Celebrim
Legend
This is a bad approach, because RL experience has taught us that what drives organizations are interests (political / religious / economic / . . . ) Tying organizations to game mechanics is just asking for troubles (they just didn't know what kind of troubles in advance).
Worse, the sort of specificity that was applied to PrC's tended to meant that for some PrCs everyone with a particular PrC was assumed to have basically the same outlook, beliefs, personality, and shtick. It was as if no two members of a PrC were really different characters save for perhaps seniority. A strongly written class ought to suggest a broad range of archetypes. I've often said that your class is poorly written if you can't conceive of a 4 or 6 person party consisting entirely of that class, with no PC in the group stepping on the toes of another one and each distinctive and memorable. I'd argue that most PrC's fail in this test. And I'd argue that almost certainly the Monk and the Barbarian, and probably the Paladin fails this test even among base classes.
I think that another problem with this approach is that if you require a special class in order to make a character with a particular archetype then your game rules can never be complete. You'd need not 100's of PrC's but 1000's or even 10s of thousands. The sort of things that are possible become limited to the author's imaginations, and not the players' imaginations.
Actually, one of the more annoying excess weights for me was making Trapfinding a class feature.
Trapfinding is a class feature for my rules, but that class feature reads: "You gain Trapfinding as a bonus feat." Now that I think about it, I probably should rewrite it to say something like, "If you already have trap finding, you may take one of the following feats instead. That said, Trapfinding itself shouldn't be a requirement for a complete party, and I'm leaning toward a complete rewrite of the Trapfinding and Track feats that eliminate the absolute prohibition that they imply from the rules by first upping the DC of all finding all traps/tracking and then simply the feats down to a simple +5 skill bonus or 5e style 'advantage'.
I've been arguing for the longest time that Ranger and Barbarian should be Fighter variants or Fighter build-options.
I've retained the split, but not in the way 3e does. Neither Ranger nor Barbarian are available classes under my rules. Each has been replaced by something else. But, for the sake of clarity, I'll refer to those classes as Ranger and Barbarian for now. The split as I see it is this:
Fighter: This class is about mastery of combat through the exercise of skill at arms. Everything that pertains to the mastery of weapons and the practice of warcraft is the province of this class.
Barbarian: This class is about overcoming obstacles by the joint application of ones prowess and the sheer force of ones will. Everything that pertains to the harnessing of ones emotion to control ones body and force ones will on one's enemy by brute force is the province of this class.
Ranger: This class is about mastery of combat through expert knowledge and study of ones enemy. Everything that pertains to the art of particular a particular class of being is the province of this class.
I've got one more full BAB class, the Explorer, which is less about mastery of combat than it is about mastery of movement and knowledge of travel. It's the 'skill monkey' full BAB class, and its combat schtick is mobility, self-defense, improvisation, and awareness, and it's style is two-handed fighting.
All the full BAB classes multi-class well with themselves and with the full skill monkey classes. It's fairly obvious what you get when you combine the various concepts, say a half fighter half explorer creates pretty obvious well-rounded adventurer swashbuckler types, and a half ranger half rogue concept creates an assassin type character.
If you think of it, in concept and spirit, Ranger and Barbarian are not so far apart.
Only because as presented, both carry the unnecessary baggage of being specific to a wilderness environment. But looking back at more core divide, why should a 'Ranger' always be about the wilderness? I make the core concept of the class as: "This class is about mastery of combat through expert knowledge and study of ones enemy. Everything that pertains to the art of particular a particular class of being is the province of this class." So why should not a thief taker or magistrate, that specializes in taking down criminals within his own society not be the province of the 'Ranger'? Why should not an assassin that specializes in dealing death to other members of his society not be a 'Ranger'? Yet unless the society is in the wilderness, what since does it make to make the class carry wilderness baggage? Or why should we have a special 'Undead Slayer' class, when the slaying of undead is simply a special case of being a 'ranger'? If the base class is well built, we shouldn't need 'Construct Slayers' or 'Demon Slayers' or any sort special of 'slayer' of anything class because you ought to be able to build a viable one out of your base class. And why should it be that by necessity if you become a powerful slayer you learn druidic magic? If you wanted to have a side shtick of being a slayer that knew some magic, couldn't you just multi-class?
So to facilitate this, I rebuilt the Ranger into a new class called the 'Hunter' which kept the core concept but lost all the unnecessary baggage and out of the box let you do obvious things that were otherwise hard and required special exceptions in 3e rules.
Likewise, I rebuilt the Barbarian. The problem I had with barbarian is that the class seemed suitable to a tavern brawler, a pit fighter, the elite bodyguard of a king, an elite shock trooper, a gladiator, a insane psychopath, a berserker, a cultist, a sworn protector of a temple, pretty much any secret or exclusive warrior society, or even 'The Incredible Hulk'. Yet if you applied the class to create such a character, it was carrying around this baggage of being from a primitive tribal society living in the wilderness, and particularly of being a Norse warrior that just didn't necessarily make sense. If in fact you examine the inspiration for the 3e Barbarian shtick, it's based on being a member of one particular elite secret warrior society from one era of history - Norse Berserkers. So I just generalized the class to embrace the whole wide range of possibilities, and called the new class the Fanatic. It now has almost nothing in common with the Hunter beyond both are martial type character concepts. You can still customize the classes to make Barbarians and Rangers, but you are no longer limited to those things. And in doing so, a whole bunch of PrCs suddenly become superfluous.
A hard working DM could split feats into groups, where some are common knowledge and the rest are to be divided among elite-esoteric-secret organizations you mentioned. The same approach could be applied to certain spells, skill-tricks, gear, substances etc.
Certainly. For myself, feats prerequisites like, "Must be a member of Cult of the Walking Ancestors." or "Must be accepted as a member of The Free Brotherhood of the Storm Coast" doesn't really thrill me, because its hard for me to think of a feat which is both broadly useful and yet be some knowledge or art that would be exclusive to one small area of the world. But I can certainly see the attraction of that if you wanted to do it. And obviously, any feat derived from a PrC - say "Arcane Archer" - could have as its perquisite the membership in the implied secret society of arcane archers - "Must be accepted into an order of Elfish Wardens" would be the equivalent in my world. More likely I'd create secret societies that gave special exemption form the normal prerequisites of a feat. For example, "Elfish Warden" faction membership might give as a benefit, "No longer need to be an elf to gain the Arcane Archer, Brachiation, Improved Arcane Archer, Natural Warden, and Forest Magic feats. Make take the Natural Scholar feat without meeting the normal requirements. May take Adopted (by elves) as a general feat as if you had the required background."
It's not just 3rd party supplements.
No.
1. feats are not (and could not be) made equal
2. feat-chains are not (and could not be) made equal
3. feat-combos are not (and could not be) made equal
I've begun thinking of feats as being like at-will or day long duration spells. For a character of a given level, what sort of at will ability or enhancement would you be willing to give them? So a feat at the end of chain which implies a certain high level before its available ought to be comparable in the sort of exponential increase in power it provides (as a part of the chain) to an appropriately high level buffing spell. Now, I don't necessarily insist that feats be spell like in their execution, in fact the opposite, because I hate disassociated mechanics, but I do insist that if a feat have a bunch of prerequisites that it have a big impact. I haven't fully reformed my feats to where I want them to be, but I'm getting there.
However, to do this has meant that outside a few core feats, I've not retained a lot of the published feats. I'd guess 80% of my feats are custom content.