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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Plane Sailing" data-source="post: 564921" data-attributes="member: 114">When setting up my current campaign (which has been running since 3e came out) I made it clear from the outset that I was going to have some campaign-specific prestige classes, and that they were all associated with particular regions or nationalities or groups. I decided to go with the original DMG idea (as I understood it). To put this in context, many of the character classes are specific to particular regions or nations in my campaign world, rather than the homogenous default situation in Greyhawk or FR. It was one of the "distinctives" of my campaign setting.Since then, a few prestige classes have appeared in additional books which fit into my campaign mythos - the duellist (which became my "Sword Coast Duellist"), the Alienist (ties in wonderfully with my cthuluoid/illithid background) the iaijutsu master from OA (which become my "Sword Saint"), the "tamer of beasts" which became my "Beastlord")The Soulknife & Pyrokineticist (as revised by Bruce Cordell).That is about it.One thing that I'll change in a future campaign is to eliminate almost all pre-reqs for prestige classes and make them gainable only through role-playing and completion of appropriate trials set by a particular group. This will help to embed them in the fabric of my campaign better, give nice role-playing goals and stops the (IMO) pernicious need to plan out a character from level 1 in order to get a particular class at a particular time. I'd much prefer the situation where Fred the wizard comes across a secret society and has to pass their acceptance rituals (which might include several tests of endurance and knowledge) without him saying "bother, if only I'd taken 'endurance' as one of my feats. Maybe in three levels time".From reading this thread I know that this won't jibe well with many of you, but I think it will be a workable and attractive way of handling prestige classes in my campaign and I thought I'd share it.To the issue of higher level characters - someone mentioned that paladins and rangers didn't have much to look forward to - I'd have thought that Holy Sword/Dispel Evil and Polymorph Self respectively might be appreciated <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> Seriously though, it seems to me that one of the benefits of higher level is the higher level challenges which are faced. Of course, one area where there could be a lot of worthwhile rules support is to help design and play a game which integrates high level PC's into politics - especially building organisations and armies, attaining fiefs, all that sort of thing. The chance to become "movers and shakers" in the campaign world. (any designers working on this?)  As it stands, high level characters with nigh godlike powers end up fighting fearsome beasts which have not bothered decimating the world until PC's reached high enough level <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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