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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ajanders" data-source="post: 2285918" data-attributes="member: 3271">That's a bold, bold statement.  Can we talk bards and the fighter skill list?"Curb personification" not so much help in terms of actual meaning.  If you mean "Replace the character's personality with mechanics", not really.  Very few prestige classes include a code of honor or require the character to do or not do an action as part of their requirements, hence have very little direct affect on a character's personality.The notion that a prestige class should be equivalent to a standard class is also ridiculous -- consider applying that logic to feats: it implies Dodge should equivalent in power to Improved Critical.  It's not.  Why?  Because it's easier to get Dodge than Improved Critical.It further implies Dodge should be equivalent in power to Skill Focus, and it's not either.  Any mook can get Skill Focus, but only the exceptional can get Dodge.In the same fashion, Prestige Classes should be more powerful than regular classes because anyone can be a fighter...you actually have to work to become a sword-saint, or a Knight of the Table Round, or a Bright Vanguard.In a similar vein, I don't know how you playtest a prestige class at all...but I don't know how you playtest a base class, either, or balance it.  In a political campaign, characters with social skills will shine, fighters, not so much.  In a dungeon campaign, the bard with Diplomacy sits around and wonders why he wasted the skill points.  In a tomb raid, the rogue may never sneak attack, but finds the traps and saves the party -- don't even ask me how you measure balance in that situation.Prestige classes should specialize the general archetypes of the base classes, either around skills (like the warmaster or kensai) or organizations (The Swift Falcon dojo, L'academe de Guerre).  Admittedly, some prestige classes do not.  We mock them, and we call them bad prestige classes.Similarly, the monster lists for d20 contain good monsters, like the barghest or the pistolwraith, and also contain bad monsters, like the explosion dog.  We don't condemn the concept of monsters, we merely weed out the explosion dogs.I've tried representing archetype focus and organizations with feats.  It's not that simple and it can be pretty inelegant, especially if you have a concept of the organization as a sequence.  And that's with using the generic class variant out of UA where characters have lots of feat slots to play with: for standard 3.5, that locks a lot of people out of your "Prestige Feats" entirely.This is mostly in the way you run your game: if your players want to add something to your game that you feel doesn't fit or is "too powerful", you need to work with them to solve it.  The DMG was not written to tell you how to manage your player relationships.If you don't like the players trying to get a PRC option, how do you handle unwelcome feat options?  Do you eliminate feats in general, or just the unwanted feat?</blockquote>

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