D&D 5E Pros and Cons of Kits, Prestige classes and Paragon paths. How 5e should handle it?

[GreyICE]

Yea, I have alot to thank Min/Maxers for. They helped me better understand exactly what I dont want 5e to evolve into. Im very thankful to them for that.

Edit (Just clarifying The above. It sounds a bit nasty and I dont mean it to be) : I was once putting together a SwordMage for an upcoming change of DM's (which never happened...sigh). I was curious as o "what was best". So I visited a CharOp Board. I read through the pages, drilled down on the feats, read which synergies to take and why, what my stats had to be ... and stopped.

I realized what I was doing. This is what contributed to my cancelling my Wow account. The obsession with the hyper-optomized character over just play whatever the hell you enjoy. This is D&D...its enjoyable because of taking on a personna, and I wasnt doing that...I was taking someone else'. I had forgotten what was important, put someone elses character on a piece of paper. There was no "Me" in it, no real character. Sure, it was mechanically effective, but it was soulless.

The funny thing was, I had to go to the CharOp boards to figure this out for myself, and so yes, the experience sorta helped me "hit rock bottom" so I could reflect and turn it around.

The really did help me understand exactly why I want 5e design to be mechanic light/fluff heavy, because thats the sort of game I enjoy. Ive grown out of hyper-configurable character mechanics, Im just over them.

So yea, I am thankful to the CharOp boards.

By the same token virtually every person on the CharOp boards would be happier if the power curve went from sky blue (great) to blue (good, and potentially great in many circumstances) with a small spattering of purple/sky blue (niche, great in only a few circumstances).

The black and red powers are things that no one really likes.

And if WotC listens to CharOp then they'd end up with a hell of a lot less balance issues that result in truly terrible choices.

 

[KidSnide]

Not only did paragon paths have greatly differing levels of effectiveness, but fluff and crunch were often barely connected. I like 4e a lot, but PPs could easily be 4e's most finicky, hard-to-choose and disassociated set of mechanics.

Really? I always found it comparatively easy to pick a PP compared to 3e's PC's.

I suppose 3e's PCs may have been worse -- it was rare in my experience for someone to take one from outside the DMG. But that just emphasizes a huge advantage for PCs: they were optional and you could play 3.x fine by mostly ignoring them.

PPs are mandatory if you want to play paragon level (except for Essentials-classes -- sort of) and there are 574 PPs in the compendium, each one taking up a page. Any given player may have no more than 15-30 to choose from, but that's a mind-boggling amount of reading for a DM to keep track of player options.

I can't figure out how DMs handle inserting the story elements implied by PPs into their campaigns unless they either (1) get the players to identify the PP they want at the beginning of the campaign and build the campaign's dominant organizations around that list or (2) ignore the fluff entirely and just treat the PP like a pure mechanical element (which kind of defeats the purpose of having these coherent concepts).

-KS

 

[Savage Wombat]

Trying to make the power curve range from "good" to "awesome" results in power creep. Developing magic cards has taught them this.

The majority of abilities should be "good" from a sense of "baseline" - which means that most power-gamers would consider them "poor" or "weak" choices, compared to the "great" choices.

Now, we don't want abilities to be "bad" choices, but it seems to be an inevitable result of avoiding the power creep. (Not to mention trying to fill out a splatbook page count.)

 

[GreyICE]

I suppose 3e's PCs may have been worse -- it was rare in my experience for someone to take one from outside the DMG. But that just emphasizes a huge advantage for PCs: they were optional and you could play 3.x fine by mostly ignoring them.

PPs are mandatory if you want to play paragon level (except for Essentials-classes -- sort of) and there are 574 PPs in the compendium, each one taking up a page. Any given player may have no more than 15-30 to choose from, but that's a mind-boggling amount of reading for a DM to keep track of player options.

I can't figure out how DMs handle inserting the story elements implied by PPs into their campaigns unless they either (1) get the players to identify the PP they want at the beginning of the campaign and build the campaign's dominant organizations around that list or (2) ignore the fluff entirely and just treat the PP like a pure mechanical element (which kind of defeats the purpose of having these coherent concepts).

-KS

One of the best things about 4E is that there's really no onus on the DM to keep track of player options.

In general, breaking the game is reasonably difficult, and characters who are designed to do so often look very odd compared to standard 4E characters (hybrids with multiclassing, weird weapon choices, etc.).

Outside of Morninglord or KAM, there's few options that are totally out of line, and certainly nothing as insane as Planar Shepherd, to name just one totally broken PrC.

Edit: KAM just got changed, it's now an entirely reasonable PP

 

[KidSnide]

One of the best things about 4E is that there's really no onus on the DM to keep track of player options.

I think keeping track of the PC's capabilities is an important part of good GMing. You don't need to be perfect about it, but it's a good idea to target PC resistances and present enemies vulnerable to PC strengths.

Anyway, half my players ask for help in selecting character options. I need to be familiar with what's available to advise them. That's been a huge PITA with 4e.

-KS

 

[GreyICE]

I think keeping track of the PC's capabilities is an important part of good GMing. You don't need to be perfect about it, but it's a good idea to target PC resistances and present enemies vulnerable to PC strengths.

Anyway, half my players ask for help in selecting character options. I need to be familiar with what's available to advise them. That's been a huge PITA with 4e.

-KS

If you stick with the options in the PHB (or whatever source the PCs class came from) you'll generally be fine.

Other than that, the CharOp forums at the WotC site have some amazing guides on classes that can really help any DM who wants to do that.

 

[aurance]

My biggest problem with PrCs in 3e was the preponderance of "-4 to weapon you'll never use, +2 to weapon you use all the time, with the barest hint of flavor" PrCs. At one point during our 3e campaign, we took a look at existing PrCs to see if we could construct those archetypes using base classes alone, and still be effective PCs... And surprisingly, most PrCs certainly could be deconstructed in such a way. We fixed a couple of the base classes to work better along these lines, and in return we could get way with not using PrCs at all.