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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 2293630" data-attributes="member: 1465">Yes they do.Originally IIRC the 3ed design team had the idea of the six DMG prestige classes as a starting point for the DM to design his own.Now with 100s of PrCls around a DM is strongly encouraged not to design his own PrCls (because they "might be unbalanced") and instead to buy more books and use the ready ones.They can still help a DM's creativity in the sense that the DM can choose a few PrCls and fit them into his world, or use them as an inspiration to make up typically an organization which has a role in the setting.While in theory they should add more colours to a player's palette, the sheer number of PrCls isn't a good thing for creativity IMHO.A creative player thinks of a character concept such as "mage who uses a lot of fire" or "big brute warrior who goes berserk", then is able to create such a character with just the core rules (or little more), and to add the flavor with roleplay and description. There is not much creativity in browsing a thousands pages until you find something ready for you.To make an example about how this can happen in someone's game. We had a player last year who wanted to make some demon hunter, and the kind of player that buys almost every book... He was mad because he couldn't find "a decent demon hunter" in all his books (he didn't want to use e.g. the Knight of the Chalice because he didn't like some features or maybe didn't have some prerequisites - I don't remember), until the DM pointed out that he could just use the Hunter of the Dead, slightly modified, but the player was suspicious of this option and at the end he looked for a different concept.IMHO the prestige classes can help creativity, but it's the sheer number of them around which doesn't help.Just for laughs... how many of us have played with LEGO when we were kids? It used to a game with incredible creativity potential. But in years, they added more and more "pre-made" bricks (those that looked already like a finished shape): in early days you took a stick-brick and turn it into a sword, or two long+thin+flat bricks and turn them into skies, but now kids have the ready shapes for both. When you have everything ready, creativity isn't exactly helped... [And BTW, LEGO was announced to be in some sort of unprecedented crisis this year  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f641.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":(" title="Frown    :("  data-smilie="3"data-shortname=":(" /> ]</blockquote>

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