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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="tarchon" data-source="post: 481540" data-attributes="member: 5990">I like that analysis.  There might be one other, an archetype PrC, like the Dread Pirate or Outlaw of the Crimson Road, which attempts to emulate a more specific type of character than the base classes.I also voted on the "more powerful" side.  They are prestige classes after all.If a class is of equal power with the base classes, it should be set up as an alternative base class (ABC), not a PrC.I can certainly understand that someone would decide not to use PrCs in general, but insisting that PrCs be on the same footing with the base classes kind of defeats the whole idea of having a separate genus of advanced classes.  Where the WotC presentation of PrCs has failed somewhat, IMO, is in implementing, as far as I can tell, all new classes as PrCs when they may have more aptly used ABCs.  Instead of giving us like 10 PrCs in each Foo & Bar supplement, an offering of 5 carefully balanced ABCs and 5 somewhat enhanced PrCs would have gone much further toward establishing this as a useful system.  It also would have made the supplements much more useful for games in which PrCs were excluded.In the DMG we have three genera of classes:NPC Classes (a little less powerful) - Commoner, AdeptBase Classes (standard power level) - Fighter, Bard, WitchPrestige Classes (a little more powerful) - Assassin, ShadowdancerI agree that PrCs shouldn't be much more powerful than base classes, but they should have a little extra umph to them.  If we look back to the model on which PrC classes were presumably based, Warhammer FRP, we see the same distinction between the Basic Careers (base classes) and the Advanced Careers (PrCs).  In the DMG it explicitly says "A character with a prestige class is more specialized yet perhaps slightly better than one without one," which would seem to agree with the idea that a PrC should generally be a touch better than a base class.  Also note that the DMG discusses examples of new and altered base classes (like the Witch) right before the PrCs, so they clearly had this idea of a three-tiered system of classes in mind, NPC, Base, and Prestige.Of our 4 PrC types, probably the Membership and Specialist types are best suited to be PrCs.  The Hybrid and Archetype PrCs in a lot of cases would have been better positioned as ABCs, although in some cases a PrC version would be reasonable.</blockquote>

Verification