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Quertus
2020-05-10, 01:33 PM
(EDIT: yes, this thread is intentionally under "role-playing", not "3e")

When trying to respond to this thread (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?611787-Your-perfect-game) about my "perfect" game, I ran into an issue: Prestige Classes.

So, Classes have value (both positive and negative). The names are evocative. They give a sense of "belonging". They pidgin hole. They tie unrelated advancement together. They make building and describing a character easier than point buy.

But I'm a little uncertain of what, conceptually, Prestige Classes offer. That is, I cannot evaluate the optimal implementation of "Prestige Classes", without knowing what I'm measuring.

So, here's what I see:

Differentiation. Sure, there may be hundreds of Fighters in my guild, but how many also have Swashbuckler and Devoted Defender levels? When talking with other X, or with beings with the discernment to comprehend the difference, you're not just an X, you're an X.Y.Z.

Prestige. It's right there in the name. Sure, there's other Thieves, but I'm a… Outlaw Trapfinder. Or whatever.

Cool build minigame. 'nuff said.

Customization. What 2e did for variety with kits, Skills & Powers, etc, 3e does with Prestige Classes (and more base classes).

Growth. This is what I would *like* Prestige Classes to represent, and what they fail at hardest. Because of the prerequisites, you really have to plan your Prestige Classes ahead of time, and they really poorly model organic growth of the character.

So, what do you see as the value of Prestige Classes? How do other systems / how would you achieve those goals?

Jorren
2020-05-10, 02:00 PM
The biggest issue I saw in Prestige Classes was the implementation. Specifically, that you could not enter them at low (or 1st levels).

While I understand that the concept was to discover them during play or to serve as a role-playing experience, waiting until 6th level (in most cases) was just a non-starter. Players often come up with a concept and want to get into the concept as soon as possible, and I believe that prestige classes would have been better served if you could enter them earlier. By 6th level many campaigns were winding down given the lack of interest in playing to higher levels.

There was also the issue that there were just too many of them and that books were regularly published with them. Given the overly narrow focus of many of them it came across as filler or padding to increase page count. Most of them I never gave a second glance.

So yes, the concept wasn't bad. Just the implementation was uninteresting and bland.

Nifft
2020-05-10, 02:03 PM
That "sense of belonging" thing seems like more of a Prestige Class feature than a trait of classes in general.

Another thing it gives the DM is a handle which can translate in-game PC knowledge into meta-game player expectations.

Like, a hooded figure in an alleyway says, "The Shadow Thieves of Amn wish to meet with you." -- and the players can go look up how badass a Shadow Thief of Amn might be, and what sorts of things they can do, and then the players can make an informed decision about how to deal with them.

Or they can hear about Archmage Kalfragilist, and they know that NPC is at least level X to be an Archmage.

Grek
2020-05-10, 03:15 PM
In my eyes, the biggest advantage to a prestige class is to allow the designers to adjust a character's conceptual limits as they progress in power.

For most people, it is easy to imagine both a low level Wizard and a low level Fighter taking on an Ogre and both making a valued contribution to the encounter. But once you move to higher levels and the party is facing down against an Osyluth (who has an aura of fear, the ability to teleport, fly, turn invisible and conjure walls of ice) it becomes more difficult to imagine what a Fighter-style character could do to contribute. Which is where prestige classes come in: At some point the Fighter should prestige-class into a Lunar Soldier or a Paladin or a Grove Warden or a Rightful King or a Dragon Knight or some other class that is basically a Fighter plus some extra concept on top of being a Fighter. D&D doesn't really do this very well, and as a result Fighters don't do so hot if their GM doesn't decide to give them magic items or special mounts which supply the needed abilities that their class doesn't cover.

Conversely, if you ask most people whether a high level magic user might be able to do X (for whatever value of X you might choose), there's a strong temptation to imagine if there's any magic user out there who could do it and only say No if you can't think of one. Raising the dead? Sure. Summon bears? Yeah. Rainbow bridge to Valhalla? Okay. Blow up a city? Probably. Turn invisible? Yep. Turn an army into bees? I guess? Which is where prestige classes come into things: you make the Wizard pick a more specific concept like Necromancer, Illusionist, Pyromancer, Shapeshifter, etc. and only let them pick things that are in-theme instead of cherry picking all the best options off of all of the spells you've ever written. D&D already does this a bit by making some spells only appear on the Cleric list and not on the Wizard list, but it could stand to do it more.

Dienekes
2020-05-10, 03:36 PM
Personally, I think it's rare for prestige classes to offer something that something like 5es subclass system doesn't. They're both a means of focusing down on the specifics of what you want your class to do. All subclasses and most prestige classes do this. Sometimes prestige classes require multiclassing two different classes, but many which do that just follow the general path of one of the classes while adding on abilities or flavor of the other class in a more unified whole. And this too could easily be replicated with a subclass system, often more elegantly than the original prestige class.

However, there is really one reason I can see a prestige class working and having value, and that's when the class itself can be equally placed as a continuation of multiple different classes.

For just a completely made up example, let's say there was some Super Enchanter Prestige class that focuses on mind controlling powers in a way that can be structured to fit and expand on the abilities of a Bard, Sorcerer, or Wizard and can work equally well for any of them? That's a prestige class.

Cluedrew
2020-05-10, 04:47 PM
Another thing I don't think has been mentioned is something like 4th's tiers (perhaps very roughly). That is growth is now not just scaling up (more levels in the existing class) the character actually changes in focus as they grow (getting a new class). Now depending on how the classes are actually structured you can probably get the same mechanical effect without this, but it does serve to label the concept.


But once you move to higher levels and the party is facing down against an Osyluth (who has an aura of fear, the ability to teleport, fly, turn invisible and conjure walls of ice) it becomes more difficult to imagine what a Fighter-style character could do to contribute.Oh challenge acc- actually that would be getting off topic. But I never figured out why people seem to have so much trouble with this other than only seeming to have the low level fighter in mind.

Belac93
2020-05-10, 05:17 PM
I do prestige classes as basically magic items: they can be uncommon, rare, legendary, etc, and provide benefits accordingly.

Ason
2020-05-10, 05:22 PM
This is a case where I think 4e handled specialization pretty well.


In levels 1-10, you're learning your base class but still have plenty of customization choices in terms of feats, abilities, items, etc. This lets you get the feel for your class, keeps you from being overwhelmed by having to figure out multiple classes at once, and still allows you to specialize.
Then from 11-20, you layer a paragon path on top of your base class. So for instance, my Barbarian and my buddy's Druid can both pick the Gatekeeper Mystagogue paragon path, yet we will still feel unique, both compared to each other and to other characters who share our base classes but choose different paragon paths.
Then from 21-30, you layer an epic destiny on top of the base class instead. Again this adds a layer of uniqueness, since a Demigod Wizard and Archmage Wizard will play slightly differently, but at their core they are still both wizards.

While I love 3.5 and PF, what I respect in 4e's system is you add the "prestige" stuff on top of your base class, so you're never forced into choosing between being good at your base mechanics or getting some cool unique powers. You always get both, but the customization classes comes at late enough levels and with low enough prerequisites that you're not overwhelmed with choices out of the gate and aren't punished for not planning your entire character from start to finish. 4e is definitely a flawed game, albeit still fun in its own way, so this system's innovations were hampered by everything else around it, but I see a lot of potential in this layering classes approach to prestige / customization.

Zarrgon
2020-05-10, 07:47 PM
Prestige Classes are a great idea....but then they fumble it, even more so with the crunch.

I think the big idea is Focus: you can make your Generic Character stand out as a single thing, so much so that your base class is hidden. A gnome Arcane Trickster would forever SAY he is an Arcane Trickster, not whatever dull base classes they were (and still are) before.

The mechanical crunch was a good idea, but few prestige classes lived up to the hype. Take Loremaster. I LOVE LOVE the idea of being a lore wizard...the Master of lost and secret lore! Ok, so I take a level in the prestige class and get a "secret"...like, er, +3 hit points or plus to a save. Um...ok, not exactly the "lore" I was thinking of. Then comes languages and boring dull spells. And.....nothing.

Worse is I have to wait 5 to 10 levels to even take the first level of Loremaster.

Phhase
2020-05-10, 08:15 PM
Prestige Classes are a great idea....but then they fumble it, even more so with the crunch.

I think the big idea is Focus: you can make your Generic Character stand out as a single thing, so much so that your base class is hidden. A gnome Arcane Trickster would forever SAY he is an Arcane Trickster, not whatever dull base classes they were (and still are) before.

The mechanical crunch was a good idea, but few prestige classes lived up to the hype. Take Loremaster. I LOVE LOVE the idea of being a lore wizard...the Master of lost and secret lore! Ok, so I take a level in the prestige class and get a "secret"...like, er, +3 hit points or plus to a save. Um...ok, not exactly the "lore" I was thinking of. Then comes languages and boring dull spells. And.....nothing.

Worse is I have to wait 5 to 10 levels to even take the first level of Loremaster.

I've got a similar beef here with prestige classes, and 3e in general: 3e tends to abstract complex fantasies into bland flat bonuses or penalties. For example, the aforementioned "mysterious arcane secrets" being...a flat stat bonus. It works from the other end as well: tons of enemies have abilities that sound interesting only for them to be boiled down to "Does ability damage" or "effectively knows these spells". That's one of the things that I think 5e made some progress in, adding unique attacks and abilities...although it does have a similar over-abstraction problem with the overuse of advantage and disadvantage.

On one hand, I get why 3e used ability damage as a default mix-in (3e is already overflowing with mechanics) but I think there's a medium between both editions to be found. It is strange to me that there is exactly 1 use of ability damage in all of 5e (The Shadow), though I do understand the rationale.

Grek
2020-05-10, 08:25 PM
Another thing I don't think has been mentioned is something like 4th's tiers (perhaps very roughly). That is growth is now not just scaling up (more levels in the existing class) the character actually changes in focus as they grow (getting a new class). Now depending on how the classes are actually structured you can probably get the same mechanical effect without this, but it does serve to label the concept.

Oh challenge acc- actually that would be getting off topic. But I never figured out why people seem to have so much trouble with this other than only seeming to have the low level fighter in mind.

4e style tiers are exactly what I'm getting at, actually. The low level fighter doesn't have the ability to (for example) bust through walls*, see invisible stuff, or pursue someone who teleports away, and scaling them up in a purely numerical sense won't grant those abilities either. So need to expand not only vertically, but also horizontally into someone who can do those things in addition to being even better as a Fighter. And a prestige class (or a 4e tier, which is conceptually similar to requiring everyone to take a prestige class at a particular level) is a good way to handle that sideways upgrade. And the same thing is true from the Wizard angle - when the Wizard hits the requisite level to go up a tier, they should be asked to specialize into a specific kind of Wizard and grab higher tier spells from that specialized list.

*Yes, the Fighter can break through a wall by hitting it really hard. But that takes actions, possibly multiple actions depending on the exact character, and is not quite the balance point I would like Fighter-style characters in this scenario to be hitting. Thus the desire for prestige classes and/or other character options which allow the Fighter to do more than the raw numbers would otherwise allow.

Gnoman
2020-05-10, 11:20 PM
From a design standpoint, prestige classes can be an excellent concept if you have a very small number of base classes feeding into them. Having a small baseload can make introducing new players close to painless, because they have less to keep track of. Low-level play is quick and simple, and prestige classes come into play just as the novices are ready to handle more mechanical complexity. It would also allow players to feel out a GM before committing to a specialization, and thus avoid a playstyle the GM is ill-suited for, or one that the current group isn't pursuing.


Where it doesn't work is a system where you have eighty bajillion base classes, most of which are far superior to almost all prestige classes.

Cazero
2020-05-11, 01:56 AM
A class needs to be narrow enough to be given actual abilities, and broad enough to catch a variety of characters. The concept of class upgrade is not a bad idea : it allows you to narrow down your class to earn more specific goodies after you reach the point where you're powerful enough for said goodies to be justified.

Prestige classes will forever be associated with 3e's terrible implementation of that good idea. Taking one was made optional, so all hope to preserve the little balance that was there was ditched in a heartbeat. Some are straight up trap options. And many fill ridiculous niches with pointless setting-specific ties that would have been better implemented with magic items, feats, skill points allocation, or one sentence in the character biography.

Psyren
2020-05-11, 03:04 AM
For the most part I don't really see a point to them, at least not one that archetypes or subclasses can't pull off better. If you want your Fighter or Monk or Alchemist etc to specialize or stand out from the generalists in some way, archetypes are usually superior - you get to feel special from level one, and you don't have to have built your character a specific way (i.e. to meet the prereqs as soon as possible) regardless of whether they knew anything about the chosen PrC in-character yet or not. And even if you do want the whole fantasy of "X organization sees your character's skill and contacts you to be a member" - that is just as plausibly achieved (perhaps even more plausibly) via retraining under the tutelage of a member, which Pathfinder lets you do. For example, if your generalist Bard learns about the Dawnflower Dervishes and seeks to join them (or conversely, if they hear about your bard and think you would be a great fit) - it's much more plausible imo for your bard to retrain their existing build to focus on those techniques, swapping out various baseline abilities for those of the organization, and keeping/benefiting from all the other high-level bard stuff like spellcasting that they had earned up until that point.

One advantage to PrCs though is that they can more easily represent a path that multiple classes can follow - especially if the class in question behaves differently based on how you enter it. Something like Living Monolith or Evangelist is trickier to pull off without making it a PrC for example.

Morty
2020-05-11, 03:07 AM
Prestige classes were more of a band-aid than anything, made to cover two issues. First was 3E D&D's character creation being suffocatingly restrictive. Thus prestige classes were made to cover the many, many concepts base classes couldn't cover. Second, which came later, was that multiclassing spellcasters was a trap. Thus PrCs were made to let them multiclass without crippling themselves.

Having started out on rocky terrain, the implementation certainly didn't help. PrCs typically kicked in at level 6 at the earliest, meaning that you had to spend your first few levels in mediocrity. They also had prerequisites, which meant that in order to actually use them you had to carefully map out your build - which didn't help the "wallow in mediocrity for a while" impression. And then of course the designers cranked out a metric ton of them to pad out sourcebooks. Most were something you wouldn't look at twice, some few were reasonably well-balanced and some were hopelessly broken.

In other words, PrCs are probably best left forgotten. They had little value to start with and their poor execution just doomed them. They're not needed in a system even a little better-designed than 3E D&D. Archetypes do their job better in 5E and PF both.

MoiMagnus
2020-05-11, 04:21 AM
I will have to agree with others saying that I didn't like their implementation, for the most part.

Prestige classes cover multiple different things:
0) Band aid for a broken system.
1) Weird concepts. Some concepts are too "big" to be a feat or a feat chain, but too "small" to be a full class, and too universal to be a subclass/archetype. As such, they are classes whose only purpose is to be used through multiclassing, never as a main class.
2) Career change. Some concept just do not feel right as "I always was that way". Being a planar traveller is not something your character was since level one. Taking such a prestige class is the opportunity to change character playstyle (probably through a timeskip in-universe), and as such should come with possibility for re-specialisation [You lose some feats and/or some class capacities, trading them against new effects that match better your new capabilities].

