Virtual Feats & Virtual Skills

[Li Shenron]

I have recently borrowed Defenders of the Faith and Tome and Blood to browse them before eventually buying a copy, and have noticed both have a short paragraph about Virtual Feats, i.e. the fact that if you are gifted (for example, for racial reasons) by a power which replicates a Feat, you can assume you actually have that Feat for the sole purpose to get other feats, and for this purpose you can as well assume you have whatever requisites the first would have required (e.g. ability score) even if you don't have it at all.
I was wondering if this may work also to qualify for a Prestige Class.

This doubt brought up an old discussion with my players about Prestige Class prerequisites, which very often include Feats and Skills.

1) If you have a power which replicates a Feat (so a Virtual Feat), can you use it to qualify for a Prestige Class?

2) Do you need a Skill Rank (EXPERIENCE) exactly or instead a total skill modifier (let's say a Virtual Skill), counting ability modifiers and race bonuses (ATTITUDE)?

All Prestige Classes description clearly say RANKS, without doubts it seems. Anyway, how can an Assassins' Guild notice that the new candidate to join them has +10 in the required Skill because his ranks instead of his dexterity? And what if he has 10 ranks but -5 in dexterity, would he qualify? After all, the effects (on the total modifier) are the same!

I play by the rules, that is a RANK is required, but still it makes me feel somehow uncomfortable.

 

[Plane Sailing]

You need to use skill RANK rather than skill MODIFIER because otherwise you would have people qualifying for prestige classes at very low levels, just because of good attributes. This is why they did it that way.

Personally I wouldn't allow virtual feats to count towards the pre-reqs for a prestige class - and I wouldn't create any prestige classes that looked as if virtual feats could be used

A ranger can pick "improved two weapon fighting" because of his virtual feats, but if he wears heavy armour, he suddenly loses the use of that real feat because his virtual feats are negated. What would you do if he had 6 levels of a prestige class on the basis of his virtual feats and then he wore heavy armour - would you disallow all his prestige levels? hit points? BAB? It is just such a can of worms that I really don't think it is worth going there.

Prestige classes are all supposed to be organisations or some such anyway, are they not? I certainly follow the suggestion that they are the arms of prestige organisations within my campaign world - and as such, the leaders of those groups grill potential candidates and would screen out any who didn't meet their exacting criteria.

Cheers

 

[Crothian]

Ranks = skill. It's easy to tell if someone is skilled with training or using natural ability.

 

[Henrix]

And virtual feats do give you access to prestige classes.
If a PrC requires Improved Unarmed and Stunning Blow, then a monk is qualified. There are other examples that are not as easy, and some might be ridiculous, but, by the books, virtual feats work as prerequisites.

 

[hong]

All Prestige Classes description clearly say RANKS, without doubts it seems. Anyway, how can an Assassins' Guild notice that the new candidate to join them has +10 in the required Skill because his ranks instead of his dexterity? And what if he has 10 ranks but -5 in dexterity, would he qualify? After all, the effects (on the total modifier) are the same!

While it's true that theoretically someone with a 1 Dex could qualify to be an assassin, this is highly unlikely to happen in practice. D&D, like most rulesets, has a certain "window" within which its rules work best at modelling reality. A good ruleset is one where that window coincides with where most gamers spend most of their time gaming -- and I would say that the situation of a 1 Dex assassin is one that isn't going to turn up for most groups.

 

[Caliber]

Actually, I believe they have rules for what happens when you lose access to a PrC, for exactly these reasons.

You keep HD, BAB, and Saves. You lose pretty much everything else.

Of course, someone might correct me since I am going by memory and cannot quote a page number but ...

 

[kreynolds]

Actually, I believe they have rules for what happens when you lose access to a PrC, for exactly these reasons.

You keep HD, BAB, and Saves. You lose pretty much everything else.

Of course, someone might correct me since I am going by memory and cannot quote a page number but ...

I don't know of a "hard-and-fast-general-rule", but in most cases, the PrC descriptions will state what happens when you lose the class. AFAIK, the only time you can suddenly be "disqualified" for a class, is if the class specifically has the ex-"?" passage. Think about it, you can't be disqualified to be a fighter, but you can be disqualified to be a paladin or monk, and a few others.