Recreating Prestige Classes With Feats?

[Tewligan]

So, I'm hoping to start up a campaign someday down the road, and Unearthed Arcana has sparked my interest in house rules and new ways of doing things. One thing I was thinking of was ditching prestige classes - they just seem unnecessarily messy to me, although I DO like the idea of characters getting tangible effects from specialized training and secret organizations. So, I thought that a compromise might be to create new feats that simulate the special training without having to tack on extra classes and whatnot. So, instead of taking the shadowdancer PrC, a character picks up the shadowdancer's special abilities slowly each time he would get a feat. Does this seem like it would work? I would attach prerequisites to the feats so that a character wouldn't be able to get them too early in his career, and they could only be learned from the appropropriate organizations or whatever. Anyone ever tried anything like this?

 

[Kemrain]

Seeing as you can get 10+ abilities in a PrC, and you have 7 feats over the career of your character, I'd say that feats are a pretty poor way of mimicing a PrC. The feats would need to be too broad, and too over powered to give you everyting those classes give. In addition, you'll be waitng 3 levels for your next ability, were a PrC often fives them every, or every other level. Plus, PC's usually have other feats that their character concepts would benefit from.

All in all, I think that PrC's are a better way to go, but it is your game, and you certanly don't have to take my opinion very far.

- Kemrain the Prestegeous.

 

[the Jester]

That's a cool idea. I like it, but haven't tried it.

 

[DanMcS]

Most fighter prestige classes would work well this way. Something like duelist should be a fighting style that can be picked up with fighter bonus feats.

Other classes, I'm not so sure about, you'd have to case-by-case them.

 

[Tewligan]

Seeing as you can get 10+ abilities in a PrC, and you have 7 feats over the career of your character, I'd say that feats are a pretty poor way of mimicing a PrC. The feats would need to be too broad, and too over powered to give you everyting those classes give. In addition, you'll be waitng 3 levels for your next ability, were a PrC often fives them every, or every other level. Plus, PC's usually have other feats that their character concepts would benefit from.

Yeah - I was thinking about the fact that the number of feats you get doesn't really stack up very well against the heap of abilities that a standard PrC gets. Not sure what to do about that - possibly giving the character some bonus feats. Or, maybe some feats that "expand" based on character level. For example, maybe the feat I cleverly call "Shadowdancer Feat #1" can only be taken after reaching 5th level, and some other prerequisites. When initially taken, it grants the hide in plain sight ability. As the character gains more levels and meets more "postrequisites", other abilities associated with that particular feat become available, like evasion and uncanny dodge. Hm. Maybe the standard 10-level PrC could be broken down into 3 or maybe 4 feats, each feat encompassing a few of the PrC's abilities. Yeah - that might work. Perhaps I'll work up one or two PrC "feat bundles" over the weekend and put them up here for critique. And hey, if anyone else takes it into their head to take a swing at this idea, I'd love to see how other people interpret it!

 

[mercucio]

Not a bad idea, but it sounds like a monster pain-in-the-butt from a book keeping perspective.

A possibility is grant benefits similar to the martial arts styles presented in Oriential Adventures, where accumulating a select list of feats and skills grants you a special ability at no cost--other than the required feats and skills of course.

 

[Tewligan]

Not a bad idea, but it sounds like a monster pain-in-the-butt from a book keeping perspective.

A possibility is grant benefits similar to the martial arts styles presented in Oriential Adventures, where accumulating a select list of feats and skills grants you a special ability at no cost--other than the required feats and skills of course.

Hm - do you think it would be that much more difficult? Really, you would only need to check for new abilities and whatnot every time you gain a level, just like you would if you were taking the actual PrC. When you leveled up, you would just write down in the notes section of your sheet whatever new ability you had unlocked with the level-up.

I hadn't thought about the OA martial arts system, though. That might warrant a closer examination - maybe I'll dig out the OA books tomorrow and see how well that would work.

 

[Tonguez]

I too have had this idea (a spin off of my idea of creating a class-less feat-based system) anyway I imagined (ie it hasn't been play tested) that Prestige Classes would be replaced a mixture of feats which gave access to a Talent tree so for instance the Shadowdancer Feat (which could only be gained by membership of the Shadow League) would give access to the Shadow Talents Tree

The Leadership feat already sets a precedent for Level as a prereq (so no problem with declaring the Shadow Dancer feat level 5 or over) and the Talents aren't feats in themselves so they might say something like "a character with this feat may choose one talent for which they qualify every two levels to a total of 8 talents"