I personally think that 5e should have a second kind of subclasses at higher level to cover those concepts (e.g. at level 15 you chose an epic destiny) . However, since most tables don't go further than level 10, I understand that it is not worth it in development time...

Aotrs Commander
2020-05-11, 06:21 AM
Conceptually, none whatsoever, from my perspective.

There is merit to them mechanically, to a degree, inso much as they are are way to provide an additional set of mechanical options to a character that doesn't always gel well with a base class (especilly in terms of direct hybridisation) and that's ho I've always treated them. The 6th level+ option was a problem, as someone mentioned; so far stuff like Mystic Thurge - one of the most useful PrC, since it actually hybridises - I have simply reduced the requirements such that it can be entered at level 3 (which also has the advantage of slanting the spell level progression faster at lower levels and slower at higher levels where the spells are more powerful).

My problem with PrC is essentially rooted in the name itself, in that they were tied to lore at all. I simply fundementally disagree that a class shold be tied to an organisation, or that class is anything other than a metagame construct to define your character's set of mechanical abilities. (Notably, the very first tbing we ditched from 3.0 was multiclassing restrictions (along with favoured classes), followed very shortly by alignment restrictions with the sole exception of the paladin and whatever evil equivilent I had in the rules at the time (antipaladin, now).)

Far, far too many PrC were just a bunch of naff flavour, the vast majority of such that were unsuitably for any homebrew worlds backed up by weak mechanics.

I believe PF's archtypes, in concert with 3.5's alternative class abilities, cover a lot of - though not all - of the ground that PrC in 3.0/3.5 needed to cover. I think there is still benefit to PrCs, especially with hybrid spellcaster class (mystic theurge/cerebremancer/PF Arcane Trickster); hell, I STILL had to make a few of my own, since there were GLARING gaps, notably in [cleric]/[rogue] (stunningly common, given that Kuo-Toa Exist) and [druid]/[cleric]. Though the name is rather moe subject to debate, though probably not worth changing at this point after twenty years.

But those cases aside, I feel that AFC and archtypes and multiclassing among the base classes is and should be preferable, with PrC merely closing the gap on things that don't require (or might be too good with) a full 20-level progression.

(If I wasn't SO NEARLY DONE after nine months with my house-rules, I might be tempted to start going through all the PrC and straight lifting out the features of a lot of them to be applied as archtypes or slotted in as class affinities (what I have chosen to call rogue talents/rage powers/hexes etc etc etc).

...

DAMMIT, I'm going to, now, aren't I?

*sigh*

Actually, maybe it won't hurt, since looking at my short-list of available PrC, it might actually trim the list down significantly, with the ground that 59 base classes (plus archtypes) now covers in 3.Aotrs...)



As a construct of something that you only get as part of some organisation, I simply have never felt that idea carries any particular worth, especially as it requires that you bend your world over backwards to accomodate it.



(Edit: well, actually, looking at my list, just flicking through Complete Divine indicates I can clear prob'lyhalf the list right out as base classes now do the job better.)

Yora
2020-05-11, 06:22 AM
Prestige Classes where an interesting concept in the Dungeon Master's Guide, where they were presented as optional classes to customize homebrew campaign settings and offer players additional customization options based on the unique organizations they befriended.

But they almost immediately became the main content of a dozen customization books for players and mandatory content in pretty much every book. I think that was the mai reason for the massive bloat that 3rd edition had, and what was really driving the whole character optimization sub-culture. The opposite of how I think Prestige Classes were originally intended.

I think their role is now given to class specializations in 5th edition. Does basically the same thing, but much more compact and accessible from 1st or 3rd level.

Spriteless
2020-05-11, 08:36 AM
In Warhammer Fantasy Battle Roleplaying Game, every class only has so much you can get out of it. Most classes are kind of crappy, and if you roll randomly you are likely to get a bunch of noncombatant peasants (https://youtu.be/M-9-bQ3JoWY?t=124). But each class also has exit options. You can go from charlatin entertainer to stage hypnotist to a basic medic, and you will be better at blocking patients' pain than someone who started as a medic. Being a peasant farmer means you don't forget your muscle with whatever you do next. It's kind of like having a bunch of temp jobs irl; if you're lucky you'll find a career path that's good, but uh I made myself sad.

It resembles what Cluedrew was saying about 4e tiers, except old and not every class has the same amount of levels and there is no expectation that you are cool people to start with. 5e classes are meant to keep getting better the more levels you take, so balancing a prestige class against that would be trouble. You could just explicitly say "This is a multiclass option meant for martial classes of 7th+ level" and it would be more balanced than 3e's kludge of "You need this combination things that you can't get until 5th level (unless you use the eldritch knight class also introduced in this book [against designers intent, still weaker than CoDzilla])." I would prefer some way to improve the fighting styles myself.

Segev
2020-05-11, 10:33 AM
I think we have two major points of comparison, nowadays, that might help deliniate what is good and bad about prestige classes: Pathfinder (1e) archetypes, and D&D 5e subclasses.

Pathfinder archetypes are an evolution of a 3.5 concept of alternate class features; they're basically suites of such swap-outs that let you redesign a class. A lot of the time, they either downplay one area of focus to emphasize another (Soulbolt archetype trades out soulknife blade for soulbolt ranged weapon early, basically swapping which you start with and which you have to pick up later), or they take a structure that the base class introduces and twist it around because it works well with another (the Vigilante class is there to play Zoro or Batman, but the Magical Child archetype takes its dual identity concept and gives it a transformation sequence, magic, and a talking animal companion for a rather different genre feel). Sometimes they even change a core conceit while keeping the general role the same (Black Blade Magus is bonded to a sentient weapon that grows in power with him, but still is a gish).

They also can be used to hybridize. A Psychic Detective Investigator trades alchemy for psychic spellcasting while keeping the core investigator thing going on. (This typically happens with already-hybrid classes, though.)

The hybridization is something that PrCs do better for solidly-themed base classes that don't already have a melding of two class archetypes into one. The Psychic Detective archetype works only because the Investigator is already a rogue/alchemist hybrid (with his own unique Inspiration mechanic), and thus you can trade out one side of the hybrid to replace it with "Psychic lite." PrCs can take any two classes and merge them, with varying degrees of success. First and foremost, PrCs can simply turn on advancement for both classes in whatever the PrC considers the "core" of each. Mystic Theurge, for instance, which takes a divine and arcane casting class and lets them both keep advancing. This would be difficult to do with an archetype, especially as modularly as Mystic Theurge does it.

5e Subclasses are basically PrCs done as modular archetypes. Sometime in 1st, 2nd, or 3rd level, the player chooses a direction to take the base class, still getting base class features throughout, but a number of the class features are dictated by subclass, as well. Subclasses can be anything from a particular focus (Thief vs. Assassin, Berserker vs. Zealot) to a form of hybrid (Eldritch Knight, Arcane Trickster) to just a bit of flavor with some ribbons (most Patrons). They're baked into the base classes, with specified advancement points, and you can do a lot with them. The trick there is picking which base class to start with if you want a hybrid, and making sure you don't make it too good (or too flavorless or badly-flavored; Hexblade is guilty of both, in my opinion).

The value of PF archetypes over PrCs is early entry and smoother progression. You can start right off the bat as a Magical Child rather than having to be Batgirl for 5 levels before she gets a talking batterang that lets her turn into Magical Girl Kumori-chan. PF also, technically, addressed this with some of the more popular hybrids via base classes. Magus remains, in my opinion, the best gish design (particularly for fighter/wizard, but also just in general) in all of the D&D family.

The value of PrCs over PF archetypes is that they can take a number of entry points and give them a focus that enhances the base class, without having to be tied to a particular base class. This is also their strength in hybridization; they can be general-purpose, hybridizing categories of classes together. A cerebromancer can start off with any manifester and any arcane caster.

One area PrC designers fall down is in over-specifying them. The PrC is too clearly designed for, and in some cases even forced by prerequisites to only allow entry by, particular classes. At that point, you should use a PF archetype, not a PrC.

Pathfinder 1e has both, which is a strength that allows you to use the modularity where useful, or use the locked-in hybridization or shifted focus instead.

5e actually does a very good job with subclasses. They come online no later than level 3, and some classes have them happen at level 1. You can design subclasses to do just about anything as long as they keep the core function of the base class in mind. It's rare that a subclass feels natural to a class and yet comes on line so late that you feel like you have to shift play style from one you didn't want to what you really wanted to play. It does miss out on PrC modularity (you need a subclass specific to a particular class to build a gish; you can't make a gish "PrC" that merges any two base classes), and it is sometimes slower to come online than an archetype. So it's the worst of both worlds, there. But the way it's baked into a class is its own strength: if you want a subclass, you don't have to figure out what abilities of the core class to "trade out;" you have specific mount-points for you to add on the powers of your subclass, and all you're trading away is the opportunity cost of other subclasses.

Psyren
2020-05-11, 11:20 AM
(If I wasn't SO NEARLY DONE after nine months with my house-rules, I might be tempted to start going through all the PrC and straight lifting out the features of a lot of them to be applied as archtypes or slotted in as class affinities (what I have chosen to call rogue talents/rage powers/hexes etc etc etc).

...

DAMMIT, I'm going to, now, aren't I?

*sigh*

I've been analyzing the Paizo PrCs over the last several weeks in quarantine for a guide I'm working on. There may be something you can leverage there once I publish it.

Luccan
2020-05-11, 11:39 AM
One problem that's dawned on me over the last couple years is that, when not useless or completely lateral in power, prestige classes kind of remove the point of higher levels for most base classes. I mean, you need the progression laid out so you know how a character is supposed to progress based on prestige classes improving things like spellcasting, but I'm not ever going to take 20 levels of Sorcerer again, am I? And at that point, you could probably chop the last ten levels or so off of base class progression, throw in a generic chapter about character improvement as applies to prestige classes, and stop pretending not taking a prestige class is really an option.

Incidentally, d20 Modern and its various spin offs did get rid of 20 level progressions for base classes, so at most you were half your base class and half your advanced class by level 20.

Aotrs Commander
2020-05-11, 11:58 AM
One problem that's dawned on me over the last couple years is that, when not useless or completely lateral in power, prestige classes kind of remove the point of higher levels for most base classes. I mean, you need the progression laid out so you know how a character is supposed to progress based on prestige classes improving things like spellcasting, but I'm not ever going to take 20 levels of Sorcerer again, am I? And at that point, you could probably chop the last ten levels or so off of base class progression, throw in a generic chapter about character improvement as applies to prestige classes, and stop pretending not taking a prestige class is really an option.

Pathfinder 1, I think, has done a good job of dealing with that problem, as all the classes now have actual features to proerly give up (especially noncasters). I have never seen the problem so much with my group - there's usually only one or tewo characters (out of 6-8) that bother with a PrC), though that's probably more because they're not that bothered (or playing full casters); but even there, and even as I started to buff up the noncasters years ago, when we had our epic game, both the monk and rogue character classed out at about 15 for swordsage (since that ToB does scale quite well), simply because the last levels of monk and rogue didn't offer anything. (I don't think they'd do that NOW!)

I think the problem there does lie less with PrC existing so much as noncasters always having gotten too short a stick, because 3.0 and 3.5 afterwards grossly over-valued nonspell class features.

(Even now, where I have done stuff like grant fighters all of the PF class features AND a feat every level AND a few little extras, there is an arguement that says "fighter still has less feats than a caster has spells...")

Which of course made PrC more valuable by percieved comparison.

(Of course rhe problem with PrC on the mechanical level is they generally fall into either "underpowered trash sometimes to actively be traps" or "objectively better and/or broken" with few seeming to hit the level of "different, but equal.")

Morty
2020-05-11, 12:00 PM
Incidentally, d20 Modern and its various spin offs did get rid of 20 level progressions for base classes, so at most you were half your base class and half your advanced class by level 20.

The class structure is the one thing I'm willing to give d20 credit for. All in all, PrCs are a solution to an incredibly specific problem that doesn't exist in systems that don't use rigid class/level progression.

Azuresun
2020-05-11, 06:29 PM
Conversely, if you ask most people whether a high level magic user might be able to do X (for whatever value of X you might choose), there's a strong temptation to imagine if there's any magic user out there who could do it and only say No if you can't think of one. Raising the dead? Sure. Summon bears? Yeah. Rainbow bridge to Valhalla? Okay. Blow up a city? Probably. Turn invisible? Yep. Turn an army into bees? I guess? Which is where prestige classes come into things: you make the Wizard pick a more specific concept like Necromancer, Illusionist, Pyromancer, Shapeshifter, etc. and only let them pick things that are in-theme instead of cherry picking all the best options off of all of the spells you've ever written. D&D already does this a bit by making some spells only appear on the Cleric list and not on the Wizard list, but it could stand to do it more.


The other problem with PrC's for spellcasters is that the Wizard, Sorcerer and Cleric are bland while also being very powerful. The only class feature they can "pay" to get into a PrC is their spellcasting and because of the treadmill nature of 3e numbers, giving up levels in that is nearly suicidal. And to amplify the problem, there's a lot of super fun and flavorful themes you can give mages or clerics through PRC's.

So quite early on, PrC's became something that amplified spellcaster dominance with ones like the Radiant Servant or Incantrix, where you could sleepwalk into the requirements, give up nothing (except Turn Undead or familiar progression), keep all your casting and get a smorgasboard of cool extras.

NichG
2020-05-11, 10:29 PM
For me the potential promised by PrCs was to have more ways that in-game actions, decisions, and goals could impact mechanical and build opportunities. This game we're embroiled in Thayan politics - here's a bunch of unique options that brings, which I wouldn't have in other campaigns.

D&D 3.5's implementation is about as far from that idea as it is possible to get though.

What I'd do if redesigning is to make PrCs act like substitution levels that you can freely retrain between the base and PrC version as long as you belong to the associated organization and have access to its services. That way there's no need to plan ahead for prerequisites, no issues with PrCs interfering with core class progressions, etc. Plus the flexibility to retrain would give them a unique mechanical role - something like prepared casters get, but for any character to take advantage of.

Luccan
2020-05-11, 10:43 PM
For me the potential promised by PrCs was to have more ways that in-game actions, decisions, and goals could impact mechanical and build opportunities. This game we're embroiled in Thayan politics - here's a bunch of unique options that brings, which I wouldn't have in other campaigns.

D&D 3.5's implementation is about as far from that idea as it is possible to get though.

What I'd do if redesigning is to make PrCs act like substitution levels that you can freely retrain between the base and PrC version as long as you belong to the associated organization and have access to its services. That way there's no need to plan ahead for prerequisites, no issues with PrCs interfering with core class progressions, etc. Plus the flexibility to retrain would give them a unique mechanical role - something like prepared casters get, but for any character to take advantage of.

They'd probably be more interesting if they were more setting-tied, true, but then you're putting resources into stuff that's useless to anyone not playing that setting and anyone who is using homebrew or a setting you're not focusing on is going to ignore your book. Which is why most of the time, even though setting PrCs existed, they were really bland in terms of setting content so you could rip out the Faerun or Eberron or whatever bits and stick in your own stuff. This made them more versatile for lore, but an Arcane Scholar of Candlekeep certainly doesn't come across as very Candlekeep-y. Although I think the actual Thayan PrCs are pretty spot on, as far as you can enforce Thay lore mechanically.

