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

[GreyICE]

I'd agree with you back when there were very few 4e resources out. And perhaps at low levels this is still true, but at high levels, it's very easy to go with a concept, make logical looking or cool sounding choices, and end up performing significantly worse than a more optimized character that's taking advantage of the full breadth of options.

I've seen this happen with players who just flip open a random book to make their choices. Fortunately we can give them guidance in the group to bring them up to par, which isn't hard, but at this point, I think it's pretty easy to make a poor character.

I guess if you pick Swarm Druid or something, but at the Heroic tier it's really, really, really difficult to screw it up. Especially with retraining.

If you evolve from 1 to 30 naturally, the complexity scales relatively smoothly, with no huge gain.

 

[Ratskinner]

I think there's a place for both...

I see themes as working somewhat like kits did in 2e, but with less attachment to a particular class. (Which I think is awesome.) I liked kits a lot. However, kits had some issues as well. They couldn't seem to decide on whether a kit was your origin story or a sub-sub-class. So you had fighter kits for say..."gladiator", but also for "peasant hero". Nonetheless, they were a nice "something less than a class" tweak.

Which is where Prestige Classes come in. I was so very excited when I read about Prestige Classes before 3e came out. I was still excited when the first couple came out....then they just got worse and worse. Having to carefully pick your feats, skills, and spells from the moment of character creation sorta defeated the purpose of "organic" character growth. That's not to mention all the overspecialized, unbalanced, or just plain weird stuff that they got into (Blood Mage, I'm lookin' at you.) In the end, I ended up almost hating them, and agree with most of the criticisms leveled at them.

4e's multiclassing and paragon paths were one aspect of that system that I didn't really like too much. I'm not so familiar with the themes idea that they came out with later. (My group was done with 4e by that time.)

I would certainly like something akin to these mechanics to be in D&DN, but I can't say I'm so enamored with any of the previous iterations that they couldn't be improved upon or replaced entirely. My biggest criterion for rules nowadays is efficiency, and this is one of those areas that seems to quickly fall into a bloat trap. I don't want to be working up NPCs and be stymied by looking through bunches of Prestige Classes and the like, worried about prereqs. If they were something like secondary themes, that a PC could pick up as they went along, that might work well.

Whatever they do, I hope their criteria for inclusion is the fun that it adds to the game, not how the architecture makes it easy to fill more splatbooks.

 

[Savage Wombat]

"THEY'RE PLAYING THE MAKE BELIEVE FANTASY GAME WRONG!"

I'm sorry that's what I hear every time I read these sorts of screeds.

Not everything is an attack on you and your preferred playstyle.

 

[pemerton]

However much you fine tooth comb a system for balance, the more choice you get for mechanical definition, the more certain builds end up floating to the top.

I wont pretend I know for a second I know how to avoid that trap. I dont. I dont think anyone knows, otherwise it would be fixed already and not an issue. What I do know its the nature of RPG's, be they Computer or tabletop, that the more choice exists, the more broken builds come along with them.

Im so much more comfortable that choice in character design comes from thematic definition, not mechanical.

One step in solving the problem of "broken builds" is to give the players reasons to not always want to be using the biggest possible numbers.

The only example I can think of like this at the moment is the Burning Wheel advancement system - because (ii) to advance a skill/stat you need to face a wide range of challenges of differing degrees of difficulty, and (ii) "degree of difficulty" is measured relative to the number of dice you roll, and (iii) the gameworld is not populated by arbitrarily many obstacles with arbitrarily high DCs, therefore (iv) you sometimes have a reason not to want to roll all the dice that you have available.

I don't have any quick and easy suggestions on how this sort of feature might be incorporated into a version of D&D, but I hope it is the sort of thing that the designers are thinking about.

 

[GreyICE]

Not everything is an attack on you and your preferred playstyle.

I think that when someone says "I want those boards burned to the ground" that it would be pretty much exactly a direct attack.

 

[Jeff Carlsen]

I like prestige classes, especially the ones that are deeply tied to a particular setting.

