Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Psion" data-source="post: 1848348" data-attributes="member: 172">Perhaps related to my discipline IRL, but I don't think it needs be secret techinques at all, and you need not think of all the organizations as secret cabals or assassin's guilds. It merely need be a specialized area of knowledge.To highlight what I mean, I particularly LURVE spellcasting PrCs. They make sense to me. Spellcasting is widely equated to an academic discipline, a realm that IRL has MANY specialties. I am an engineer and graduated with an engineering degree, but when I was going for my masters, it became obvious by the course selection that "electrical engineering" in and of itself, was not a course option. I had to choose something specific. I could have went into making chips, control systems, networks, analog circuits, etc.So it appears to me magic is. The idea that advanced wizards would get into specific disciplines as they advance resonates with me. Wizards need not have some secret cabal... it could be a public academic discourse. The esotericness of their topic matter alone creates a barrier to entry.Of course, this need not apply only to academic disciplines. I'm sure there are dozens of workers from all kinds of fields out there who can talk about their trades which they have, over the years, become uniquely qualified for.Nobody says all organizations need PrCs. Book of the Planes has membership feats as well. Spycraft and various other supplements have featured feats and PrC that have your organization as a prereq, but the PrC or feat is not universal. When I Translated my world to 3e, many organizations that were translated proved perfectly workable as is, using core classes.To this end, FWIW, I really dig the idea of substitution levels. Sometimes a full blown PrC is inappropraite, and a concept is so broad that many core classes arguably should have access to certain capabilities as is. Substitution levels fit the bill nicely.Too bad the swashbuckler is crappy too (I recommend the SA duelist or AU unfettered.)I am all for new base classes, with a pretty strict caveat: that a first level starting character would be a member of the class must make sense. I also go mostly for broad, archtypal base classes, and those archetypes are chosen with the feel of the game I want to run in mind. Monk is hanging on by a thread, and the old Paladin is out. I allow Priests (the cleric is too martial to fit the role of all priests AFAIAC), Martial Artist, Shaman, Unholy Warrior (paladin is too narrow), Psion, PsyWar, Wilder, and I am really trying hard to justify Hexblade.</blockquote>

Verification