NichG
2020-05-12, 01:08 AM
They'd probably be more interesting if they were more setting-tied, true, but then you're putting resources into stuff that's useless to anyone not playing that setting and anyone who is using homebrew or a setting you're not focusing on is going to ignore your book. Which is why most of the time, even though setting PrCs existed, they were really bland in terms of setting content so you could rip out the Faerun or Eberron or whatever bits and stick in your own stuff. This made them more versatile for lore, but an Arcane Scholar of Candlekeep certainly doesn't come across as very Candlekeep-y. Although I think the actual Thayan PrCs are pretty spot on, as far as you can enforce Thay lore mechanically.

I understand the explanation of why a publisher might make the choice not to go that route, but I'm thankfully not constrained by the need to make money from what I do with the hobby, so that kind of consideration doesn't really matter to me so much.

And in the context of a single campaign, if e.g. making homebrew for a specific table, you can use the same approach as with a lot of on-the-fly generation of content. Establish only the vague details 'in the city of Arborcrest there's a guild of druids who specialize in constructing architecture out of the controlled growth of plants', and if the players go in that direction then you start spinning out the details of the 'Arboreal Architect' PrC or whatever.

Luccan
2020-05-12, 01:12 AM
I understand the explanation of why a publisher might make the choice not to go that route, but I'm thankfully not constrained by the need to make money from what I do with the hobby, so that kind of consideration doesn't really matter to me so much.

And in the context of a single campaign, if e.g. making homebrew for a specific table, you can use the same approach as with a lot of on-the-fly generation of content. Establish only the vague details 'in the city of Arborcrest there's a guild of druids who specialize in constructing architecture out of the controlled growth of plants', and if the players go in that direction then you start spinning out the details of the 'Arboreal Architect' PrC or whatever.

Oh, fair enough. The Thay example made me think you were wondering why WotC did that.

Also, Arboreal Architect is a potentially killer idea for a PrC (and would explain all those elf "grown from trees" cities).

Morty
2020-05-12, 03:37 AM
Perks for belonging to a setting-specific organization should just be freebies handed out by the GM for belonging to the organization. There's no reason to bring levels into it - that just makes it unnecessarily clunky.

Aotrs Commander
2020-05-12, 04:58 AM
Perks for belonging to a setting-specific organization should just be freebies handed out by the GM for belonging to the organization. There's no reason to bring levels into it - that just makes it unnecessarily clunky.

Exactly.

When I do grant organisational benefirts, I only do so if all the PCs are part of that group if those benefits are truly mechanical - let roleplaying benefits stay as roleplaying benefits and make the PCs roleplay for them only; or if they're mechanical, if all the PCs don't get identical benefiets, they all get one each.

I have had a couple of parties (both Evil-aligned by co-incidence) which were part of a larger group; the Dark Lord's Black Ops team got what amount to a teamwork benefit and the occaisonal skill benefit (such as them undercover working as ship's crew, so now they have a bonus to Profession (Sailor); and in the Aotrs party (in Rolemaster), they ALL get four spell lists known to 10th level as part of their training.



(It probably comes as no surprise after saying that, but my lst of "approved" PrC in 3.x for my game is considerably short compared to existant PrCs, and shorn of basically everything that had remotely setting-specific flavour or had that aspect flat-removed (see: assassin and the "must kill someone to be an assassin" entry clause.))



As I forgot to say last post:


I've been analyzing the Paizo PrCs over the last several weeks in quarantine for a guide I'm working on. There may be something you can leverage there once I publish it.

Gimme a nudge when that's up, though I think that the majority of PF's PrC are fairly setting-specific to Golarion (which doesn't preclude their use as we actually PLAY on Golarion, but part of the point of the major overhaul for 3.Aotrs was that I can use PF stuff without much conversion). But if there's any particularly good ones that can be re-purposed...

(One of the guding principles of what I've been doing as I port stuff is to read the guides (more than one if I can find it) and find the good, the not-worth-porting and the salvagable (and buff as necessary), and yoining the former and the latter with adjustements.)

Psyren
2020-05-12, 09:15 AM
Gimme a nudge when that's up, though I think that the majority of PF's PrC are fairly setting-specific to Golarion (which doesn't preclude their use as we actually PLAY on Golarion, but part of the point of the major overhaul for 3.Aotrs was that I can use PF stuff without much conversion). But if there's any particularly good ones that can be re-purposed...

It's worth noting that every Golarion-specific PrC has an OGL version with the serial numbers filed off - e.g. "Arclord of Nex" on Nethys is "Mage of the Third Eye" on d20pfsrd, and keeps its mechanical strengths as the de facto Universalist specialist without needing any of the setting-specific fluff.

The majority of the truly Golarion-specific ones tend to be tied to specific organizations or faiths - in which case, you just need a similar faith or organization from your own campaign, use the OGL name and you're good to go.


(One of the guding principles of what I've been doing as I port stuff is to read the guides (more than one if I can find it) and find the good, the not-worth-porting and the salvagable (and buff as necessary), and yoining the former and the latter with adjustements.)

Oh there are definitely some worth leveraging I'd say :smallsmile:
I wrote up Rose Warden recently for instance, which is almost rogue+ in urban campaigns, and pretty good even outside of them too. You can replace the worship of Milani with any deity that would sponsor freedom fighters and liberators.

Pleh
2020-05-12, 06:35 PM
For me, Prestige Classes are a double edged sword. When done well, they make the Character Building aspect more continuously present in the game's meta.

What I mean is that a lot of build options are a slow progression, which I think helps the game maintain a consistent balance of power, but it can also make you feel a little locked in to your path. If you made a mistake that cripples your party contribution, or just realize part way through that your playstyle is monotonous/boring or just not what you had expected or want to use anymore.

Prestige Classes, among other things, give you a path out besides just multiclassing (which can also diversify your power base, but to some extent, it means "starting over" with new first level abilities instead of getting your current level abilities). It allows you to potentially "trade sideways" into something different that might suit your experience better.

Prestige Classes have value when they're a "Get To," and turn sour when they become a "Have To."

A few ways that Prestige Classes become a burden rather than a joy for me:

Trap Options. Obviously it shouldn't feel like choosing a branching path was a gotcha trick. This kinda sorta includes things that are "technically fine" as a specialized niche, that just happens to not actually come up very often. I'm thinking of Thief Acrobat. I love the fluff, I love the abilities it gives. Then I remember that it only really gives you some nifty mobility options that are better and more cheaply handled by a couple of spells. By the time you could get into the class, you could have taken spellcaster classes and had the Fly spell, and who cares about acrobatics why you can just fly? Some trap options are truly traps, others are just not balanced well and are more incidentally traps.

Necessary Options. If there is clearly one best choice, it isn't much of a choice, is it? When electing a particular PrC is more or less needed to make an otherwise dysfunctional class concept actually work as advertised, it becomes less of a freedom to branch out and more of a patch to fix what wasn't built well to begin with. What should be ice cream on the cake just becomes a tax to get to play what the base class promised from level 1.

Game Redefining Options. Mixed bag here. You'd think you definitely want PrCs to redefine how the game is played. How else does it shake up the experience and feel different from sticking to the base class? But I'm thinking Incantatrix here. This gets pretty subjective, because it's about crossing the line between making new mechanics that play on the same level as the original mechanics and entering the field where the new mechanics just completely change how the game is played. For example, magic was already the favorite child of the game and metamagic needed to be carefully balanced to keep things from power creeping into a different kind of game. Then they add a prestige class that specializes in *metamagic*. How is this not going to automatically shift the game to an even higher gear than the one where low tier options were already falling behind? Once this kind of power is available, the players that play for power will always aim for maintaining this level of power, almost forcing other players to play to that level. Honestly, PrCs need to be carefully balanced to neither go above or below the power level expected for base classes. They shouldn't be "advanced options" for players that want to build stronger characters. It shouldn't be trading up or down, just sideways.

Now to compare with Archetypes and Subclasses.

Conceptually, I prefer Prestige Classes. It's more interesting from a game standpoint to have defined objectives and be allowed to search out a way to meet those objectives. Archetypes and Subclasses do a better job of avoiding the pitfalls by locking you in to certain progressions. But it's still locking you in to certain progressions rather than letting you play around with various build permutations. That's the downside. You have actually less agency to manipulate the system. When the features are gated behind meeting prerequisites, it adds to the core gameplay by letting you "feel" the changes to your build as you play.

The more I think about it, the more I think the conceptual value of Prestige Classes is easy to see in Borderlands 2, if you've ever played it. In that game, you get a Class Mod that boosts a few of your skills and adds a couple of other perks (like a small health regen). You compare with other class mods that provide different bonuses to different skills or provide different perks. Usually, you are picking these based on which class skills you rely on most for your playstyle, trying to get the skills to synergize. Then you go and play the game, "feeling" the difference it makes to the game and swap it out if it isn't helping you as much as you thought it might (or if you find a better one).

PairO'Dice Lost
2020-05-12, 08:45 PM
Prestige Classes, among other things, give you a path out besides just multiclassing (which can also diversify your power base, but to some extent, it means "starting over" with new first level abilities instead of getting your current level abilities). It allows you to potentially "trade sideways" into something different that might suit your experience better.

[...]

Archetypes and Subclasses do a better job of avoiding the pitfalls by locking you in to certain progressions. But it's still locking you in to certain progressions rather than letting you play around with various build permutations. That's the downside. You have actually less agency to manipulate the system.

Agreed. For all that archetypes and subclasses add more variety at low levels, it's variety within your class concept (or at least tied to it; the 5e Eldritch Knight subclass gives a fighter magic, but it's still a fighter, with magic that's thematically appropriate for a fighter to have) rather than a lateral shift of some sort, and every such concept has to be able to come online at low levels in at least some way so you either can't offer ones like "Lich King" that are inherently higher-level concepts or, if you do, they get watered down to a Dread Necromancer-style "I'm 2nd level, so I'm 5% lich!" progression. Not to mention that characters changing course mid-story is a staple of fantasy, and having a way to represent that that "continues on" from the earlier progression, theurge PrC-style, is easier to balance than making "starting over" with arbitrary multiclassing work.

3e-style substitution levels and ACFs are much better in that respect, since you can mix and match them so any choice you make at 1st doesn't lock you into any choices at 5th or 10th or 20th, and you can offer them at any combination of levels to suit the concept they're trying to express, but they have the opposite problem: any individual set of substitution levels and any individual ACF can't be as deep, comprehensive, or thematic as an archetype or subclass, so there are things that won't "fit" into one of those and would be better as an archetype, subclass, or PrC.

Personally, I think that both the in-class variety offered by archetypes/subclasses and the out-of-class variety offered by ACFs/sub levels/PrCs are valuable to have, and in an ideal progression system you'd have both, with characters getting class and subclass abilities starting at 1st level and their choice of multiple kits/PrCs/Paragon Paths/etc. at certain levels which add onto, rather than replace, the base class abilities.

Knaight
2020-05-13, 03:56 AM
Taking a step back a bit: Classes are really good at a handful of things. The big ones are that classes embed setting into mechanics like little else, and direct players to the specific parts of a setting which are of interest to the game. A given space opera world might have both a lot going on in space and on a planet, but if the available classes are all along the lines of Navy Pilot, Space Pirate, Freetrader, you get a different sense of what the PCs are doing than if the classes are along the lines of Detective, Criminal, Stockbroker.

Prestige classes are a logical extension of that. So are kits, subclasses, certain ways to structure talent systems, affiliation rules, etc.; there are a lot of ways to extend the function of classes. Prestige classes work best when adding something extra to something that's already a full class concept. To use a fantasy example this time, a world might have Cataphract as a relevant class. Cataphracts from various places with subtly different martial cultures are probably best handled with something closer to subclasses, where you might distinguish between a Scythian Cataphract and a Parthian Cataphract. Meanwhile something like a Kingsguard Knight might be better served by a prestige class, as they're likely already a full on elite knight before the kingsguard stuff comes in.

Obviously the whole factor where classes embed setting makes giving examples without a setting a bit tricky, but hopefully that gives the idea.

Morty
2020-05-13, 04:39 AM
What I mean is that a lot of build options are a slow progression, which I think helps the game maintain a consistent balance of power, but it can also make you feel a little locked in to your path. If you made a mistake that cripples your party contribution, or just realize part way through that your playstyle is monotonous/boring or just not what you had expected or want to use anymore.

Prestige Classes, among other things, give you a path out besides just multiclassing (which can also diversify your power base, but to some extent, it means "starting over" with new first level abilities instead of getting your current level abilities). It allows you to potentially "trade sideways" into something different that might suit your experience better.


This is certainly a problem, but I don't know if PrCs are a solution. It also feels like it's baked into a class/level system to a degree that trying to solve it is a little like putting wheels on a pair of skis.

Cluedrew
2020-05-13, 07:38 AM
Taking a step back a bit: Classes are really good at a handful of things.You know I think Grek's idea of growth could use a bit more attention but it wasn't until you said this that it clicked why.

I think prestige classes are a terrible way to bring a class based system closer to point-buy. OK maybe not terrible if you do a good job with it, but still I think offering more flexibility within classes is a better way to do slight variations (sub-classes and archetypes are kind of a hefty way of doing this) and a good multi- or duel- classing system does hybrids in a much more general way than stating out every combination as its own class.

Maybe in the end classes becoming other classes (prestige classes as tiers) has another in-class way to handle it but I haven't thought of it.

Vahnavoi
2020-05-13, 10:51 AM
Prestige classes have very litte conceptual value; they were an outgrowth of the limitations of d20 D&D, combined with a failure of the designers to use other systems already present to same effect.

Seriously: ACFs, substitution levels, archetypes... those could've been comfortably as feats. Same goes for some entire base and prestige classes, for example, duelist, dwarven defender, barbarian could've just been feats or feat chains for a fighter.

Hybridization could've been implemented with just better multiclassing rules. You really don't need waste-of-space prestige classes like arcane trickster or mystic theurge if a thief/wizard or wizard/cleric works out-of-the-box.

So if designing a new system or modifying d20 rules, screw prestige classes!

PairO'Dice Lost
2020-05-13, 12:25 PM
I think prestige classes are a terrible way to bring a class based system closer to point-buy. OK maybe not terrible if you do a good job with it, but still I think offering more flexibility within classes is a better way to do slight variations (sub-classes and archetypes are kind of a hefty way of doing this) and a good multi- or duel- classing system does hybrids in a much more general way than stating out every combination as its own class.

Maybe in the end classes becoming other classes (prestige classes as tiers) has another in-class way to handle it but I haven't thought of it.

PrCs that exist to hybridize classes, to hand out abilities similar to those offered by base classes, or to do things that could deserve their own base classes could be fixed by improving multiclassing, but that's only a small subset of them; that wouldn't help you with your Singers of Concordance or your Gatecrashers or other concepts that don't really deserve their own base class.


Prestige classes have very litte conceptual value; they were an outgrowth of the limitations of d20 D&D, combined with a failure of the designers to use other systems already present to same effect.

Seriously: ACFs, substitution levels, archetypes... those could've been comfortably as feats. Same goes for some entire base and prestige classes, for example, duelist, dwarven defender, barbarian could've just been feats or feat chains for a fighter.

