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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 6313338" data-attributes="member: 18">Words are wind, John Snow.Ah, yes, precisely.Further, Greg, anything in Dragon is seen by a small minority of D&D DMs. I mean, how many copies of 3E sold compared to how many copies of Dragon 274 or 293 or the like?The DMG example is particularly unfortunate, even awful, because they do indeed say that, and then, when they actually show us some PrCs, most or all of them are literally generic. Assassin, for example, for god's sake. They tell us PrCs are esoteric and campaign specific, then they give us a classic 1E *class* as a PrC. Arcane Archer is another - utterly generic. Dwarven Defender - utterly generic. I could go on. As I remember, every single PrC in the DMG is generic, and could fit into any campaign.It's totally classic bad game design - say the rules are for one thing, then demonstrate, at length, that they're for another - people will remember the examples, not the preamble. It was clear from splats and so on that WotC did not intend for DMs and players to *actually* not use PrCs except a few "culturally appropriate" ones, either.Of course even fixing that leaves the biggest problem - wild and totally uneven power which is totally unrelated to how rare or hard to get into the PrC is (indeed on the contrary, many of the hardest-to-get-into PrCs are very weak).Your proposed replacement doesn't make much sense to me, because race/cultural influences would be strongest at level 1. Basically you're proposing replacing PrCs with Kits, I guess. Well, Kits were less problematic, there is that. Not everyone wants their PC defined by their race/culture, though, and you could bet a lot of money that such splats would end up making certain race/class combos the ne plus ultra of that class.I agree with that, at least.I think PrCs would be fine for the role of "advanced classes" (something D&D has long had - c.f. RC D&D etc., and many other RPGs have used successfully), with a fixed entry point (likely level 10 or 11), and clear, limited entry requirements (prob. with a focus on RP/culture stuff rather than stats or feats), allowing you to "specialize" your class a bit, much like Paragon Paths in 4E (but probably more significant), but I don't think they're a good model for anything lower-level than 10, and I think the whole "Oh you make them up for your individual campaign idea!" was a ridiculous pipe-dream on about fourteen levels (the first being that it's huge work for something that might never get used, the second being that most DMs are not keen on designing classes, or good at it... and so on). If you are going to suggest DMs do it themselves, they need a really strong mechanical framework to do it with (something no edition has ever provided explicitly).EDIT - On abuse, yeah, I didn't see it much IRL, but what I did see being a REAL problem in the REAL game was ridiculous entry requirements forcing players to plan ahead really far, or, if they didn't (and most didn't), get frustrated when they found the requirements (personally I tended to waive them, but still), and really dodgy mechanics on PrCs, where they might sound good, but actually be terrible, or be good, but only for an ultra-specialized build that went somewhat against the concept of the PrC.</blockquote>

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