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Message: <blockquote data-quote="wingsandsword" data-source="post: 2121736" data-attributes="member: 14159">I went to my FLGS tonight, and while I was browsing around I saw a teenager come in with his friend and start browsing the D&D books, and one picked up Complete Adventurer while standing right next to me and his friend was on the other side of me, and after flipping through it for a few seconds, the following conversation ensued (recalling from memory):Teen: Wow, cool, you can play Ninjas in D&D now!Friend: Woah, we can have ninja in our games now?Myself (after a moment's pause): Uh, you could play ninja in D&D before.Teen: Uh uh, I've never seen Ninja in D&D before.(I politely ignore Sword & Fist, Oriental Adventures, Rokugan and Way of the Ninja, which are all on the shelves and bookcases)Myself: You could have played a ninja with the core rules if you really wanted.Friend: No you couldn't, there are no rules for ninja in the Player's Handbook!Myself: You could play one before, play a Monk/Rogue and take Assassin levels.Teen: You can't multiclass Monk and Rogue, or you can't be a monk anymore.(Realizing they would probably consider the fact that I let Monk's multiclass in my games to be sacrilege, I offer an alternate explanation)Myself: First level in Monk, 4 levels in Rogue, take 10 Assassin levels, then finish out in Rogue.Teen: That's not a ninja, that's a Monk/Rogue/Assassin!  It doesn't have special ninja powers and anyway, monks have to be lawful and assassins evil, this says ninja can be any alignment, so I can have my chaotic good heroic ninja!Myself: It's all in the roleplaying, how you describe and play your character, wear black pajamas if you want (also bite my tongue on the idea of heroic chaotic-good ninja).Teen: Nuh unh, now you can play them in D&D, it even says so right here, it'll even say right there on the character sheet: "Ninja".(Teen and his friend go over to the register to buy Complete Adventurer, happily chattering about Ninja PC's they want to make).Then it struck me exactly why there is such an incredible proliferation of Prestige Classes and now Core Classes.  Many people are unable, unwilling, or simply haven't thought of the idea of creating character types from existing classes.  Because it says "Elder of the Inner Circle" or "Grand Dragonmaster Monk" or "High Priest of Grummsh" on their character sheet they can play that character, but the idea of using multiclassing, or even just a single class and some good roleplaying (and feat/skill selection) eludes them.  I like the flexibility in classes that 3.x has given us, but starting gaming under earlier editions made me learn how to do more with less I guess, and not need a special class for every single character concept.Now, I like prestige classes, I think they are a good thing.  But you can have too much of a good thing, probably hundreds of "official" ones between D&D books and Dragon magazines and thousands more from the d20 field.  A dozen new core classes in the Complete books didn't help much (when honestly, many of those core classes could be easily represented by existing combinations of core and prestige classes, feats and some actual roleplaying and creativity).  I like the idea of using Prestige Classes to create paths for characters that couldn't be easily done in other ways (Dragon Disciple), to act as a workaround for spellcaster multiclassing (Eldritch Knight/Arcane Trickster/Mystic Theurge), or to represent highly specialized advanced training in a field that comes with membership in an elite organization (Red Wizard), however classes that exist only as uber-power-ups (Radiant Servant of Pelor) or a reason for characters to be able to write the name of an organization or concept on their sheet (Ronin, Dread Pirate) seem to be redundant.Are you making a prestige class because it does something you can't do with base classes and existing PrC's or makes an organization really unique, or just so you can write a new word on the "class" line of your character sheet or a nice way to power-up your character?Does anybody agree with this?</blockquote>

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