Hybridization could've been implemented with just better multiclassing rules. You really don't need waste-of-space prestige classes like arcane trickster or mystic theurge if a thief/wizard or wizard/cleric works out-of-the-box.

So if designing a new system or modifying d20 rules, screw prestige classes!

ACFs and substitution levels would not have worked as feats, and wouldn't be a good extension for feats in a d20 hack, because they modify base numbers and swap out class features, which isn't a thing feats do and, if they did, would make for massive and clunky feat descriptions with long lists of prerequisites and that interact with other feats in weird ways. Certain PrCs could indeed work just fine as feat trees, assuming you handed out at least one feat per level and/or increased the default "size" of a feat so getting three levels' worth of PrC features in one feat wasn't too far above the baseline...but barring that, characters already don't get enough feats so turning PrCs into feat trees just exacerbates that problem.

The question basically becomes, where's the line between class features/class levels and feats? Sure, you can go super generic and make absolutely everything a feat or similar--d20 Modern and SWSE did roughly that, where classes just give you a chassis and a list of talents you can access and everything else is build-your-own-class--but (A) that framework limits how you can build classes to what you can do with feat trees and (B) the whole point of a class-based system is to provide common benchmarks and minimum bars for everything. A rogue getting sneak attack of roughly +[level/2]d6 is a known progression that can be balanced around, for instance, while if a Rogue 20 could have anywhere from +1d6 to +10d6 then basic assumption about average damage output are difficult to make. It's basically the Shadowrun or GURPS problem, where there's zero correlation between how many points you have and what your capability is in any area.

Pleh
2020-05-13, 12:53 PM
PrCs that exist to hybridize classes, to hand out abilities similar to those offered by base classes, or to do things that could deserve their own base classes could be fixed by improving multiclassing, but that's only a small subset of them; that wouldn't help you with your Singers of Concordance or your Gatecrashers or other concepts that don't really deserve their own base class.

ACFs and substitution levels would not have worked as feats, and wouldn't be a good extension for feats in a d20 hack, because they modify base numbers and swap out class features, which isn't a thing feats do and, if they did, would make for massive and clunky feat descriptions with long lists of prerequisites and that interact with other feats in weird ways. Certain PrCs could indeed work just fine as feat trees, assuming you handed out at least one feat per level and/or increased the default "size" of a feat so getting three levels' worth of PrC features in one feat wasn't too far above the baseline...but barring that, characters already don't get enough feats so turning PrCs into feat trees just exacerbates that problem.

The question basically becomes, where's the line between class features/class levels and feats? Sure, you can go super generic and make absolutely everything a feat or similar--d20 Modern and SWSE did roughly that, where classes just give you a chassis and a list of talents you can access and everything else is build-your-own-class--but (A) that framework limits how you can build classes to what you can do with feat trees and (B) the whole point of a class-based system is to provide common benchmarks and minimum bars for everything. A rogue getting sneak attack of roughly +[level/2]d6 is a known progression that can be balanced around, for instance, while if a Rogue 20 could have anywhere from +1d6 to +10d6 then basic assumption about average damage output are difficult to make. It's basically the Shadowrun or GURPS problem, where there's zero correlation between how many points you have and what your capability is in any area.

A lot of great points here, but let me highlight this one again.

I feel like success with prestige classes has to hit this mark: a good prestige class must be more than the sum of its parts.

Most feat trees are just that, a sum of abilities that stack up into an optional playstyle.

A prestige class goes one step further, sacrificing core class abilities to specialize, becoming the master class for the task.

More later. Lunch break is over

Knaight
2020-05-13, 04:30 PM
You know I think Grek's idea of growth could use a bit more attention but it wasn't until you said this that it clicked why.

I think prestige classes are a terrible way to bring a class based system closer to point-buy. OK maybe not terrible if you do a good job with it, but still I think offering more flexibility within classes is a better way to do slight variations (sub-classes and archetypes are kind of a hefty way of doing this) and a good multi- or duel- classing system does hybrids in a much more general way than stating out every combination as its own class.

Maybe in the end classes becoming other classes (prestige classes as tiers) has another in-class way to handle it but I haven't thought of it.

This is an area where D&D runs into its own identity crisis in a big way. Basically: Is D&D a specific setting (or at least a very closely related family of settings), or is it a generic fantasy toolkit? Those are fundamentally different design goals which suggest fundamentally different designs, and I don't envy any designer who realizes that and has to try and thread it - though I strongly suspect a lot of designers didn't try to thread it but decided that they personally were on one side or the other, and tried to build to that*.

Prestige classes are a bit of a flashpoint for that. One one hand they do get used as a soft point buy through class flooding approach, which kind of functions at the expense of being a really high overhead way of doing it. They're a fundamentally bad tool for the job, but like someone getting a decent wood carving out of a screwdriver there is some credit due, even if chisels aren't exactly unknown tools and would have worked better.

On the other hand, a lot of prestige classes absolutely represent specific organizations, where specific members take specific roles. Others represent certain narrow and often really gonzo archetypes, and in doing so inform the setting. Yeah, there's a group of people that ritually consume a rare metal, they're called Greenstar Adepts. Yeah, there's a group of psychics that specifically study transcending their physicality to the point of becoming psychic ghosts, those are the Uncarnate. Those weird setting specific prismastic-whatever spells that mix the planes and elementalism in weird ways? Yeah, those have dedicated specialists, Initiates of the Sevenfold Veil.

The actual design quality of those classes varies a fair bit, but I can respect prestige classes as a tool there, and as someone with a soft spot for gonzo sword and sorcery I can see how if I wanted to play someone else's setting those would be really good hooks. They're cool classes, doing cool class things, and they make sense as extensions of existing classes where prestige classes can fit in (though I'm also very down for a setting where every mage is along those lines, and there's nothing like "Wizard" to be seen).

This post is getting a bit long, so I'll just quickly point at Legends of the Wulin and Chuubo's Marvelous Wish Granting Engine. Neither use levels, LotW doesn't use classes (and Chuubo uses them in an alien way to D&D), but both have mechanisms where you can spend experience to buy into setting specifics as a player, which also signals the GM to bring that in. In Chuubo's that's large scale narrative frameworks and the like (it's a weird game), in LotW it's all sorts of setting organizations. Prestige classes potentially work in that sort of conceptual space, when they're allowed the room to breathe.

*Which I'm also sympathetic to. I guarantee that if I somehow got my hands on D&D as a designer I'd be right there pushing the specific setting, specific game, leave generic fantasy to generic systems viewpoint in the team meetings.

Cluedrew
2020-05-13, 06:58 PM
To PairO'Dice Lost and Knaight: Thank-you both for replying, I had a longer post in mind but suddenly I am being called away so I am just going to comment I was coming down on "prestige classes as point-buy" not some of there other uses.

Jay R
2020-05-13, 10:09 PM
They sell game books.

Morty
2020-05-14, 03:26 AM
"Trying to make a class-based system into point-buy" is a very good way of summing up PrCs. It also applies to multiclassing. Though instead of "class-based" I'd say "level-based".

PairO'Dice Lost
2020-05-14, 04:12 AM
I feel like success with prestige classes has to hit this mark: a good prestige class must be more than the sum of its parts.

Indeed. It's precisely those PrCs that aren't more than just a handful of features thrown together--like the abovementioned Duelist and Dwarven Defender, which are essentially 1 or maybe 2 worthwhile feats surrounded by a bunch of dreck--that easily convert to feat trees, while "real" PrCs would be very difficult to decompose in that way.


This is an area where D&D runs into its own identity crisis in a big way. Basically: Is D&D a specific setting (or at least a very closely related family of settings), or is it a generic fantasy toolkit?
[...]
*Which I'm also sympathetic to. I guarantee that if I somehow got my hands on D&D as a designer I'd be right there pushing the specific setting, specific game, leave generic fantasy to generic systems viewpoint in the team meetings.

I'd argue for the former, personally, and I'd be right there with you emphasizing D&D's D&D-ness first and foremost. D&D settings are definitely their own distinct thing, and remain so even if you port one over to another system where there's nary a d20 to be seen. Even with all the serial numbers filed off, D&D has very explicit metaphysics and setting conceits that can't be turned into "generic fantasy" without basically replacing every single race/class/spell/etc. and ignoring or rewriting a bunch of other rules.

Also, the fact that the general game flavor in every edition has pushed strongly for the idea that all D&D settings are connected in some way, with much more cross-genre and visiting-Earth adventures and plot elements than any other purely-fantasy game and not one but two separate meta-settings to tie the rest together, means that even a basic "Kingdom of Genericsburg" homebrew setting with generic races and generic fantasy and so on is sort of implicitly part of the larger D&D milieu and becomes explicitly so the minute you grab something from a published setting to slot into the setting.

Now, obviously not every or even most designers thought about things in that way (as you mention, every post-1e edition has had at least a little bit of factionalism between designers in both core and splatbooks), but we do at least know that PrCs were intended to function as specific setting tie-ins in 3.0 and WotC moved away from that with 3.5, so the early 3e devs were at least on board with that opinion even if it wasn't a unanimous thing and/or WotC forced them to start churning more out for 3.5 splats.

Aotrs Commander
2020-05-14, 05:25 AM
This is an area where D&D runs into its own identity crisis in a big way. Basically: Is D&D a specific setting (or at least a very closely related family of settings), or is it a generic fantasy toolkit?

The latter, with the option for the former, as far as i'm concerned. (I have yet to encounter in 30 years of gaming a set of RPG rules system that that was setting-specific that was mechanically superior to one that wasn't, and the more-setting specific a set of rules inherently gets, the worse it seems to become mechanically.) Notably, there are only four books in my 3.x stuff that are setting-specific sourcebooks and they are all early 3.0; three of them 3rd party (I think Creature Collection 1 was out even before the MM) and they were only mined for the mechanics (which have been largely replaced in the years since). Hell, the root cause of me digitisting my houserules for 3.5 started with compiled spell and feat lists and then moved on strip-mining feats and spells out of the Completes (etc al) to reduce the amount of books to lug down the club seeing as they were basically wasted space apart from the feats and spells, 95% of the time).

I am once again going to upset the old guard by saying that D&D's lore from any edition has never had any hold on me in the slightest (I have no nostalgia for D&D, it was my distant forth RPG). I've only played on its settings tangentially and even then only when I started to not have the time or energy to write a whole campaign myself and started using modules for our weekly games.

You may quite rightly accuse me of not really wanting to play "D&D" at all and that would be a fair assessment. (Hell, for my homebrew rules I DID get rid of Vancian casting.) D&D has, for me never been a game in an of itself, it has never had a "flavour," of its own; whether AD&D, 3.0, 3.5 or Pathfinder 1 (and or the hybrids thereof), it's just a set of rules - like any other set of rules - that I use to run my game, because that's easier than spending a decade plus writing my own1. (And even then, they are with what amounts to probably a few year's worth of accrued modifications.) A game is not the rules; the rules are merely the imperfect simulation of the "real" world, whatever the rules may be and whatever that world is.

(For the record, I never had any truck with Rolemaster's own world either, and only paid attention when it was talking about Middle-Earth; I only played Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay because it had very good questbooks, ditto for Dungeoneer (advanced fighting fantasy); I used Star Wars D6 and D20 and Stargate D20 for other things (more than I did for its intended purpose for the latter) and none of the other RPGs I own (MechWarrior, Heavy Metal, Discworld GURPS) have ever been used.)

Settings - even with Golarion, which remains the only campaign world I actually bought stuff for to read, before I had any intention of playing on it - I run on ultimately because I don't have the infinite time to right my own adventure paths. And Golarion aside, if I can get away with it, I'll even move it off them if feasible, for no other reason to make them not be on Greyhawk or the Realms or whatever. (I ran Night Below and said it was set on the world of Generica, which I never bothered to develop beyond the name and maybe making a couple of deity names, simply because that half-arsed effort was more pleasing to me than pretending it was Greyhawk; which means I literally prefer to functionally set a game on no world, rather than use one of D&D's own...)

So I'm only interested in rules exactly as far as the extent of their mechanics run. If something comes along that is an order of magnitude better than 3.5/PF, I'll snap its hand off. But I don't think that seems very likely that you could produce a set of mechanics that could be that good that it would be better than all the hammering into satisfactory shape over the past 20 years that I've done for 3.x - but you never know. Maybe 6E or PF 3 whill be as far ahead a quantum leap beyond 3.x as it was beyond AD&D. And even then my interest is going only as far as it allows me to play in my toy box, not D&D's.




1Which is what it took for me to right and publish my starship rules, because again, while Full Thrust was good and it was the best around, it wasn't enough.

Knaight
2020-05-14, 05:26 AM
I'd argue for the former, personally, and I'd be right there with you emphasizing D&D's D&D-ness first and foremost. D&D settings are definitely their own distinct thing, and remain so even if you port one over to another system where there's nary a d20 to be seen. Even with all the serial numbers filed off, D&D has very explicit metaphysics and setting conceits that can't be turned into "generic fantasy" without basically replacing every single race/class/spell/etc. and ignoring or rewriting a bunch of other rules.

We're on the same page, but as far as I can tell it's a genuine large split within the D&D player base. Both sides have a lot of proponents, there's no way to just pick one without alienating a lot of players, and I don't see WotC doing something dramatic like making two games to cover each camp separately, especially as that raises questions about why they don't do that for other divides.

Like I said, I don't envy the designers dealing with that problem.

Morty
2020-05-14, 07:07 AM
Where this gets more complicated is that regardless of the designers' intent (which are indeed probably conflicted), people are going to be playing D&D as a generic fantasy setting anyway. Either because they don't feel like learning anything else or because they legitimately believe it works as one. Or assuming that D&D conceits are generic and universally applicable. Or any combination of the above.

NigelWalmsley
2020-05-14, 07:48 AM
"Trying to make a class-based system into point-buy" is a very good way of summing up PrCs. It also applies to multiclassing. Though instead of "class-based" I'd say "level-based".

It's not really a binary like that. Just as nominally point-based systems tend to have archetypes similar to classes (e.g. no Shadowrun PC is running around as a 1/3 Hacker, 1/3 Mage, 1/3 Street Samurai), class-based systems tend to have additional customization beyond the class.

Pleh
2020-05-14, 09:14 AM
Where this gets more complicated is that regardless of the designers' intent (which are indeed probably conflicted), people are going to be playing D&D as a generic fantasy setting anyway. Either because they don't feel like learning anything else or because they legitimately believe it works as one. Or assuming that D&D conceits are generic and universally applicable. Or any combination of the above.

Here's a thought. There can exist a difference between a generic fantasy and Generic Fantasy.

D&D is fairly generic in that it can incorporate many different styles of D&D. That's part of how you get a number of distinct and somewhat incompatible settings it can run. It can serve many settings, making it somewhat generic.

Yet it doesn't quite handle a setting that itself is truly Generic Fantasy. It's a little too trope based and self defined and this tends to make all the D&D settings feel pretty similar to each other. It's crafted its own little niche and behaves generically within the bounds of its niche, but struggles when you start removing the foundational assumptions it was built on.

