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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3791925" data-attributes="member: 4937">Only in so far as you've related them:"I find well written PrCs to be a boon, because it gets players to invest in the setting. But all to many players miss that, brush off the backstory, and pronounce their entitlement to play the mechanics."I took that to mean, "I found it can work, but all too often it doesn't..."   I didn't realize 'all too often', meant 'once', though I agree that once is too often.I'm sure it can work with the right players, right DM, right PrC's, and so forth.  And I agree that nothing in the rules is going to work if the DM or the player is going to be a jerk, but...  Where my opinion seems to diverge is that I think rules can either reduce friction or increase it to some extent. In my experience, PrC's tend to increase friction because among other things they blur the line between what is the rightful province of the player (his character), and what is the rightful province of the DM (the setting).  Most 'jerky' behavior I've experienced in RPing tends to come when the DM attempts to take on the role of a player (DM PC's, adversarial DMing, DM's attempting to play the PC's for them, etc.) or players attempting to take on the role of the DM (rules lawyering, attempting to take control of the setting in various ways, canon/fluff lawyering, setting other players as adversaries, trying to predetermine outcome, trying to RP the NPCs for the DM (what you might call 'personality lawyering'), etc.).  I prefer classes to be very fluff neutral so that the mechanics can be adapted to whatever happens to be the cultural setting.  This isn't to say that the mechanics can't be very evocative, for example, I think the cleric domains are quite evocative when married to fluff.  But they don't force fluff onto the campaign except in the most generic way.The fact of the matter is that originally, the PrC's were put in the DMG for a very specific reason (I don't have a link but I do remember this being discussed by the design team when PrC's were first introduced).  Then, they ended up in player material because you could sell more books if you were offering them as player options.  Even if that isn't actually taking away DM control, it creates the appearance of taking away DM control.  And I think it does it in a way that is far more problimatic than breaking down a PrC into a collection of feat chains would be.Of course, the whole of my objections to PrC's isn't this (if it was, it would be very trivial); this is just how my objections to PrC's relates to the thread.</blockquote>

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