Which PrCl would you never want in your game? (part 1 - DMG)

Which PrCl would you never want in your game?

  • Arcane Archer

    Votes: 33 9.6%
  • Arcane Trickster

    Votes: 25 7.2%
  • Archmage

    Votes: 26 7.5%
  • Assassin

    Votes: 44 12.8%
  • Blackguard

    Votes: 45 13.0%
  • Dragon Disciple

    Votes: 94 27.2%
  • Duelist

    Votes: 19 5.5%
  • Dwarven Defender

    Votes: 17 4.9%
  • Eldritch Knight

    Votes: 27 7.8%
  • Hierophant

    Votes: 34 9.9%
  • Horizon Walker

    Votes: 67 19.4%
  • Loremaster

    Votes: 26 7.5%
  • Mystic Theurge

    Votes: 70 20.3%
  • Red Wizard

    Votes: 135 39.1%
  • Shadowdancer

    Votes: 29 8.4%
  • Thaumaturgist

    Votes: 49 14.2%

DungeonMaster said:
No he isn't. If you have more money you can afford items like metamagic rods of quicken.

Saying "the Mystic Theurge can spend thousands of gold pieces on something the single classed caster doesn't need to help make up the difference in their abilities" doesn't really help your argument. All things being equal, the non-MT won't have to drain his cash resources to obtein the same effect that the MT can get by buying expensive theings, and thus will be able to buy other things, or even the same things, and end up ahead of the MT.

[And at many points it's irrelevant as survival is more important. Whether you cast one spell or 2 is largely irrelevant when the dragon breaths on you and you need protection from energy on, or in the case of the cohort + leader both need it on.

And this is a problem because? Are you both likely to get caught in lots of the same AoE spells? I find that parties facing AoE capable opponents tend to spread out and minimize their multiple exposure. Having an extra body is always more helpful than not.

It's still out of your own cash.

No, it's not. Effectively, if the cohort has their own item creation capabilities, then you get the items he makes for half the cost you would have otherwise paid.

One way or another you're splitting up resources not the least of which is XP. You're trying to compare groups with disparate XP levels.

Someone hasn't read the 3.5e rules very well. Go back and brush up on them, then come back with an actual argument.

It's not effectively twice the hp if you're targeted with an area-effect.

"I can come up with a corner case that usually doesn't make much difference". Gosh, you are convincing.

It likewise doesn't mean anything if you're targeted with a save-or-die - what matters is your save and the MT will have a better save than the single-class characters guaranteed from both multiclassing and better overall gear.

And the MT has better overall gear because? Oh, right, he's spent several thousand gold on metamagic rods of quicken, so he has lots less money to boost his saves than the single-classed character. Your argument simply doesn't wash.

The MT can do things like contingency:heal, which isn't a parlor trick.

When he's 14th level. His single classed buddy has been able to cast one or the other of those spells for three levels now. I'm sure he's very impressed that the MT has finally caught up.

And the MT can take leadership too you know - and get another MT.

Some one who can cast spells four] (or five) levels below the ability of the single classed caster. How useful!
 

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DungeonMaster said:
I'm not so sure. Kits died in the transition from 2nd to 3rd so there's hope that "prestige classes" likewise get their ass booted in 4th.
The only disturbing thing is that kits were much more balanced and flavorful than PrC so the trend would be that things get worse, not better as time goes forward. But that's judging off of a single data point.

*choke*

Are you serious? In 2E there was so much abuse of kits our DM almost gave up running. Most of the kits came down to mechanical benefit for "X hates you" and "must wear red" types of 'restrictions'. Prestige classes are a thousand times better -- and this is my opinion as DM, not player.
 

I never liked the Assassin Death Attack mechanic (and thus never used Assassins as a DM), but after having my Cleric the target of an Assassination attempt (in RttToEE), I can say with authority that Death Attack sucks, and the DMG Assassin is icky.

-- N
 

The trouble with Death Attack is that most of your enemies have great Fort saves, and the others are very hard to surprise (the arcane spellcasters have cool spells, and how do you get the drop on a rogue?) So you are left assassinating bards.

Plus most monsters have good fort saves and good con besides.

So you have to wait 3 rounds, hope that you are unnoticed, and then get once small chance for an instant kill.

Comparing the 1st ed. assassin, you didn't have to wait 3 rounds, and the chance was about 50% vs. your level, but you really had to plan the assassination (DM judgement).

And I think Diaglo can back up that originally Assassins were neutral, not evil. Basically, mercenaries.

All that said, I like the idea of assassins as a DM. They make good "sneaky" bad guys. Playing one, though...
 

The idea of assassins is a good one. Yes. No conflict there.

The implementation of the DMG Assassin(tm) PrC is a bad one. That's all I'm sayin'.

-- N
 

I hate Dragon Disciples! they are way too powerful. they get way too many ability increases. plus, most people don't even care about the dragon they learn from. most people just take the class for the power and have no devotion to helping their favored dragons. it's so stupid and unnecessary in D&D. there are many prestige classes in the Dracominicon book that make more sense, less powerful, and more balanced out.
 

I've always felt that there's exactly two requirements for good prestige class design:
  1. That the class is mechanically balanced for the standard game described by the rules.
  2. That the prerequisites for and the abilities granted by the class make thematic sense together.
As far as I'm concerned, that's it. Now, I voted against the arcane archer because I don't think it's very interesting and because elves are accorded too much of the "coolness" of D&D - even though I don't think the class is cool, it seems to me that a character who fires spells from his bow is intended to be "cooler" than a warrior who's really good at holding the line a la dwarven defender.

(I blame Tolkien. Jerk.)