PairO'Dice Lost
2020-05-14, 10:56 AM
Notably, there are only four books in my 3.x stuff that are setting-specific sourcebooks and they are all early 3.0; three of them 3rd party (I think Creature Collection 1 was out even before the MM) and they were only mined for the mechanics (which have been largely replaced in the years since).
[...]
You may quite rightly accuse me of not really wanting to play "D&D" at all and that would be a fair assessment. (Hell, for my homebrew rules I DID get rid of Vancian casting.) D&D has, for me never been a game in an of itself, it has never had a "flavour," of its own;

Here you're conflating "setting-specific" as in "published setting using the D&D rules" (relative to generic D&D) with "specific setting" as in "the implicit setting of the D&D rules" (relative to generic fantasy). D&D's implicit setting and "flavor of its own" is Vancian casting (and alignment, and the existence of dungeons, and many many other things) and trying to "fix" or dramatically overhaul D&D by removing Vancian casting or other things intrinsic to the baseline setting assumptions and game experience like you mention here demonstrates that D&D isn't generic fantasy in the way that, say, GURPS or Fate are because those settings not only can handle hot-swapping all sorts of different flavor and mechanical takes on certain setting elements but don't have any kind of default take to swap out in the first place.


whether AD&D, 3.0, 3.5 or Pathfinder 1 (and or the hybrids thereof), it's just a set of rules - like any other set of rules - that I use to run my game[...]A game is not the rules; the rules are merely the imperfect simulation of the "real" world, whatever the rules may be and whatever that world is.

(For the record, I never had any truck with Rolemaster's own world either, and only paid attention when it was talking about Middle-Earth;[...]I used Star Wars D6 and D20 and Stargate D20 for other things (more than I did for its intended purpose for the latter)

D&D may be "just a set of rules" in a way that, say, a Star Wars or Star Trek RPG isn't since the latter have one specific set of characters/planets/technologies/canonical events/etc. attached where the former has many, but a setting created with D&D's setting-agnostic material as a starting point is still going to be recognizable as such in the same way that a setting created by filing the serial numbers off Star Wars as a starting point would be.

Heck, even a starting-with-Earthdawn setting is going to be noticeably different than a starting-with-D&D setting, even though Earthdawn's original schtick was taking lots of D&D-isms like dungeon crawling and levels and giving all of them in-game justifications, because the specific way it chose to reify those D&Disms differed from the D&D default and Earthdawn has diverged quite a bit since then.


Here's a thought. There can exist a difference between a generic fantasy and Generic Fantasy.

D&D is fairly generic in that it can incorporate many different styles of D&D. That's part of how you get a number of distinct and somewhat incompatible settings it can run. It can serve many settings, making it somewhat generic.

Yet it doesn't quite handle a setting that itself is truly Generic Fantasy. It's a little too trope based and self defined and this tends to make all the D&D settings feel pretty similar to each other. It's crafted its own little niche and behaves generically within the bounds of its niche, but struggles when you start removing the foundational assumptions it was built on.

Precisely. Another way to think of this is to use two different scales, "rigidity vs. flexibility" and "genericism vs. specificity." A given game engine can be generic and flexible (like GURPS, where it can theoretically work with any kind of setting and there are many possible ways to play it), generic and rigid (like Apocalypse World games, where it can theoretically work with any kind of setting but you're locked into a very particular playstyle), specific and flexible (like D&D, where there are very idiosyncratic setting assumptions but you can freely vary genre/tone/power level/etc. within them), and specific and rigid (like Star Wars, where there are very idiosyncratic setting assumptions that derive from and are tied into one particular setting).

Knaight
2020-05-16, 10:39 AM
Where this gets more complicated is that regardless of the designers' intent (which are indeed probably conflicted), people are going to be playing D&D as a generic fantasy setting anyway. Either because they don't feel like learning anything else or because they legitimately believe it works as one. Or assuming that D&D conceits are generic and universally applicable. Or any combination of the above.
Which is another reason it's such a hard needle to thread. If D&D wasn't the 800 lb gorrila it was it could get away with a lot more specificity, because people who would better fit other games would gravitate towards them. As the standard entry point to the hobby and the only game a lot of people even know exists though it can't do that, and so you get weird things like people trying to use D&D not just as a generic fantasy setting but also to play hard science fiction games and the like.

Aotrs Commander
2020-05-16, 10:50 AM
Which is another reason it's such a hard needle to thread. If D&D wasn't the 800 lb gorrila it was it could get away with a lot more specificity, because people who would better fit other games would gravitate towards them. As the standard entry point to the hobby and the only game a lot of people even know exists though it can't do that, and so you get weird things like people trying to use D&D not just as a generic fantasy setting but also to play hard science fiction games and the like.

I think that there is a fair amount of the reverse: 3.0 fundementally MADE D&D - via D20 - into the "default" generic system via the SRD for a good number of years. EVERYTHING was D20 for a bit. Hell, I've personally played no less than four non"D&D" D&D games (Star Wars, Stargate, Sidewinder and Judge Dredd) - and that's not counting either Pathfinder or Starfinder, which are fundementally D&D-adjacent. The idea of the SRD - which nobody had ever done before, and was, to be fair, a stroke of genius - very much made 3.0/3.5's rules into something more than just a popular-but-specific form of fantasy roleplay rules.

While WotC did not themselves try (very hard) to make D20 into Rolemaster or GURPS, where you could go anywhere and any when themselves,, the SRD functionally made D20, via 3rd parties, pretty much do that.

Knaight
2020-05-16, 11:35 AM
I think that there is a fair amount of the reverse: 3.0 fundementally MADE D&D - via D20 - into the "default" generic system via the SRD for a good number of years. EVERYTHING was D20 for a bit. Hell, I've personally played no less than four non"D&D" D&D games (Star Wars, Stargate, Sidewinder and Judge Dredd) - and that's not counting either Pathfinder or Starfinder, which are fundementally D&D-adjacent. The idea of the SRD - which nobody had ever done before, and was, to be fair, a stroke of genius - very much made 3.0/3.5's rules into something more than just a popular-but-specific form of fantasy roleplay rules.


There was a temporary d20 boom, sure (and there's been another small one around the 5e rules recently) - but I'm not talking about use of professional d20 products, and the habit of using D&D for basically everything whether it fits or not predates 3e significantly.

Generic d20 has a lot less setting specificity built into it than D&D (and PairO'Dice Lost has basically covered what I mean by setting specificity, though the elements I'd highlight versus throw into "all the other things" differ a bit), and is closer to other generic systems in that it still has a particular feel but isn't as strongly genred - especially once you start getting into Mutants and Masterminds and the like, which do things like jettison levels and largely remove character progression.

PairO'Dice Lost
2020-05-16, 08:56 PM
(and PairO'Dice Lost has basically covered what I mean by setting specificity, though the elements I'd highlight versus throw into "all the other things" differ a bit)

I picked Vancian casting, alignment, and dungeon crawling as the three points to highlight partly because Aotrs was talking about Vancian casting in the bit I quoted but mostly because all three are basically the first things that D&D-players-who-don't-like-D&D try to get rid of--Vancian casting "doesn't make sense" and alignment is "a nonsensical straitjacket" and dungeon crawls are "hack-and-slash and board gamey" and all that, while totally ignoring the actual setting flavor, the in-game explanations, the out-of-game historical context, and so on. White Wolf pretty much marketed World of Darkness as the anti-D&D by highlighting its "realistic" magical lore, shades-of-gray character motivation, and lack of focus on combat, in direct opposition to those points.

By comparison, other fairly idiosyncratic things like the zero-to-hero leveling curve, the sci-fi/fantasy/horror genre blend, the anachronistic era-blending from Bronze Age to Renaissance, the assumption of dozens of fallen civilizations in every world's history, the racial monocultures, the odd role and prominence of religions in the world, and so on and so forth are largely ignored, unrecognized, glossed over, or at least not commonly complained-about by the "D&D sucks" crowd.

Aotrs Commander
2020-05-17, 07:48 AM
I picked Vancian casting, alignment, and dungeon crawling as the three points to highlight partly because Aotrs was talking about Vancian casting in the bit I quoted but mostly because all three are basically the first things that D&D-players-who-don't-like-D&D try to get rid of--Vancian casting "doesn't make sense" and alignment is "a nonsensical straitjacket" and dungeon crawls are "hack-and-slash and board gamey" and all that, while totally ignoring the actual setting flavor, the in-game explanations, the out-of-game historical context, and so on. White Wolf pretty much marketed World of Darkness as the anti-D&D by highlighting its "realistic" magical lore, shades-of-gray character motivation, and lack of focus on combat, in direct opposition to those points.

By comparison, other fairly idiosyncratic things like the zero-to-hero leveling curve, the sci-fi/fantasy/horror genre blend, the anachronistic era-blending from Bronze Age to Renaissance, the assumption of dozens of fallen civilizations in every world's history, the racial monocultures, the odd role and prominence of religions in the world, and so on and so forth are largely ignored, unrecognized, glossed over, or at least not commonly complained-about by the "D&D sucks" crowd.

My "problem" with Vancian casting (and I should clarify, I missed a word when I referred to it last time, I removed it from my homebrew CAMPAIGN WORLD'S setting-specific rules, not totally from my 3.Aotrs) is not that it doesn't make sense internally (spell levels = electron valances), just that it's idiosyncratic enough it can't model pretty much any other magic system I've read about or seen in fiction apart from it's own source material and Discworld, which parodied it. (And so, in the highly unlikely event I ever DID anything with Dreemaenhyll, I'm not beholden to those idosyncracies that would shape how it works.)

Alignment... Is okay when used as a very light, prosciptive thing mostly for "what spells hurt you," but fundementally trying to fit the whole breadth and complexity of the entirity of sapient/sentient creatures into nine pidgeon-holes was never going to work. But 3.x's somewhat misguided idea to ingrain in solidly into the mechanics (which even I thought Was A Good Idea At The Time) has made it simply not worth doing anything to, as far as I'm concerned. It's not problem enough to warrent solving, as it were.

NO idea about the dungeon-crawl stuff, certainly can't come from my quarter, as you can VERY much accuse me and my group of being full of a lot of wargamers and whose quests are very defnitely edging towards hack-and-slash end of the spectrum most of the time (except, oddly, when I actually write myself, where games tend to more end up explore-y); hell, down to the complete embracement of the fifteen-minute adventuring day! White Wolf is pretty much my antithesis.



For my own campaign world, the VERY first thing I did was had a broad look at when technologies emerged and made a historical-ball-park timeline (with variations, such as more advanced (relative to Earth) metallugy because Dwarves Exist etc). Fantasy Writers Have No Idea Of History Time is one of my other bugbears, and I don't think I've EVER seen anyone do a fantasy world's history that didn't do that; even much-vaunted-by-me Golarion only gets it credible SOMETIMES... Ditto with racial monocultures, something else I dislike. Again, for my campaign-specific rules, I went as far as splitting racial traits into "race" and "culture" and EVERY intelligent creature gets a culture, even if it's "Wild."

Hell, I dislike racial monocultures so much, I explictly have made four starfleets and counting (https://www.facebook.com/1198737823615066/posts/i-was-intending-to-do-a-post-for-accelerate-and-attack-to-get-it-on-facebook-and/1230367343785447/) for the elenthnar race to explictly avert the old "aliens only have one nation each" trope, and only didn't for the earlier Jalyrkieons (who have them in fluff) because their techtree in my rules was sufficiently atypical to make it harder to make something "different but related." (I'd probably be well underway on th fifth, but the lockdown has rather taken the wind out of my sails.)

(Fallen civilisations is kinda realistic, though; admittedly not them always being More Advanced Than Current, but it makes for good dungeon crawls, so I am prepared to give that one a pass, and hell, it makes for good exploration in scifi even when it ISN'T More Advanced. My party of high-tech magical space Liches certainly enjoyed picking over the ruins of a "fantasy" civilisation while the tried to work out what happened to it to wipe all the intelligence creatures out. Exposition partly provided by magical memory orbs, that was fun.)

PairO'Dice Lost
2020-05-17, 10:17 AM
My "problem" with Vancian casting (and I should clarify, I missed a word when I referred to it last time, I removed it from my homebrew CAMPAIGN WORLD'S setting-specific rules, not totally from my 3.Aotrs) is not that it doesn't make sense internally (spell levels = electron valances), just that it's idiosyncratic enough it can't model pretty much any other magic system I've read about or seen in fiction apart from it's own source material and Discworld, which parodied it. (And so, in the highly unlikely event I ever DID anything with Dreemaenhyll, I'm not beholden to those idosyncracies that would shape how it works.)

It's pretty close to historical takes on magic, actually, with the Ars Goetia/Key of Solomon grimoires, the emphasis on symbology, the "names of God/language of the gods shaping the world" thing, and so on, and is basically the system you'd get if you started with Classical or Renaissance magic and said "Now how do I get all this incense-and-chanting stuff up to combat speed so I can weaponize it?" It's not very close to any of the 80s fantasy or urban fantasy "belief + mana = stuff happens" magic systems, sure, but those takes on magic are generally soft and squishy and not particularly great for RPG magic without lots of GM adjudication (see: Ars Magica, Mage: the Gerund, and others). As I've previously opined on the topic of Vancian verisimilitude:


Regarding how well Vancian represents magic, as one or two people mentioned upthread spell preparation involves performing a little ritual for every spell you want to cast and then storing it away for later, which has quite a bit more historical influence than most systems. In Goetic magic, you pull out your musty old tome, inscribe a mystical diagram on the floor, wave your arms in mystic gestures, chant for an hour and ten minutes, call out "Demon, come forth!" and poof, a minor demon from the Lesser Key of Solomon appears in your magic circle.

In D&D magic, you pull out your spellbook, inscribe a mystical diagram on the floor, wave your arms in mystic gestures, chant for an hour--then magically lock the current state of the ritual away in your mind instead of finishing it immediately. When you want to complete it, most likely after buffing yourself, double-checking the dimensional anchor, etc., you wave your arms in mystic gestures, chant for ten minutes, call out "Demon, come forth!" and poof, a CR 6 or lower demon from the Monster Manual appears in your magic circle.

Not only is the general flavor pretty much the same, going from "perform a big fancy ritual" to "perform most of a big fancy ritual and save the last bit to be triggered later" is probably the best extrapolation of traditional European hermetic magic, Mesoamerican sacrificial magic, or the like to get you combat-time spells; the concept of nebulous "magical energy" that a person just has and uses to "do stuff with magic" is a very modern one, comparatively, and doing things like negotiating during combat with previously-bound spirits to help you would be too slow.

Regarding how D&D magic works, it does essentially work on a True Names/Language of Magic concept, though it isn't explicitly called out as such aside from truenaming. The vast majority of spells have verbal components, spoken in a tongue belonging to ancient and powerful magical beings, and there's an entire class for people who can talk and sing so well that magic happens (and the bard was was, incidentally, the first example of a prestige or advanced class back in 1e, basically being better magic-users than the Magic-User). You need to know creatures' names to call them specifically with planar binding and similar spells, and most magic items have magic words that make them function. Power Word spells pack the most amount of power into the smallest space (in AD&D, they were very powerful spells given the lower overall monster HP and had ridiculously fast casting times, and even in 3e they're no-save spells with proportionally powerful effects) and are explicitly words with inherent magical power. Other examples of words-as-magic abound: glyphs, sigils, runes, symbols, etc., and of course wizards and archivists write down magic spells in their spellbooks and prayerbooks--magic spells made of words which themselves are magical and can't be understood by the uninitiated; scrolls, likewise, are literally written-down magic.

