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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 2291804" data-attributes="member: 4937">Your scacasm-fu needs work, grasshopper.  My whole argument is that PrC's reduce options.  If I actually thought PrC's increased player choices and options, then I probably either wouldn't be opposed to them or at least wouldn't be as adamantly opposed to them.   Your problem is that you see the removal of PrC's as something that limits options.  If we were to elimenate PrC's and do nothing about replacing them, then indeed we would be reducing choices.  But that's not at all what I've suggested.What I suggested is PrC's should not have been included in the design of the game in the first place.   The design of 3rd edition contains two primary mechanics for customizing a character.   First, in the PH they introduced the concept of Feats.  With a feat you could choose what things you wanted your character to excel at.  For the most part, although some feats were more benificial to some classes than others, feats were fully applicable to any class.   In theory, as I've already shown, you can make a character of any concept using just combinations of feats and basic mechanics like multiclassing.   But in addition to this concept, the designers of 3rd edition came up with a completely different approach called 'Prestige Classes' which they introduced in the DMG.  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.  But, compared to the concept of feats, the Prestige Class is alot less flexible mechanic that limits player options significantly.  First, it sets rigid requirements for the entrance into the PrC.   These requirements include not just skill and feat prerequisites that tend to be harsher than those for feats, but also include requirements in things like background and requirements for the role-playing experiences that your character must have before he can entire into the PrC.  In short, they force conformity in characters - reducing player options.   If that wasn't bad enough, the ability 'packages' offered by PrC's aren't nearly so mix and match as feats.   You don't get to decide what order you want to take them in.   You can't skip over class abilities that you don't want to take or that don't fit your character concept.   You can't acquire these abilities as part of advancing yourself in another class.  In short, PrC's don't really help a player build a character concept, they impose a character concept on the player.Now suppose that the designers of 3rd edition had looked at the design of the game as a whole and had a conversation like this:"You know John, the more I think about it, the more I realize that the concept of Feats and PrC's are redundant - I think we should clean up the design and get rid of one.   "Hmm...Yeah Monte, I can kind see that, but I can imagine both methods being popular with some people.   Why don't we make one mechanic core and the other an option?""Well, I've thought about that, but I'm afraid that what will happen if we do that is that we'll end up spreading out our focus and not doing either mechanic as well or as fully as we should.  Plus, if we offer a mechanic as an option that enhances PC's power in-game it will likely be adopted before people really have thought out the consequences.   I think we can achieve the best balance and enjoyability by just offering one or the other.""So which one do you want to elimenate?""I'm thinking we should elimenate PrC's and make feats more common.  I've noticed that several classes go for long stretches without adding new class abilities.   Players hate that.   Plus, by making feats more common and numerous we give players more customization options - far more than we could give them by adding PrC's.  They'll be able to take whatever skills that they feel fit thier character concept, instead of being stuck taking the same list of class abilities that everyone has.  Rather than spend time making new PrC's, I think we should just add more feats to the core game.  Adding more feats to the game will slightly bump up PC power, but no more than it would if we offered both feats and PrC's.""While we are on the subject, I've been thinking of some ways to increase the flexibility of the base classes.  I think that classes like Barbarian, Paladin, Druid, and Ranger have too much setting specific flavor.  I think I've got some ways that we can make the class abilities of each flexible, and between your new more numerous feats and multiclassing the possibilities for characters are going to be almost endless.""Rock on."That's what should of happened.  But instead, WotC tried to push both mechanics - though clearly they understood that the Feat was better for and more fundamental to the game than the PrC because they pushed the PrC into the DMG and made them explicitly optional.  In doing so though, they divided thier time between a good flexible modern character creation mechanic (the feat), and an inflexible, rigid, old fashioned character creation mechanic (the PrC).   The result is a game with alot of options, but not nearly as much options as it could have had.  Now, you might argue that they could have done the above and STILL added the PrC as an option, and that this would be by definition more options still.  But I would argue that you're fooling yourself, because it should be clear that if the above reforms were made and then you decided to add a PrC to the game, one of the two situations would be true a) the PrC could be emulated using feats (either existing or created for that purpose) and/or multiclassing, or b) the PrC could not be emulated using feats and/or multiclassing which would only be true if the PrC added more abilities than any class would recieve as feats.   In the former case, the PrC doesn't add to the possible options of the players.  In the latter case, we could emulate the PrC simply by increasing again the available feats that players had access to at a given level.   At that point, you could again add a more powerful PrC back into the game as an option, and if it still could not be emulated then we'd have to increase the number of available feats yet again ad infinitum.  In that case, it becomes clear that the option that is really being desired by the PrC is not a character concept, but increased character power, and what PrC's really represent is not increased options but unbalancing power creep.  What the PrC-phile who still demanded at PrC's were necessary to his 'character concept' would be saying is equivalent to a new player in GURPS saying that for a given number of character points the rules forbid him to buy as many skills as in his opinion his 'character concept' demanded, and so the rules are 'flexible' enough.  At some point you have to stop and say, "This far we go, but no further" and balance the players desire to be broadly (or even deeply) heroic with what is good for the game.</blockquote>

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