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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mhacdebhandia" data-source="post: 1648105" data-attributes="member: 18832">If you have players who don't care about the flavour of your campaign, the mechanical balance of their characters, the logic of their character's history as a person living and adventuring in the world, and who abuse prestige classes to fit their personal power-concept of an "awesome char!!!!one" . . .. . . the problem you have is nothing whatsoever to do with prestige classes.As I have said here and elsewhere ad nauseam, prestige classes are nothing more than a tool. They are a game-rules construct that can be employed in a number of different ways.* You can use them to represent the teachings of a particular game-world organisation, like an Order of Assassins headquartered in a remote mountaintop complex. All characters who enter the assassin prestige class would have to be accepted into the order, which may or may not have requirements other than those necessary to actually learn the skills of an assassin - such as the "must kill someone for no reason other than to join the assassins" requirement, or more.* You can use them to represent particular traditions taught by individuals or loose groups that don't qualify as an organisation. Maybe all contemplatives are trained one at a time in a close relationship with a master, in an unbroken lineage of practitioners stretching back to the first holy figure ever to discover the techniques - or receive them in a vision.* You can use them to represent skills that a character can learn on her own from lore and secrets she may have uncovered herself. Perhaps a wizard finds a volume of forgotten magics in a long-abandoned tower and discovers the insanity of the Far Realms through independent study, eventually taking on the alienist prestige class as her researches grip her more and more obsessively.* You can also use prestige classes to mechanically model things which don't even remotely require anyone in the gameworld to recognise that the character is no longer progressing in the same class as before (even to the tiny extent that characters in the gameworld recognise such things in the first place). Prestige classes used to patch inadequacies in multiclassing - like the eldritch knight - are an example of this function, but so too are classes which represent a concentration upon one part of something the character already does, such as the frenzied berserker, who's done nothing more complex than learn how to lose herself even more completely in the depths of her rage.I don't have a lot of respect for people who allow the idiocy of others to prejudice their opinions towards something barely related to said idiocy. Bad players are bad players, bad design is bad design, but that's it.</blockquote>

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