If you were to put an explicit statement in the Magic chapter that "D&D magic works by knowing and using the language of magic," you'd have to change absolutely none of the fluff and it would work just fine. And incidentally, while magic doesn't work via spirits, there are plenty of classes in 3e with a "get magic from powerful spirit creatures" theme, including the spirit shaman and wu jen with their minor-class-feature-but-basically-just-flavor companion spirits, the sha'ir who works magic entirely through its companion spirit, the warlock who gains power from a pact with an otherworldly being, the binder who channels spirits through his body, the hexblade that has a companion spirit that's basically a curse made manifest, and every single arcane class with a familiar.


The point I was trying to get at in the original post, and perhaps could have expanded on here, was that when it comes to magical aesthetics there's a pretty big spectrum between magic as actually practiced (specifically in the pseudo-Medieval-to-pseudo-Renaissance period that the rest of D&D's aesthetic is largely based on) on the one end, and magic as viewed in more modern fantasy works on the other.

Magic-as-actually-practiced was, essentially, one part mysticism and one part science. There were fancy diagrams and chanting, there were textbooks full of alchemical formulas and reagents, there were lists of demons and procedures for bargaining with them, there was a whole lot of ritual around the whole thing, and most importantly magic was a process of channeling that which was outside the magic-user (spirits or demons or angels or even gods themselves) to some useful end. To those workers of magic, magic wasn't some special separate something, it was merely another part of an integrated worldview that held everything from prayer to physics as being part of a cohesive whole; Newton famously worked on a variety of alchemical and occult studies with just as much rigor and interest as his more "real" studies on optics and gravity. And in general, if you follow a particular procedure successfully, you get a certain magical result, just like following a chemical formula or computer program (though obviously they didn't think of things in those terms at the time).

Then you have magic-as-seen-in-popular fantasy, where magic is much more of an idiosyncratic individual thing. Magic works by willpower/emotion/etc., often with some sort of focus like a wand or gem or something, but any words/gestures/foci are largely mnemonic aids and/or emotional props like Dumbo's feather, and the more powerful magic-users can go without them entirely. Magic comes entirely from the user, either via some sort of internal reservoir of magical energy or via an innate gift or talent that lets you tap into some external energy source that only people born with wizard blood or whatever can access. Magic is generally a thing rather than a process, where there's a sharp divide between "things that have magic in them" and "things that don't have magic in them," and you can magic at things all you want in whatever way you want until your internal magical battery runs dry.

Both approaches to magic can be used well in fiction, and many works use some blend of the two, including D&D (things like antimagic field being able to "turn off" magic in an area or spell levels being fungible for spontaneous casting is a strictly New Magic thing), or have the two kinds of systems side-by-side in-setting (LotR has Old Magic human sorcery and Maiar wizardry with chants and staffs and all next to New Magic rings of power and elven magic with feelings and willpower and all, Dresden Files wizards can do both New Magic quick'n'dirty Evocation and Old Magic incense'n'candles Thaumaturgy, and so on). Neither is inherently better than the other, it all depends on what fits your setting best.

But the context of my original post, and Anonymouswizard's post that I responded to, was that a lot of people object to Vancian magic on the grounds that "it doesn't make sense that magic would work like that" or "it doesn't feel magical" or whatever, and everyone and their brother who homebrews up a new magic system (for D&D or any other RPG) almost exclusively takes the "mana bar + magic skill(s), done" approach. It's assumed, for some reason, that this is how magic "really works" or is "supposed to work" and Vancian's idea of performing little rituals to call on extraplanar energy is nonsensical, when in fact for hundreds if not thousands of years that's exactly how people viewed it as working--heck, the flavor of Eberron's magewrights and adepts, where a blacksmith knows one specific ritual to make his swords better and a midwife knows one specific ritual to heal a mother in labor and so on, is much closer to how people actually practiced folk magic in ye olden days, and Eberron is the least Medieval published setting out there aesthetically.

So while I have no idea whether Vance actually researched or inspired by real-world magical traditions or whether he started with the magic-as-misunderstood-technology-and-sapient-mathematics premise and just worked backward from there (the same way 40K's techpriests and other post-apocalyptic settings turn maintenance rituals into religious rites because the characters are going through everything by rote), and I know that Gygax and Arneson retrofit Vancian flavor onto their mechanics rather than coming up with something flavor-first, the point is that if you were trying to come up with a system that looks and feels a lot like how magic did historically, it would turn out a heck of a lot closer to Vancian magic than any of the common alternatives people like to replace it with, and the idea that a magic system "making sense" or "feeling magical" has to mean just thinking really really hard to make things happen or gauging how much magical oomph to shove into a given magical effect is purely a product of fantasy literature from the last 50 years or so.


Alignment... Is okay when used as a very light, prosciptive thing mostly for "what spells hurt you," but fundementally trying to fit the whole breadth and complexity of the entirity of sapient/sentient creatures into nine pidgeon-holes was never going to work. But 3.x's somewhat misguided idea to ingrain in solidly into the mechanics (which even I thought Was A Good Idea At The Time) has made it simply not worth doing anything to, as far as I'm concerned. It's not problem enough to warrent solving, as it were.

You actually can pretty much fit everything into nine boxes if you map things to concepts in moral and ethical philosophy. Leaving the cosmic and societal stuff aside, at a personal level Law is deontology (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deontological_ethics), ethical Neutrality is aretology (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue_ethics), Chaos is consequentialism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequentialism), and Good, moral Neutrality, and Evil have different maps of the "moral circle" or "circle of altruism" (https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/4/4/18285986/robot-animal-nature-expanding-moral-circle-peter-singer).

Granted, alignment can easily be misused because people are dumb and do things like play Chaotic Stupid characters or assume alignment = personality or the like, and because the writers of the Exalted and Vile alignment sections in BoED and BoVD were apparently smoking some strong stuff from the Drugs chapter of the latter book. But as actually described in the core books of various editions, alignment works pretty well.


Ditto with racial monocultures, something else I dislike. Again, for my campaign-specific rules, I went as far as splitting racial traits into "race" and "culture" and EVERY intelligent creature gets a culture, even if it's "Wild."

I've done the same in mine. Turns out things like polymorph spells, crossbreed races, and playing monsters is much easier when you know what's innate and what's not, whodathunkit?


(Fallen civilisations is kinda realistic, though; admittedly not them always being More Advanced Than Current, but it makes for good dungeon crawls, so I am prepared to give that one a pass, and hell, it makes for good exploration in scifi even when it ISN'T More Advanced. My party of high-tech magical space Liches certainly enjoyed picking over the ruins of a "fantasy" civilisation while the tried to work out what happened to it to wipe all the intelligence creatures out. Exposition partly provided by magical memory orbs, that was fun.)

Any fallen civilizations of note in D&D settings are generally assumed to be more advanced than current because an equivalent or less-advanced civilizations wouldn't leave eternally-powered nigh-impervious relics around for the modern era to find.

It's entirely possible to run a game where you're in the first "real" advanced civilization and no others came before you to help you bootstrap your particular brand of magical awesomeness...but then your archwizards get some crazy ideas (Netheril) or you piss off another highly-advanced civilization (Jhaamdath) or you spit in the face of the gods (Istar) or the like and get yourselves nuked, and then the next civilization to arise can benefit from all the toys you left behind. :smallamused:

Nifft
2020-05-17, 11:32 AM
Any fallen civilizations of note in D&D settings are generally assumed to be more advanced than current because an equivalent or less-advanced civilizations wouldn't leave eternally-powered nigh-impervious relics around for the modern era to find.

Hmm, that's not how I do things.

Magic of the D&D style makes that sort of assumption unnecessary.

D&D magic being a thing means that an individual can create an eternally-powered nigh-impervious relic without the aid of any particular infrastructure.

Furthermore, the creation of the artifact in question might be the exact and specific event which wrecked or consumed the previous civilization -- and that doesn't demand any particularly advanced precondition, just a bunch of dudes to sacrifice.

As an example, in my games the Ur-Flan weren't more magically advanced. They were powerful, but their spells didn't go above level 9, and their relics aren't more advanced than what people in modern Greyhawk could produce -- they're just more horribly detrimental than what modern people would accept, and their fabrication methods are a big part of why the Flanaesse had such vast tracts of empty land when the Oerdians migrated east.

It's a case of less-advanced empathy rather than more-advanced tech.

Tanarii
2020-05-17, 11:48 AM
The original conceptual value was simple: they offered a way for the DM to have a custom world special faction with special abilities, and to map out the mechanical abilities gained if the players joined that faction. Basically, the equivalent of making your own "Knights of Solamnia" or "Orders of High Wizardry".

Somewhere along the line WoTC realized they could make good money cranking out 'generic' prestige classes for folks who wanted to spend their free time theorycrafting builds (similar to feats), and they started to become viewed as a player entitlement.

Luccan
2020-05-17, 12:01 PM
The original conceptual value was simple: they offered a way for the DM to have a custom world special faction with special abilities, and to map out the mechanical abilities gained if the players joined that faction. Basically, the equivalent of making your own "Knights of Solamnia" or "Orders of High Wizardry".

Somewhere along the line WoTC realized they could make good money cranking out 'generic' prestige classes for folks who wanted to spend their free time theorycrafting builds (similar to feats), and they started to become viewed as a player entitlement.

Maybe its been too long since I read the chapter and it actually advises making them all part of certain orders and cabals, but the original prestige classes in the DMG are pretty generic. You've got three that have group membership requirements and two of those (Arcane Archer and Dwarven Defender) are just "be x race" as a prereq. Assassin is the only one the requires you to become a member of a group post character creation.

Tanarii
2020-05-17, 12:10 PM
Maybe its been too long since I read the chapter and it actually advises making them all part of certain orders and cabals, but the original prestige classes in the DMG are pretty generic. You've got three that have group membership requirements and two of those (Arcane Archer and Dwarven Defender) are just "be x race" as a prereq. Assassin is the only one the requires you to become a member of a group post character creation.
Oops yes, I forgot "or racial specialties". Still a faction thing, just a broader one.

Nifft
2020-05-17, 12:15 PM
Maybe its been too long since I read the chapter and it actually advises making them all part of certain orders and cabals, but the original prestige classes in the DMG are pretty generic. You've got three that have group membership requirements and two of those (Arcane Archer and Dwarven Defender) are just "be x race" as a prereq. Assassin is the only one the requires you to become a member of a group post character creation.

Don't forget the Red Wizard of Thay, which was also in the DMG (but not the SRD).

The other PrCs seem to be intended as examples, to spur each DM's creativity in his or her own game, so most of them being generic might be fully intentional:


https://i.imgur.com/rJjY6Zm.png

If you look at the later published settings like Eberron, you can see some direct translations from a generic DMG template into a campaign-specific variant, like the Eldritch Knight (DMG) => Knight Phantom (5Nations).

Luccan
2020-05-17, 01:49 PM
Don't forget the Red Wizard of Thay, which was also in the DMG (but not the SRD).

The other PrCs seem to be intended as examples, to spur each DM's creativity in his or her own game, so most of them being generic might be fully intentional:


https://i.imgur.com/rJjY6Zm.png

If you look at the later published settings like Eberron, you can see some direct translations from a generic DMG template into a campaign-specific variant, like the Eldritch Knight (DMG) => Knight Phantom (5Nations).

Honestly I forgot about the Red Wizard. The physical copy of the DMG I owned was 3.0, which had a shorter list of PrCs, and I mostly use the SRD these days. Still, at best it's a suggestion by examples, rather than outright stated. Which explains why it's far more common for PrCs to not have such prereqs.

Knaight
2020-05-17, 03:37 PM
I picked Vancian casting, alignment, and dungeon crawling as the three points to highlight partly because Aotrs was talking about Vancian casting in the bit I quoted but mostly because all three are basically the first things that D&D-players-who-don't-like-D&D try to get rid of--
I definitely get that - I tend to get involved less in the "D&D sucks" conversations and more in the "D&D is not particularly well suited for generic fantasy" conversations, and while all three of those hold I also tend to favor pointing out things that are clear setting specific elements. So the Arcane/Divine split, the heavy influence of planes and planar-interfacing spells, the very specific bestiary, and if we're talking about 3.x I usually also point to the demographic by class and level tables.

NigelWalmsley
2020-05-17, 03:55 PM
the very specific bestiary

What? D&D's bestiary is the kitchen sink-iest part of the game. You can pull out the monsters you need for basically any setting. It's true that there will be less monsters than a dedicated setting-specific game will have, but you're still miles ahead of any other "generic fantasy" option on that front.


if we're talking about 3.x I usually also point to the demographic by class and level tables.

You mean the things pretty much everyone ignores all the time? It's like saying 3e is a bad fit for Kung Fu adventures because Monks aren't proficient with unarmed strikes.

PairO'Dice Lost
2020-05-17, 05:20 PM
Hmm, that's not how I do things.

Magic of the D&D style makes that sort of assumption unnecessary.

D&D magic being a thing means that an individual can create an eternally-powered nigh-impervious relic without the aid of any particular infrastructure.

Furthermore, the creation of the artifact in question might be the exact and specific event which wrecked or consumed the previous civilization -- and that doesn't demand any particularly advanced precondition, just a bunch of dudes to sacrifice.

Anyone can do the "eternally-powered" part, but by "nigh-impervious" I was referring to actual minor and major artifacts, which are head and shoulders above modern items power-wise, generally unique in capability, and specifically no longer creatable in the modern era. Generally ancient civilizations are used and referenced for their artifacts rather than generic dungeons full of +1 longswords, which are more the province of mad cultists or lich kings or whatever, so even if you posit that a particular civilization had the same spell knowledge, magical cap, etc. as modern ones, there's at least one area in which they were more advanced than the modern ones.


As an example, in my games the Ur-Flan weren't more magically advanced. They were powerful, but their spells didn't go above level 9, and their relics aren't more advanced than what people in modern Greyhawk could produce -- they're just more horribly detrimental than what modern people would accept, and their fabrication methods are a big part of why the Flanaesse had such vast tracts of empty land when the Oerdians migrated east.

It's a case of less-advanced empathy rather than more-advanced tech.

You don't have to assume ancient civilizations were more advanced, or at least that all of them were, certainly, it's just a default assumption that at least some of them were to justify certain things about the setting.


What? D&D's bestiary is the kitchen sink-iest part of the game. You can pull out the monsters you need for basically any setting. It's true that there will be less monsters than a dedicated setting-specific game will have, but you're still miles ahead of any other "generic fantasy" option on that front.

This is another case of conflating "generic in D&D" and "generic in fantasy." Any monsters in D&D can generally work in any setting for D&D, but those monsters themselves are either unique to D&D (e.g. illithids or owlbears), inspired by mythology or fiction but distinctly different than the source material (e.g. medusas or hobgoblins), generic monsters given a D&D-specific spin (e.g. dragons or ghosts), and so on. Color-coded dragons, devils and demons being different things, "oozes" as a monster category, and many other things make D&D's monsters distinct from those in other games and immediately recognizable if ported wholesale into non-D&D games or settings.


