DragonLancer said:
That's not what a PrC is meant to be though. They are meant to be campaign or setting specific oders or organisations, not a new specialist class or upgrade. If a player wants to be a member of the Royal Guard of Menhar thats a PrC, if they want to be a warrior who specialises in X attack form then play a fighter and take the appropriate feats.
And that sums up the problem quite well.
The problem is that PrC's have ended up doing alot of completely different things. The PrC got into 3rd edition as a result of Monte's love of secret societies. In a sense, the PrC as Monte saw it represents something of a throw back to 1st edition feel when designers would freely create new human monsters with special abilities and the like without worrying about what this meant for consistancy. Beserker and Dervish weren't classs in 1st edition, they were types of monster. Clear divisions into things like races, class, and level weren't worried about so much in 1st edition.
I sympathized with Monte's goal, but I feel that the PrC does more harm than good even at that level. I'd much preferred 'prestige feat' trees, with the same sort of prerequisites that are prequisites for the PrC's. The problem with that approach is that there are not enough feats available to the average character to do it. And that gets us down to what a PrC really is for the most part - a base class with extra feats. Granted, this feats are (usually) fixed and not configurable, but there really is no other difference between a class ability and a feat. They are both small perks. The only real difference between most PrC's and a base class is that PrC's get more of them. Most of the time when a PrC is taken by a player, something that PC's see as thier right rather than something that is earned by appropriate RP now that PrC's are available in player oriented splatbooks, the underlying reason is the player either wants to min/max his character by getting more 'feats' than he could otherwise or because the player doesn't feel he can make a character of the type he wants with the feats he has available.
Monte's original 'flavor' PrC's are largely ignored unless they incidently fit into one of those categories. Those categories have lead to several additional goals for PrC's which are far from ideal.
First, alot of PrC's exist to fix holes in the rules - either feat trees that should be there but aren't or else problems with multiclassing (usually spell casters). These problems would be much better addressed elsewhere. They aren't part of the original design goals of PrC's, they are just a cludge fix. And they are generally an unsatisfactory one. For one thing, rather than having a single fix, you need a separate PrC for each multiclassing option or combination that a player might want. This has lead to PrC proliferation.
Second, alot of PrC's exist to allow options which are normally not viable with the rules. For example, a PrC might exist to make a fighter using a whip as viable as one that uses more standard weapons. There is a serious question as to whether this is a good goal. In the real world, whips weren't effective martial weapons and knives and daggers tend to be martial weapons of last resort. It isn't necessarily clear to me that just because a character wants to play a grappler which is an effective melee combatant against Dire Bears, or a Whip user that is effective against oozes and dragons that the means of doing that should be provided to them. Some choices are simply going to be suboptimal and some probably should be suboptimal. This too has lead to PrC proliferation.
Thirdly, alot of PrC's exist to make a 'narrow specialist'. These in my opinion are the worst offenders. History and experience tells any RPGer that 'narrow specialists' are almost impossible to balance. A character that narrowly specialises - a 'Johnny One-Shot' as they are called in GURPS - at something is almost always more powerful than one that spends its character resources on a wide variaty of skills and abilities. The way to build a powerful character is to pour all your resources in something and then do that one thing all the time. That's how players min/max by definition. It's not more 'narrow' to specialize in a weapon, if you plan on using that weapon all the time - which face it, you are going to do anyway. It's not more 'narrow' to specialize in a spellcasting, if you intend to cast spells all the time. The only way to balance a class by making it more powerful in a narrow area, is to make that narrow area one which is so situational that it can't happen all the time - for example, 'only when riding a mount' or 'only when aboard sailing vessel' or some such, and even those are broken in particular campaign settings. I'm appalled by the number of people that said 'I think a PrC should be more powerful, but balanced by being more narrow'. In practice, that just doesn't happen and anyone that's been playing RPG's for a while should know that. Classes that are designed to make a character a specialist archer, or a specialist spiked chain user, or something like that just make me want to slap the designer around and say, "What the heck are you thinking? Have you any experience with the game at all or where you just drunk when you did this? Please tell me that marketing forced you to include this crap in the game over your stringent objections! Tell me something, to make me think that you aren't in fact an idiot!"
PrC's really really need to go. They are bad for the game in all sorts of ways. But they won't because about half the player base really like them (in the same way drug addicts like heroine), and because they are really easy to create filler to help designers pad out (and sell) books.