The problem 3.5 had, as I see it, is that prestige classes were being used to cover almost every character concept that wasn't an existing base class.

Pathfinder seems to have corrected this by, instead, widely expanding the number of options available to each base class. It's possible to build a wide variety of characters within a single class. This has left prestige classes to do what they do best.

 

[Savage Wombat]

I think that when someone says "I want those boards burned to the ground" that it would be pretty much exactly a direct attack.

Oh, I didn't realize that they were your boards, or that you were dependent on them to game.

Anyway - I think the game is done a disservice with all of this min-maxing, number-crunching "My DPS is 2.7 points below spec" behavior. And I'm saying that as a 3.5/PF player, too.

Maybe the game should be structured so that anything with a hard numerical bonus is clearly boring, and all the cool/fun character options are less rigid. I dunno.

 

[pemerton]

I think the game is done a disservice with all of this min-maxing, number-crunching "My DPS is 2.7 points below spec" behavior. And I'm saying that as a 3.5/PF player, too.

Maybe the game should be structured so that anything with a hard numerical bonus is clearly boring, and all the cool/fun character options are less rigid.

Well, like I posted a little bit upthread, one step might be to give the players reasons to not always want to be using the biggest possible numbers.

I think "coolness" is probably not, on its own, a strong enough reason. I think that reasons are needed that are tied deeply to the fiction and the mechanics of the game. I gave an example above of a mechanical feature of Burning Wheel that has this goal.

One way the fiction can make a difference is if situations can be set up where the dynamics of the fiction are such that every PC has a reason to muck in, even if it is not his/her specialty (eg set up social situations so that the fighter has to say something - even if it's not very eloquent - so as to avoid looking like a complete tool, or conceding the truth of someone else's criticism of him/her). This sort of encounter design can push against hyper specialisation.

Whether tackled via mechancis or via fiction or both, it's not going to happen on its own. The designers have to think hard about it, and come up with solutions. Conversely, as long as the game is structure so that both in mechanical terms, and in terms of the fiction, bigger numbers are rewarded, then optimisation (whether via build, or hunting out the best magic weapons, or whatever it might be) will be the order of the day.

 

[GreyICE]

Oh, I didn't realize that they were your boards, or that you were dependent on them to game.

Dependent on them? No. Enjoy them? Yes. I'd say that's a pretty direct attack on my preferred playstyle.

You of course are free to disagree. You'd be wrong, but I can't stop you from being wrong.

 

[Sunseeker]

Oh, I didn't realize that they were your boards, or that you were dependent on them to game.

As someone who visits CharOp boards, but takes them as advice more than rules, I have to say I like them a lot. There are a lot of choices out there, especially in 3.5/Pathfinder hybrid games, and it takes a long time to sort through all that information on your own. Sometimes you want to know: "Is there a step up in rapid shot, because I really like that playstyle." ANd CharOp boards are great places to find that information.

Anyway - I think the game is done a disservice with all of this min-maxing, number-crunching "My DPS is 2.7 points below spec" behavior. And I'm saying that as a 3.5/PF player, too.

I agree that playing for the sake of number crunching takes a lot of value out of the game. I say this as a WoW player who has a lot of experience with "talent specs" or "Best in Slot" gear. However, it's nice to get help especially when you're new to the game or new to the class on how to avoid many of the bad choices in systems like 3.5/Pathfinder that require a lot of system mastery to know about.

Maybe the game should be structured so that anything with a hard numerical bonus is clearly boring, and all the cool/fun character options are less rigid. I dunno.

I like doing damage. I know knowing I just shat out 150pts of damage in a single round. That doesn't make my gameplay boring, it doesn't make me a bad roleplayer, and it doesn't bother my table(because we're all powerhouses). Players shouldn't be forced to choose between effective and fun, I find being effective at my class very fun. A lot of people feel the same way.

Best idea so far: why don't we let each player decide what they find to be fun, and not design systems that punish people for low system mastery or enjoyment of high numbers.