You mean the things pretty much everyone ignores all the time? It's like saying 3e is a bad fit for Kung Fu adventures because Monks aren't proficient with unarmed strikes.

DMs might not use those tables to generate every single settlement's NPCs because they're intended as quick auto-generators rather than hard rules, but the setting splats use those stats as a baseline so if you've used Waterdeep or Sharn then you've indirectly used them, and I'm sure you've seen forum debaters pull out a "Well, according to the demographics tables, you can find an Xth-level Y in a Metropolis..." argument at least once.

Elves
2020-05-17, 06:12 PM
In a level based game I don't think there's a substitute for actually taking a level in a class with a cool, longer and more exotic name than a base class could have. I don't think you can really replicate PRCs with subclasses (kit modifications) either, since those are tied at some level to hitting the same notes as the base class or else they become something completely different. Prestige classes and subclasses/variant classes/whatever you call them fulfill different roles and there's space for both.

Having specialized classes that are shorter than the main base classes and have certain requirements to enter is a very simple and common sense idea.

But there are two ways that 3e, especially in the early part of its run, did not execute well on that idea:
- Base classes with bad and few class features, making PRCs feel mandatory
- PRCs with piddling and over-specific class features, especially ones that were setting-specific and/or could have easily been replicated with minor "organization" bonuses.

Most of the objections in this thread seem to be about those execution failures, not about the core concept, which IMO is very sound. There were a lot of good PRCs in 3e as well.

Honestly, PRCs are such a simple idea that the only reason not to include something like them in a D&D-type game is if you want it to be very minimal and standardized. That's understandable for something like an indie game where you want it to be self-contained. Less so for the flagship of the genre.

Nifft
2020-05-17, 09:07 PM
You don't have to assume ancient civilizations were more advanced, or at least that all of them were, certainly, it's just a default assumption that at least some of them were to justify certain things about the setting.

The times that I've used "more advanced" civilizations, they're for elements stolen from Conan or Fafhrd & Grey Mouser -- the idea of crashed spaceships, or abandoned colonial starports, or other specifically-justified futuristic tech.

For some artifacts, that setting element is quite natural: the Machine of Lum the Mad, the Apparatus of Kwalish, the Mighty Servant of Leuk-O -- those blatantly are from "more advanced" civilizations. And those artifacts are awesome, and their origin is awesome. But it's not the default origin, and it's not even close to the only origin.

The Hand and Eye of Vecna? Nope, not "more advanced", just some evil bony-boi who turned into a god.
The Sword of Kas? Same eye, different hand. Not "more advanced".
The Mace of Cuthbert? Again, just some guy who got god'd.
The Teeth of Dahlver-Nar? NO FILLINGS, probably not very advanced.

There's wiggle room for some artifacts. Like, you could probably write up a backstory where the Rod of Seven Parts is from a "more advanced" civilization. But that's not the only reasonable origin, and you'd have to invent the civilization which justified your backstory -- the Wind Dukes of Aaqa are just a broad-stroke allusion in most sources.

Luccan
2020-05-17, 11:35 PM
In a level based game I don't think there's a substitute for actually taking a level in a class with a cool, longer and more exotic name than a base class could have. I don't think you can really replicate PRCs with subclasses (kit modifications) either, since those are tied at some level to hitting the same notes as the base class or else they become something completely different. Prestige classes and subclasses/variant classes/whatever you call them fulfill different roles and there's space for both.

Having specialized classes that are shorter than the main base classes and have certain requirements to enter is a very simple and common sense idea.

But there are two ways that 3e, especially in the early part of its run, did not execute well on that idea:
- Base classes with bad and few class features, making PRCs feel mandatory
- PRCs with piddling and over-specific class features, especially ones that were setting-specific and/or could have easily been replicated with minor "organization" bonuses.

Most of the objections in this thread seem to be about those execution failures, not about the core concept, which IMO is very sound. There were a lot of good PRCs in 3e as well.

Honestly, PRCs are such a simple idea that the only reason not to include something like them in a D&D-type game is if you want it to be very minimal and standardized. That's understandable for something like an indie game where you want it to be self-contained. Less so for the flagship of the genre.

I don't think PRCs are a necessary extension of a class and level system, whether or not subclasses and ACFs can fill the roll. It over-burdens the system by demanding short progression classes that can be entered at a variety of levels and are at least close to on par with any level they can be entered from. It's too easy to fall short or shoot past your goal. You could do it, but you need a tight grip on progression and every PRC needs to be considered with all possible base classes and other PRCs. The more you add of either, the more likely you are to fail. PRCs are a nice option in the right games, and one I'm glad to have in 3.5 (and its direct spin offs) where it's necessary. But you shouldn't need it any more than you need multiclassing; it's a class based game, if you can't persuade enough people to stay in a single class for every level to begin with, something has gone wrong.

Elves
2020-05-18, 01:21 AM
every PRC needs to be considered with all possible base classes and other PRCs. The more you add of either, the more likely you are to fail.
No you don't. Against their rough equivalents, sure. But it's fine if there's content that doesn't get used much. You should have a better basic methodology in writing PRCs than was the norm in much of 3e, but there doesn't have to be this tight claw around the content that's allowed to exist so that only the stuff that's part of some perfect, enclosed framework is allowed in.

If the worry is these public events like the adventurers league or whatever, just implement something like Magic where only core content plus current season content is allowed -- or just use pregen characters.


But you shouldn't need it any more than you need multiclassing.it's a class based game, if you can't persuade enough people to stay in a single class for every level to begin with, something has gone wrong

On the contrary, I'd say a modular level system is inherently friendly to and almost logically necessitates the existence of multiclassing (and from there, logically implies prestige classes). If you want to have people locked into a single class progression, a level system likely isn't the best way to go (you see this in games with a very pre-set, rigorously curated meta like World of Warcraft, where the levels are virtually meaningless except as a way of gating content).

At the point where single-classing is the only option, you're almost better off treating it more like a MOBA, with unique heroes who have unique kits designed to have a certain gameplay flow.

But that starts to not "feel like D&D", as the sacred phrase is now, and more importantly, it doesn't employ the unique advantages that tabletop D&D has when compared to a competitive videogame where the meta has to be strictly monitored and homogenized.


I'm not actually saying it's a bad option. Honestly, if I were to host a D&D game right now, for any edition, I would probably just work with the PCs to build the unique power kits they want, rather than strictly following the character building guidelines. But it takes you pretty far from the conventional D&D levelling system. I think if you want to use that system, its natural logic leads to the existence of multiclassing and prestige classes.


Edit: Re the charge of people "not willing to stay in a single class", see my post above -- that's an issue of weakly designed base classes, just as the claim that prestige classes were too finicky and overspecific is an issue of weakly designed prestige classes. By all means, have base classes be so fun that lots of people don't even want to leave.

PairO'Dice Lost
2020-05-18, 01:29 AM
For some artifacts, that setting element is quite natural: the Machine of Lum the Mad, the Apparatus of Kwalish, the Mighty Servant of Leuk-O -- those blatantly are from "more advanced" civilizations. And those artifacts are awesome, and their origin is awesome. But it's not the default origin, and it's not even close to the only origin.

The Hand and Eye of Vecna? Nope, not "more advanced", just some evil bony-boi who turned into a god.
The Sword of Kas? Same eye, different hand. Not "more advanced".
The Mace of Cuthbert? Again, just some guy who got god'd.
The Teeth of Dahlver-Nar? NO FILLINGS, probably not very advanced.

Note that I said a default and some artifacts in the bit you quoted. There are indeed plenty of artifacts that were created by being used to do something heroic, by being the personal item of an ascended god, by having a power being bound inside it, and so on and so forth.

But when it comes to the nameless/generic artifacts (as much as any artifact can be "generic") like the Book of Infinite Spells, Philosopher's Stone, Orbs of Dragonkind, Staff of the Magi, and the like, most settings (but, again, not all) assume that they were just made by a fallen civilization that was better at, respectively, spellbook-scribing, alchemy, soul-binding, and item crafting than anyone in the modern era.


There's wiggle room for some artifacts. Like, you could probably write up a backstory where the Rod of Seven Parts is from a "more advanced" civilization. But that's not the only reasonable origin, and you'd have to invent the civilization which justified your backstory -- the Wind Dukes of Aaqa are just a broad-stroke allusion in most sources.

I mean, the Wind Dukes explicitly ruled an empire that encompassed the entire Inner Planes, most of the Planes of Law, and at least dozens of Material Plane Worlds, and the Rod of Seven Parts was a superweapon capable of killing gods in one hit. If they don't count as "more advanced" than modern civilizations, then geez, you have really high standards. :smallamused:

NigelWalmsley
2020-05-18, 06:41 AM
This is another case of conflating "generic in D&D" and "generic in fantasy." Any monsters in D&D can generally work in any setting for D&D, but those monsters themselves are either unique to D&D (e.g. illithids or owlbears), inspired by mythology or fiction but distinctly different than the source material (e.g. medusas or hobgoblins), generic monsters given a D&D-specific spin (e.g. dragons or ghosts), and so on. Color-coded dragons, devils and demons being different things, "oozes" as a monster category, and many other things make D&D's monsters distinct from those in other games and immediately recognizable if ported wholesale into non-D&D games or settings.

This seems like missing the point. Yes, the D&D bestiary contains things that are specific to D&D. But it also contains a huge variety of things that allow you to support basically any setting. You've got western dragons, eastern dragons, Norse monsters, Greek monsters, Indian monsters, Chinese monsters, and all kinds of other things. The point isn't that everything fits well in any particular setting, but that you are equipped to support any particular setting.


I'm sure you've seen forum debaters pull out a "Well, according to the demographics tables, you can find an Xth-level Y in a Metropolis..." argument at least once.

I've seen that exactly once, from one poster. I don't think I've ever seen those tables come up when someone wasn't arguing with him.


I don't think PRCs are a necessary extension of a class and level system, whether or not subclasses and ACFs can fill the roll. It over-burdens the system by demanding short progression classes that can be entered at a variety of levels and are at least close to on par with any level they can be entered from.

That's a result of open multiclassing, not PrCs. The sensible version of PrCs looks like 4e's Paragon Paths or Epic Destinies, and happen at particular levels and last for a specific amount of time. It's true that trying to make 3e-style PrCs work well is hard, but that's true of 3e-style classes as well.


But you shouldn't need it any more than you need multiclassing; it's a class based game, if you can't persuade enough people to stay in a single class for every level to begin with, something has gone wrong.

Again, I think this is probably more down to specifically open multiclassing. The idea that someone might have some Rogue powers and some Wizard powers is entirely reasonable, and not particularly difficult to support. The issue is trying to support a Wizard/Rogue/Fighter/Bard/Hexblade/Favored Soul.

Tanarii
2020-05-18, 09:49 AM
But you shouldn't need it any more than you need multiclassing; it's a class based game, if you can't persuade enough people to stay in a single class for every level to begin with, something has gone wrong.
The bigger problem is when it's designed to be a single class game, and multiclassing is kind of tacked on. Especially when it's open multiclassing in which you can just start adding a new level from any other qualified class or PrC.

It kinda works if the system assumes that low levels generally have less value than higher levels. For example in D&D 3e and 5e, spellcasters in both 3e and 5e, gaining the next level on a class usually has more value than the previous.

Where it falls down is non-progressive or highly front-loaded classes. Which in D&D is most non-spellcasting class features.

Cluedrew
2020-05-18, 11:42 AM
On the contrary, I'd say a modular level system is inherently friendly to and almost logically necessitates the existence of multiclassing (and from there, logically implies prestige classes).What do you mean by "a modular level system"? Starting from the basis of "the character is there class" base I only know of 3 attempts to make it much more flexible: multi-classing (covered), duel-/hybrid-classes (build your own classes, actually just explodes the number of classes) and other build options (not the entire character comes from the class choice). How many of these would be included?

Nifft
2020-05-18, 11:55 AM
Note that I said a default and some artifacts in the bit you quoted. There are indeed plenty of artifacts that were created by being used to do something heroic, by being the personal item of an ascended god, by having a power being bound inside it, and so on and so forth.

But when it comes to the nameless/generic artifacts (as much as any artifact can be "generic") like the Book of Infinite Spells, Philosopher's Stone, Orbs of Dragonkind, Staff of the Magi, and the like, most settings (but, again, not all) assume that they were just made by a fallen civilization that was better at, respectively, spellbook-scribing, alchemy, soul-binding, and item crafting than anyone in the modern era. First off, a default case is a catch-all for things which haven't been otherwise assigned -- a default is the same as the default. If you had more than one, none of them would be the default.

The 3e version of the Philosopher's Stone (https://www.d20srd.org/srd/magicItems/artifacts.htm#philosophersStone) was just a special kind of geode.

It sounds like you've been playing a lot of Forgotten Realms lately and its tropes have rubbed off on you, but those tropes are not even slightly generic.


I mean, the Wind Dukes explicitly ruled an empire that encompassed the entire Inner Planes, most of the Planes of Law, and at least dozens of Material Plane Worlds, and the Rod of Seven Parts was a superweapon capable of killing gods in one hit. If they don't count as "more advanced" than modern civilizations, then geez, you have really high standards. :smallamused:

Nah, what I have is more than one source.

Here's what an early source had to say about the Wind Dukes:

https://i.imgur.com/NSn3ObR.png

See anything about ruling the entire Inner Planes? Neither do I.

What source are you using for your proclamation?

PairO'Dice Lost
2020-05-18, 12:26 PM
This seems like missing the point. Yes, the D&D bestiary contains things that are specific to D&D. But it also contains a huge variety of things that allow you to support basically any setting. You've got western dragons, eastern dragons, Norse monsters, Greek monsters, Indian monsters, Chinese monsters, and all kinds of other things. The point isn't that everything fits well in any particular setting, but that you are equipped to support any particular setting.

The point is that D&D's takes on dragons, Greek monsters, and so on aren't "generic fantasy" takes, they're D&D-specific: other games don't assume that dragon breath weapons and temperaments vary by color, that "medusa" is a race rather than an individual (and one that is distinct from "gorgon"), and so on. While those versions of those monsters can obviously be ported elsewhere, if you're talking about "things that D&D players often talk about as if they are 'generic' when they're actually idiosyncratic to D&D" then the monster list and particular descriptions of monsters are definitely up there.


First off, a default case is a catch-all for things which haven't been otherwise assigned -- a default is the same as the default. If you had more than one, none of them would be the default.
[...]
It sounds like you've been playing a lot of Forgotten Realms lately and its tropes have rubbed off on you, but those tropes are not even slightly generic.

It's a default because every setting has its own default assumptions. FR and Greyhawk assume "made as a prototype/one-off by an advanced fallen civilization" while Dragonlance assumes "made as a relic by the gods or their main servants" and Ravenloft assumes "made by the Dark Powers to screw with you," for instance. All of the earliest settings (Mystara, Blackmoor, Greyhawk, and FR) did the "fallen civilizations" thing, so it's more common than you're implying, but things definitely did branch out after that.


