Nail said:
Which begs the question: "What are the typical opponents of a mid- to high level Ftr?"
In the campaigns I've run or played in, the answer has
never been "tumbling rogues or monks".
(How have your games been in this regard? I'm intensely curious.)
We have had some tumblers, but it is mostly spell casters who are the real issue.
However, your game or my game doesn't matter as much as what makes sense for game balance for the system as a whole.
Nail said:
We're far off topic now, but our group has found that giving Ftrs more feats (one bonus feat per level) solves most of the power-gap problem.
One reason for doing this is that Prestige Classes for spell casters tend to get their cake and eat it too. In other words, in addition to gaining cool new abilities, they also tend to get full casting level. They lose very few abilities of the original class. That adds to the concept of combatant types appearing weak.
Prestige Classes for combatant types tend to get the cool new abiliites, but do not gain the feats or other abilities of the original class.
This is an inherent design flaw with PrCs. There should be pros and cons for them, especially for spell casters, not just pros.
But, the bigger, better, badder mentality of WotC will never be fixed. They cannot, from a business perspective, afford to put out PrCs that are just "ok". They have to be cool, or they do not garner as many sales.
I personally think that most spell casting PrCs should lose a level of spell casting at level one (the cost for entering the PrC), and then have full spell casting progression afterwards. Really strong ones should lose another at level 6 (level 6 being a special level for most classes which typically increases BAB and all saves). If they have to take more casting levels away, then typically the other abilities of the PrC are just too potent anyway.
Extensive PrC multiclassing would then take a backseat to taking a single PrC because the player really wants it.