From a mechanical standpoint, though, there's nothing wrong with the class. It's fairly well-balanced and its abilities make sense as a package.

When people talk about "bad" prestige classes, they are in my experience talking about them being bad for two reasons:
  1. They're not balanced.
  2. They're stupid.
In the first case, some players and DMs don't realise that Wizards of the Coast has to write to their standards of mechanical balance for the core game. Too often you can see DMs complaining that X and Y prestige classes are "completely broken", which indeed turns out to be the case - once considered in the light of Z changes the DM has made to the game, which completely shifts the grounds of play! Wizards of the Coast has published prestige classes which are unbalanced in the default game - they're not perfect. Their actual strike rate in such circumstances, though, is very different to the one attributed to them by DMs online and in geek conversations around the world, many of whom either fail to grasp what the actual default game balance is or who have made changes to that balance without considering the consequences.

In the second case, it's an obvious fact that people have different tastes. About the only objective criterion which can be applied to the question of how appropriate a given prestige class is for the game on "flavour" grounds is this: whether or not the class in question appeals to a reasonable proportion of players of the game who are likely to buy the book in which it appears. That last clause is bolded because it's crucial: the context in which a prestige class appears can and does make a difference.

Take a much-maligned example: the Green Star adept prestige class from Complete Arcane. Arguments about mechanical balance aside, I've seen dozens of players and DMs denigrate the class for its "weirdness" - and while said weirdness has eminently defensible roots in the weird fantasy fiction of authors like Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard, it's arguably true that the Green Star adept found its way into Complete Arcane simply because it's a spellcaster class - and that it might have found a more receptive audience if its creator had been assigned to write a few prestige classes for, say, a book on constructs, or a book more explicitly inspired by such weird fantasy fiction than by the pseudo-Tolkien default flavour of Dungeons and Dragons. In other words, the "weirdness" of the Green Star adept is arguably appropriate to D&D - considering that Gary Gygax himself prefers such sources to Tolkien - but it was not necessarily appropriate for inclusion in Complete Arcane, given that the Complete series is intended to appeal to as many players as possible and therefore arguably cannot afford to stray too far from the default flavour of D&D, as a book like Heroes of Horror arguably can.

In essence, my point is this: many of the objections raised against prestige classes are short-sighted, and many of the genuine problems with them are not generally recognised in audience discussion. Personally, I love prestige classes, and favour a multiplicity of applications for them beyond the Dungeon Master's Guide's suggestion that they be used to mechanically distinguish in-game organisations that characters (or their enemies) might like to join. To my mind, they can be more than that - they don't even have to have a recognisable impact detectable by characters in the gameworld, existing instead as a purely metagame construct to facilitate a character concept. But then, that's one extreme of a continuum of which the other end is the Dungeon Master's Guide default, and I imagine that most players and DMs occupy points elsewhere on that continuum.
 

Kamikaze Midget said:
Now there is a mechanical loss (level) for a mechanical benefit (sweet powers).
Un-huh. Lemme see what I need to "lose" mechanically to enter, oh I don't know, the assassin "prestige class". Um, I need Disguise 4 ranks, Hide 8 ranks, Move Silently 8 ranks.
[Sarcasm]
Oh man I feel the pain of my sacrifice .
[/Sarcasm]

And they don't require you to make a new character to take advantage of them.
[Sarcasm]
I'm sure with every spiffy new book that WOTC puts out with ever more power-creep that you have a PC just waiting in-line with the exact requirements necessary to meet the new PrC.
[/Sarcasm]
Please. It's blatant intellectual dishonesty to claim these require no modification of existing characters .


In 2e, Red Wizard might've been a Wizard kit. Now, it's a PrC, and it is much more interesting as a PrC than it ever could've been as a kit, because it can contain powerful and unique abilities, an entire menu of them, that can be payed for with more penalties than "Good-aligned creatures are hostile to you, ggrrrr".
You're right. Now it's "you must be an archer to qualify for this archery PrC, ggrrrr". :rolleyes:
 

CRGreathouse said:
*choke*
Are you serious? In 2E there was so much abuse of kits our DM almost gave up running.
But has no problems running with 5 levels of redwizard, 5 levels of archamge, 1 level of the arcane order or other blah/blech/blue/blam "builds" that can hit ACs of 229 or caster levels into the 50's?
Sounds like he needs medication.

Most of the kits came down to mechanical benefit for "X hates you" and "must wear red" types of 'restrictions'. Prestige classes are a thousand times better -- and this is my opinion as DM, not player.
Yeah and most Prestige classes come down to mechanical benefits for something you were doing already - like being an archer - oh look you need to take archery feats?!?! The PAIN. Someone make it stop!...
Anyhow my opinion as a DM is Prestige classes are by far the most broken ridiculous nonsense that is as someone has pointed out: a cash cow for the masses. The simple fact that you can stack levels of X and Y and Z gives you 100 time the abuse potential of a kit. Plain and simple. More option = more ways to break the game in more ways.
I've never seen a broken kit. I've seen 1 trillion damage hulking hurlers though.

I ran a game of munchkin once - and guess what? No one used the munchkin rules. They brought only "legitimate expansion rules" as their munchkin character. Sign of the times.
 

mhacdebhandia said:
When people talk about "bad" prestige classes, they are in my experience talking about them being bad for two reasons:
  1. They're not balanced.
  2. They're stupid.

To add to your experience:


  • 3. They're inflexible.
    4. They don't scale well.

Those are my two biggest pet peeves. They are combined in the typical PrC cop-out -- "do cool thing 1/day, DC=fixed number".

-- N
 

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