Furn_Darkside said:
Because they are spell casters- and that is, usually, all they have to offer the group. Especially in the case of wizards and sorerers.
Should the melee PrCs lose BAB progression because they get a power? Should the skill PrCs lose skill point progression because they get a power?
However, typically melee characters get benefits above and beyond just BAB. The fighter gets feats, the barb gets rage, and the ranger and paladin get spells. Similarly, the rogue gets sneak attacks and other funky stuff in addition to 8 skill points per level. Thus you can offer a tradeoff when designing a PrC for such characters, without having to touch BAB.
I've said this before about spellcasting PrCs, but it bears repeating. The problem is that a lot of the power of a spellcasting class comes through their spells. Either a PrC grants full access to those spells, and thus becomes overpowered, or it only grants partial access, in which case it becomes weak. The latter case is also hard to handwave: if a PrC is supposed to be a specialist at, say, healing, why should they get less and/or weaker healing spells than a regular cleric? Substitute any niche you care to name for healing.
The wizard class doesn't have this problem so much as the sorc, since you get a metamagic/item creation feat every 5 levels. It's still a problem though. Clerics and druids also have more at stake than arcane spellcasters, namely better saves, better BAB, turn undead, etc. If a PrC featured a reduced save or BAB progression than the base class, in return for nifty abilities, this would be a good tradeoff. In practice, however, every cleric PrC ends up with exactly the same BAB and save progression as a normal cleric, and also has nifty abilities, so again nothing much is lost.
One solution might be to limit spellcasting PrCs to casting spells from only particular schools. They would be like specialist wizards (which IMO should have been treated as PrCs in the first place). Or if the existing schools don't fit the theme, you could use any other classification scheme instead. This fits in perfectly with the PrC concept: you're better in your chosen niche, but you're not as flexible.
