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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 2256888" data-attributes="member: 4937">I hate prestige classes.  I think that they are the worst thing that happened in 3rd edition.  They are bad in every way.  They are bad mechanically.  They are bad for role play.  And they are bad for creativity.  Bad. Bad. Bad. Bad. Bad.Mechanically, the whole point of prestige classes seems to be to give players more feats per level compared to some other class.  Virtually every popular class either seems to be wizard with more feats and/or skills or fighter with more feats and/or skills.  This is ridiculous.  If the PC's needed more feats per level in order to capture the feel of certain concepts, then all classes should have been given more feats per level.  This is to say nothing of the fact that many prestige classes are front ended with benefits.  It appears to me that prestige classes are only taken when they are unbalanced.  Judging from the classes players on these boards seem to favor, a balanced PrC seems to be of no interest to players. In role play terms, prestige classes are huge step backwards in maturity because they encourage players to define their characters solely by what they can do mechanically rather than more broadly by who they are.  It encourages players to think that 'fighter that wears light armor' is a character concept.  While 3rd edition went a long way forward toward making the base classes broader and capable of accomodating more than a single sterotype, prestige classes seem to drag the game in the other direction - towards a single sterotype.   On top of that, the greater sense of game ownership that 3rd edition encourages in the players leads them to demand and expect to be able to take a 'prestige class' even if they have no in character reason for doing so, to metagame character knowledge of what is presumably a small and often secretive organization, and to expect that any prestige class that tickles thier fancy ought to be readily available (at exactly the moment that they want to take it) regardless of the character of the campaign world that they are in. There are no prestige classes in my games, and there never will be.  If a player were to express interest in a prestige class I would try to find out what the player was actually interested in and work with that player to create a feat or feat tree that would approximate the class abilities of the intriguing prestige class.  I don't believe that there is any concept that can be done with a PrC that can't be done with the proper feats and multiclassing, and if there is then either the concept is probably sufficiently broad as to need a base class or thier is something wrong with the flexibility of your base classes.</blockquote>

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