes and the metagame thinking that goes with them take away from the kind of fantasy game I enjoy playing. I don’t think my way is better or worse than anyone else’s: I only know that my madbadfun probably differs from the majority of players out there, and that makes me a little sad (or at times rather frustrated, as with the FNG last Friday night). There are probably players out there that are masters at seamlessly melding roleplaying and mechanics – it’s been my unfortunate experience to meet so few of them.

 

[Ankh-Morpork Guard]

For me, prestige classes and the metagame thinking that goes with them take away from the kind of fantasy game I enjoy playing. I don’t think my way is better or worse than anyone else’s: I only know that my madbadfun probably differs from the majority of players out there, and that makes me a little sad (or at times rather frustrated, as with the FNG last Friday night). There are probably players out there that are masters at seamlessly melding roleplaying and mechanics – it’s been my unfortunate experience to meet so few of them.

Ever thought about trying PbP games? There's a much lighter focus on rules(though, of course, they're usually still there at least at the start with character creation) and a much stronger focus on roleplaying. While I've been lucky enough to have face to face players who are good with blending roleplaying with mechanics(probably because I taught pretty much all of them the game, and my own thoughts on that matter were pounded into them too), I've generally found that PbP players are very good with the whole mechanics/roleplaying blending.

...of course, its not for everyone, but its a suggestion, especially if you'd like to keep playing 3e and encounter more people who may share your game philosophy.

 

[The Shaman]

Ever thought about trying PbP games?

Yep - click on the FREE TOUR! link in my signature...

 

[Ankh-Morpork Guard]

Yep - click on the FREE TOUR! link in my signature...

Well, there we are then.