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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3791826" data-attributes="member: 4937">Very few things are, which was sorta my point of the 10:11 post.  When arguing, the tendency is to conform your argument to an either/or form so as to make it clear what you are saying.  But, the truth of the matter is that most of the time, you are talking about something that is fuzzy and that there are exceptions to the general thrust of your argument.  In this case, my general thrust is 'it's flawed', and the fact that with the right DM, players, PrC, and roleplay it can work well doesn't change that fact.It's hard to quantify how often it works.  I confess I dropped PrC's from my own campaign so early on, that I've got very little experience with them.  From my experience outside of my campaign, its not so much that they are distracting, it's that crunch has no direct bearing on how interested a player is in the fluff.  Alot of the time, they aren't really interested in the fluff at all, and no amount of crunch can make them interested in and of itself.  Or else, they are interested in the fluff, but only in a generic way because the PrC is a generic concept rather than an enhancement to the fluff and its being used to kludge a hole in the rules better fixed by more flexible base classes and/or more feats.Besides that, for the little good they do do, they aren't worth the problems of sterotyping, inflexibility, balance, player entitlement, and so forth they introduce.As you yourself said, why should you wait to be a duelist until X level.  Why can't a fighter be a duelist right from the start?It's not so much that I think PrC's should only be used for campaign specific institutions, it's that as a design decision, I only think they make sense in that context.  The other uses of PrC's strike me as kludges intended to patch holes in the rules that more rightly should have been patched using different tools.  Very few PrC class abilities couldn't have been turned into feats.  Some solution to multi-casting spellcasters should exist other than a PrC for each combination.  Base classes shouldn't be so narrow that every specialist needs a PrC to support it given the rich possibilities of the feat and skill systems to produce specialization.  Base classes shouldn't have so much flavor built in (paladin, barbarian, druid, ranger) that you need PrC's for variant base classes that really should have been options of a better designed base class.  For example, if I want to have a raging fanatic who is an oathsworn temple guardian of a lawful organization, I shouldn't have to cludge a PrC together.  I should be able to just give them levels in the super-concept of 'fanatical emotion driven warrior' that 'initiate of a barbaric secret warrior society' is just one concept within.</blockquote>

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