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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mhacdebhandia" data-source="post: 2304874" data-attributes="member: 18832">I've always felt that there's exactly two requirements for good prestige class design:<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">That the class is mechanically balanced for the standard game described by the rules.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">That the prerequisites for and the abilities granted by the class make thematic sense together.</li> </ol>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:<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">They're not balanced.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">They're stupid.</li> </ol>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.</blockquote>

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