Spatzimaus
First Post
Well, as Nifft pointed out, PrCs are an "optional" rule, and so IMC we've always had all PrCs be subject to DM approval, and barring a few life-altering game events, you were required to tell the DM of your intentions at least 4-5 levels in advance. This gave him a chance to integrate it into the campaign, come up with appropriate NPCs, and basically prevented the cherry-picking abuses.
Hard-capping the number of PrCs isn't a good idea, IMO, because there ARE a few PrCs out there that are never intended to be full-path classes, they're something a character can mix in with his normal class (or another PrC) if he wants to slightly strengthen one aspect of the class at the expense of another. Penalizing someone for only taking 1-2 levels of that sort of class defeats its entire purpose. For example, IMC we had a custom 5-level Artificer PrC that basically had almost no spellcasting advancement, but gave item creation-related abilities; in a lot of ways, it was more attractive to just take 2-3 levels.
That being said, most PrCs get accepted in the campaigns I've played, with two main exceptions:
1> Any PrC with full spellcasting advancement at every level. No amount of prerequisites can balance this, IMO, and few have any sort of ongoing cost to balance with.
2> The Mystic Theurge-style 2-caster PrCs. While caster/caster multiclassing is horribly underpowered, the MT is just way, WAY too much in practice.
Most of the others end up getting tweaked a little, but not by enough to really skew balance either way.
Of course, once we switched the primary game to our homebrew (which is d20Modern-based with the six base classes and a handful of "advanced" classes), all these multiclassing headaches went away. It's pretty much impossible to cherry-pick the d20Modern base classes, so even though they're a bit bland, it really helped the game.
Hard-capping the number of PrCs isn't a good idea, IMO, because there ARE a few PrCs out there that are never intended to be full-path classes, they're something a character can mix in with his normal class (or another PrC) if he wants to slightly strengthen one aspect of the class at the expense of another. Penalizing someone for only taking 1-2 levels of that sort of class defeats its entire purpose. For example, IMC we had a custom 5-level Artificer PrC that basically had almost no spellcasting advancement, but gave item creation-related abilities; in a lot of ways, it was more attractive to just take 2-3 levels.
That being said, most PrCs get accepted in the campaigns I've played, with two main exceptions:
1> Any PrC with full spellcasting advancement at every level. No amount of prerequisites can balance this, IMO, and few have any sort of ongoing cost to balance with.
2> The Mystic Theurge-style 2-caster PrCs. While caster/caster multiclassing is horribly underpowered, the MT is just way, WAY too much in practice.
Most of the others end up getting tweaked a little, but not by enough to really skew balance either way.
Of course, once we switched the primary game to our homebrew (which is d20Modern-based with the six base classes and a handful of "advanced" classes), all these multiclassing headaches went away. It's pretty much impossible to cherry-pick the d20Modern base classes, so even though they're a bit bland, it really helped the game.
