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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 2286442" data-attributes="member: 4937">The basic argument in favor of all PrC's is that somehow the flavor that they add is beneficial to role playing.  Yet, the evidence that is always provided for this argument is based around mechanics.Simply put, I think the problem with PrC's is that they encourage players to want to get something for nothing.  Prestige classes are in general either more powerful than base classes, or else no PC ever takes one.  All popular PrC's either give full attack progression and more feats and/or skills per level than a fighter, or else give full spell progression but more feats and/or skills than a base spell caster.  There is no popular PrC that could not be equally done by making available equivalent feats instead of class abilities and appropriate multiclassing.  What makes PrC's more attractive than that is simply that PrC's get more class abilities and other extras than base classes get feats.  If you convert PrC's into an array of feats you soon realize that the primary thing that makes a PrC interesting is that its more powerful than the base class.  If they were not more powerful than the base class, PC's in general simply wouldn't take them no matter how flavorful that they were.  And the few that would take them would quickly become disenchanted with them because they put your character in a straight jacket.One of the complaints often made against fantasy and science fiction in general is that the fantastic races in those stories are often represented as a single character and that often as not that character carries the personality of the entire race, so that every character of that race becomes only a minor variation on that character.  To me, PrC's have this problem.  In general, PrC's are attached to so much fluff, that there is often effectively only one character of each PrC.  D&D has been gradually moving away from that model, so that there is now in D&D certainly not only one fighter, one cleric, one rogue, and one wizard.  The mechanical diversity of these classes encourages creativity on the part of even the most inexperienced role players in a way that the rigid first edition mechanics did not.  But one thing that PrC's most certainly are not is mechanically diverse, and that - especially in inexperienced role players - encourages them to think only inside the box.When D&D came out, one of the first complaints made against it was that your character was defined solely in terms of what he could do.  Early attempts to depart from D&D, say like C&S, tried to make your character more than merely the mechanics of what he could do in order to encourage actual role playing rather than or in addition to problem solving and other sorts of tactical gaming.  D&D has come along way from its roots, but PrC's are a marked step backwards and they've caused alot of thought, creativity, and paper to be wasted on something that isn't actually good for the game.  In essense, they are nothing more than a magic item that a player is encouraged to feel that they can give themselves.</blockquote>

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