Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 481272" data-attributes="member: 4937">I've been so disappointed with the implementation of PrC's that I ban them from any serious campaign that I am running.  In fact, I would go so far as to say that the PrC's is the single biggest design flaw in 3rd ed.  I also think it funny that new PrC's are probably the single most common rules extension offered in supplemental material.  To me, the whole concept is somewhat juvenile, and is designed primarily it seems to appeal to juvenile tastes.  The vast majority of the existing PrC's are shallow and munchkinish.  They are the worst sort of example of defining your character based on what he can do, not who he is.  Either the class is unique enough that it should be a balanced core class on its own, or else it is similar enough to an existing class to be treated as a balanced variant of that class.  But the idea that there should be hundreds of these unique classes each of which is more powerful than core classes, and which is introduced without play testing to ensure that they are balanced against each other is a huge departure from 3rd ed.'s strong design philosophy.  I thought we were getting away from kits and specialty priests and all the other things which were good in theory, but in practice stunk to high heaven in 2nd edition?I agree with the poster that said that the vast majority of PrC's powers could and should be turned into feat chains.  If you do this, you immediately realize that the vast majority of all PrC's can be quite simply described.  Take an existing core class and give it extra bonus feats.  Viola, a new PrC. In fact we could probably go further.  The PrC's that people actually take (regularly) fall into two classes.  Either they are fighters that get a bonus feat every level instead of every other level, or else they are spell casters with full spell progression that get bonus feats every other level (or every level!) instead of every fifth level or not at all.  The real point of a PrC seems to be allowing a character of X level to have more feats than they would otherwise be entitled too.  In some cases, this is only inelegant, since the feats are relatively poor ones - and such PrC's tend to be ignored anyway.  In cases where those extra feats are consistantly useful, then they move from being a mere aesthetic blemish to being full fledged breaks in the design. The real arguement against the notion that a class like 'Order of the Bow Initiate' should be allowed to be better with a bow because it is giving up generality, is that most fighters aren't themselves generalists.  Most fighters try to excel at doing one thing very well, and any extra ability that they may acquire in something else is just icing on the cake.  I wholly reject the notion that a fighter10/order of the bow initiate10 should be better with a bow than a fighter20 who has been concentrating on nothing but skill with the bow.Order of the Bow Initiate, Archmage, Templar, Frenzied Beserker, Master of Chains, and the like are just prime examples of entirely what is wrong with PrC's.While the goal of making weak concepts into strong ones sounds nice, it is questionable that every weak concept needs to be made into a strong concept.   And its certainly questionable that already strong concepts need to be made into stronger ones.  Since when is 'archer' a weak concept?  Ok, maybe the days are gone when I can play a character with full sneak attack progression, and full magic user spell progression, and full thief skill progression who is only one level lower than a straight thief or magic user, but is that entirely a bad thing?More over, in many cases, that a concept was 'weak' should have been addressed at an earlier design stage.  It seems virtually every splat book has a 'summoner' prestige class of some sort to make up for the percieved weakness of the 'Monster Summoning' spells I persume.  But, if they are truly weak, why not change the spells instead of cludging on a fix at a latter point?Alot of 'weak' concepts can be fixed by simply adding just a few feats that support the concept.  There is no need for this whole mess that is PrC's.And don't get me started on what happens when a PrC meant to support a 'weak' concept starts intefacing with a feat or series of feats designed to do the same thing.</blockquote>

Verification