Nah, what I have is more than one source.

Here's what an early source had to say about the Wind Dukes:

[snip image]

See anything about ruling the entire Inner Planes? Neither do I.

What source are you using for your proclamation?

Let's see, there's...
2e Book of Artifacts, Rod of Seven Parts entry
Age of Worms adventure path, The Whispering Cairn and A Gathering of Winds
Dragon #224, History of the Rod of Seven Parts
Rod of Seven Parts adventure module, Vaati lore
2e Monstrous Compendium Annual: Volume Four, Vaati entry
How's that for more than one source? :smallamused:

Yes, the original artifact writeups (Eldritch Wizardry booklets, 1e DMG, etc.) had pretty sparse lore than was more allusion than fact and was largely filled in by later products, but then they also had literal fill-in-the-blanks powers that you rolled on a table (to prevent players from knowing their powers and allow DMs to customize them per campaign) which were also solidified later. When discussing what various settings say about artifact lore, one can't exactly go back to the beginning before said settings were detailed.

Nifft
2020-05-18, 12:44 PM
It's a default because every setting has its own default assumptions. FR and Greyhawk assume "made as a prototype/one-off by an advanced fallen civilization" while Dragonlance assumes "made as a relic by the gods or their main servants" and Ravenloft assumes "made by the Dark Powers to screw with you," for instance. All of the earliest settings (Mystara, Blackmoor, Greyhawk, and FR) did the "fallen civilizations" thing, so it's more common than you're implying, but things definitely did branch out after that. Greyhawk has tons of "gods did it" and "some dude who was awesome did something awesome and this is what's left of him", and much of their "advanced civilization" tech was NOT due to the fall of those civilizations, but rather because something from a Sci-Fi setting literally fell from the skies and now here it is.


Let's see, there's...[list]
2e Book of Artifacts, Rod of Seven Parts entry

Okay, I started trying to fact-check my assumptions with this entry, and it seems to back me up (not you) -- I don't see anything about the Wind Dukes of Aaqa ruling any particular plane.

Could you cite from each of these sources the part where your claims about the civilization details are supported?

Because right now, it looks like you're mistaken about your own sources.

Here's what the 2e Book of Artifacts says:

https://i.imgur.com/2QjBIhm.png

Man_Over_Game
2020-05-18, 04:21 PM
But I'm a little uncertain of what, conceptually, Prestige Classes offer. That is, I cannot evaluate the optimal implementation of "Prestige Classes", without knowing what I'm measuring.

So, here's what I see:

Differentiation. Sure, there may be hundreds of Fighters in my guild, but how many also have Swashbuckler and Devoted Defender levels? When talking with other X, or with beings with the discernment to comprehend the difference, you're not just an X, you're an X.Y.Z.


That's what I see as the core to Prestige Classes.

Every caster has spell slots. Some casters use them to summon monsters. Fewer summon demons. But only I can summon a demon and take over his body.

It's about introducing enough specialized mechanics that your character feels distinctly unique, to make your persona only yours. I think it fits better in a system where everything has more universal mechanics (so magic wasn't any different than martials in terms of core tabletop mechanics), rather than 3.5.

However, 3.5 is special since people liked 3.5 due to its complications, and so they wanted something even MORE complicated. MORE difficulty. If you have a game with an impossible level of difficulty, there will be people lined up to try and surpass it, as it too provides them with a sense of uniqueness and identity (See: I Wanna Be the Guy).


Personally, in a good game, I feel it's the means of creating new mechanics while demanding specific limitations to those mechanics to prevent those features from mutating with other resources (you cannot cast/maintain spells while Raging, because Spells + Raging could be overpowered), all to develop a sense of identity for the player.

When it's poorly implemented, it's a means of artificially ramping up the difficulty.

I say Prestige Classes are a poor mechanic to 3.5, because a lot of mechanics in 3.5 are mutually exclusive. For example, you cannot attack and cast a spell in the same turn without some kind of specialization effect that you invested into. One that you had to choose instead of something else.

Skills and Attacking, Attacking and Magic, Magic and Skills; these don't interact without some kind of exception saying they do, and often your build is defined by one of these pillars. You're already very unique, since the game only really works with specializations in the first place. Adding another mechanic (Prestige Options) to basically say "Nobody else can do this cool thing that you invested into" was entirely redundant when that's already the core of the game.
At the level Prestige Options were available at, everything is already so specialized that the focus should have been on generalizing mechanics to allow more diversity, rather than walling them all off even further.

------------------------------

There is one other consideration for Prestige Options and how they fit in, to use them as "patches" for certain thematic/mechanical combos that seem effective but actually aren't. For example, combining the Lightning Warrior with the Thundermancer sounds like it'd be a cool, thematic character, but limitations to the system prevent those classes' features from working with one another. In DnD terms, an example of this is a situation where you can't attack and cast a spell at the same time, so you're stuck being EITHER a Thundermancer OR a Lightning Warrior rather than feeling like both at once.

A Prestige Option-esc change to the game can fix that. However, these are less of a "specialized class" sort of deal, and more of a "If you happen to be these two things, here's some glue to hold them together". A good way of implementing that is providing a bonus based on the lowest level class in the combo. For example, "If you make an attack, you can cast a spell as part of your attack from the Thundermancer spell list, as long as that spell has no higher spell level than the lowest of your Thundermancer and Lightning Warrior levels". This rewards someone who dabbles, as well as those who lean into the Prestige Option, but doesn't require someone to do either as that'd be against the point.

PairO'Dice Lost
2020-05-20, 01:10 AM
Greyhawk has tons of "gods did it" and "some dude who was awesome did something awesome and this is what's left of him", and much of their "advanced civilization" tech was NOT due to the fall of those civilizations, but rather because something from a Sci-Fi setting literally fell from the skies and now here it is.

I wasn't including the high tech artifacts under "fallen civilizations" (though the spaceships did fall, technically :smallamused:), just things like the axe of the dwarvish lords (first united dwarven kingdom), Daoud's wondrous lantern (Tusmit), Tovag Baragu (Baklun), and similar.


Okay, I started trying to fact-check my assumptions with this entry, and it seems to back me up (not you) -- I don't see anything about the Wind Dukes of Aaqa ruling any particular plane.

Could you cite from each of these sources the part where your claims about the civilization details are supported?

Because right now, it looks like you're mistaken about your own sources.

Here's what the 2e Book of Artifacts says:

[snip picture]

I didn't actually remember which sources had which material, just that all the Rod of Seven Parts material talks about the Vaati and vice versa. Here are two supporting quotes that came up on a quick search:


Aeons ago, the Vaati ruled a vast empire spread over several worlds of the Material Plane, with footholds throughout the planes.


In ages long past, before the rise of elves, dwarves, or humans, the legendary Wind Dukes of Aaqa ruled a vast empire, bringing Law and elemental magic to many barbarian worlds. Air and lightning powered their magic, and their tie to the Elemental Plane of Air was very strong.

In time, they mastered the other elements as well, and as they grew more and more powerful, dozens of other elemental and lawful races swore fealty to them, from the lofty djinn and proud salamanders to the least of the mud sorcerer cults and the inevitables, servants of the Wind Dukes. At its peak, the empire of the Wind Dukes comprised most of the elemental planes, from the oceanic palacies of the marid to the City of Brass.

The Inner Planes were harmonius, united under one rule--until forces led by the demonic Queen of Chaos rallied slaad, demons, and others against them.

---


However, 3.5 is special since people liked 3.5 due to its complications, and so they wanted something even MORE complicated. MORE difficulty. If you have a game with an impossible level of difficulty, there will be people lined up to try and surpass it, as it too provides them with a sense of uniqueness and identity (See: I Wanna Be the Guy).

Actually, when 3e came out, people liked it due to its simplicity, as it was head and shoulders better than AD&D when it came to mechanical unity, clarity of prose, standardization of structure, and so forth. The idea that people like 3e because it's "overly complicated" is a meme that arose during the 3e/4e edition wars to support the "4e streamlined everything so it's better" narrative, and doesn't at all reflect the opinion on 3e at the time


I say Prestige Classes are a poor mechanic to 3.5, because a lot of mechanics in 3.5 are mutually exclusive. For example, you cannot attack and cast a spell in the same turn without some kind of specialization effect that you invested into. One that you had to choose instead of something else.

That's the case in...pretty much every game, really. Whenever you take a turn, the things you can do are limited by actions or action points or initiative passes or whatever, and if you want to be able to do multiple things at once you have to have a special thing that says you can.

Exclusivity is the fundamental basis of class systems. Classes divide the space of possible options into "things only members of class X can do" vs. "things members of class X can do and members of other classes can also do" vs. "things members of class X cannot do" as well as "things all members of class X can do" vs. "things some members of class X can do." Anything that lets you shake up those categories should ideally be accomplished through a class-based feature (e.g. an ACF or subclass) rather than a class-independent feature (e.g. a feat or template), or you start diluting the system quite a bit.

3e, with its free multiclassing, substantial skill system, "second progression" of magic items, and so forth is probably at the maximum level of flexibility you can feasibly manage in a class-based system before it's time to throw up your hands and just use GURPS, and some would argue (though I would strongly disagree) that it's past that point already. Loosening the boundaries between classes in 3e or a 3e-like system isn't a good idea unless you're tightening them up elsewhere, and even then it's iffy.


There is one other consideration for Prestige Options and how they fit in, to use them as "patches" for certain thematic/mechanical combos that seem effective but actually aren't. For example, combining the Lightning Warrior with the Thundermancer sounds like it'd be a cool, thematic character, but limitations to the system prevent those classes' features from working with one another. In DnD terms, an example of this is a situation where you can't attack and cast a spell at the same time, so you're stuck being EITHER a Thundermancer OR a Lightning Warrior rather than feeling like both at once.

A Prestige Option-esc change to the game can fix that. However, these are less of a "specialized class" sort of deal, and more of a "If you happen to be these two things, here's some glue to hold them together". A good way of implementing that is providing a bonus based on the lowest level class in the combo. For example, "If you make an attack, you can cast a spell as part of your attack from the Thundermancer spell list, as long as that spell has no higher spell level than the lowest of your Thundermancer and Lightning Warrior levels". This rewards someone who dabbles, as well as those who lean into the Prestige Option, but doesn't require someone to do either as that'd be against the point.

Good idea in theory, shot to pieces by combinatorics in practice. Hot-patching certain class combinations works, kind of, when you have the 4 "classic" classes, or the 9ish core classes of 2e, or the 11 of 3e; making 11 classes play nicely with each other "only" requires 110 rules notes. But the next class you add needs 11 new notes, the next 12, the next 13, and so on, and that's assuming you don't consider ACFs or wizard specializations or the like separately from the main class. You could try to be more generic by e.g. making multiclass notes for "Warrior Classes" rather than separate notes for the Fighter/Paladin/Ranger/Knight/Marshal/Warblade/..., but then you run into unforeseen combo territory and you're probably better off making PrCs to at least restrict the playtest and balance space.

Nifft
2020-05-21, 12:28 PM
I wasn't including the high tech artifacts under "fallen civilizations" (though the spaceships did fall, technically :smallamused:), just things like the axe of the dwarvish lords (first united dwarven kingdom), Daoud's wondrous lantern (Tusmit), Tovag Baragu (Baklun), and similar. Fallen space ships aren't fallen civilizations, of course -- not unless your civilization was doing very poorly to begin with! :biggrin:

Tovag Baragu is basically a fantasy interplanar Stonehenge, and I'm not sure that we should consider Stonehenge as from a more advanced civilization. It's more of a location than a relic anyway. You could spin it as tech, but you could also spin it as crude stone-age monoliths capping some natural planar phenomenon. In both cases it might plausibly be dangerous to muck with, but there's no necessity for advanced tech to get that functionality.

The Axe of the Dwarvish Lords seems to commemorate an achievement of conquest & culture rather than a technological or magical peak. Many relics follow that pattern: an important thing happened, therefore some part of that important thing is now a powerful item. For example, Dhalver-nar was a historically important Cleric, so now each of his teeth has a power. It's not about advanced dental technology, it's just an association with a fateful historical event.


I didn't actually remember which sources had which material, just that all the Rod of Seven Parts material talks about the Vaati and vice versa. Here are two supporting quotes that came up on a quick search:
Thanks for looking those up, it seems that one source gives details, one gives a modestly supportive broad stroke, and the other ~7 do not support your point at all.

That's well within the bounds of what I had originally said:


(...) the Wind Dukes of Aaqa are just a broad-stroke allusion in most sources.

So, I think in the final analysis your sources agree with my point.



Actually, when 3e came out, people liked it due to its simplicity, as it was head and shoulders better than AD&D when it came to mechanical unity, clarity of prose, standardization of structure, and so forth. The idea that people like 3e because it's "overly complicated" is a meme that arose during the 3e/4e edition wars to support the "4e streamlined everything so it's better" narrative, and doesn't at all reflect the opinion on 3e at the time
3e systematized things which had been ad-hoc in 2e, just as 2e systematized things which had been ad-hoc in 1e.

The 3e systematization did simplify some things, but also allowed for new types of complexity.

By the end of its run, 3.x was probably just as complicated as 2e had been, albeit in different ways.

(4e didn't live long enough to become the complexity villain, but if it had been as well-supported in terms of content, it might have gotten there eventually.)



There is one other consideration for Prestige Options and how they fit in, to use them as "patches" for certain thematic/mechanical combos that seem effective but actually aren't. For example, combining the Lightning Warrior with the Thundermancer sounds like it'd be a cool, thematic character, but limitations to the system prevent those classes' features from working with one another. In DnD terms, an example of this is a situation where you can't attack and cast a spell at the same time, so you're stuck being EITHER a Thundermancer OR a Lightning Warrior rather than feeling like both at once.

A Prestige Option-esc change to the game can fix that. However, these are less of a "specialized class" sort of deal, and more of a "If you happen to be these two things, here's some glue to hold them together". A good way of implementing that is providing a bonus based on the lowest level class in the combo. For example, "If you make an attack, you can cast a spell as part of your attack from the Thundermancer spell list, as long as that spell has no higher spell level than the lowest of your Thundermancer and Lightning Warrior levels". This rewards someone who dabbles, as well as those who lean into the Prestige Option, but doesn't require someone to do either as that'd be against the point.

As glue they leave a lot to be desired, and if you're going to homebrew a PrC for a specific character then that begs the question -- why not just homebrew a base class for that class combo?

Duskblade might be a good place to start, for that theoretical archetype.

------ ====== ------

One value I see in PrCs is giving players something to aim their builds at.

It's potentially negative value if you never homebrew, but if you do homebrew then you can give campaign-appropriate and setting-specific targets for the players to hit.

(Which they're free to ignore, of course -- but when they later see these PrCs in the wild, they'll have a ballpark for capability and organizational details.)

PairO'Dice Lost
2020-05-21, 01:49 PM
Tovag Baragu is basically a fantasy interplanar Stonehenge, and I'm not sure that we should consider Stonehenge as from a more advanced civilization. It's more of a location than a relic anyway. You could spin it as tech, but you could also spin it as crude stone-age monoliths capping some natural planar phenomenon. In both cases it might plausibly be dangerous to muck with, but there's no necessity for advanced tech to get that functionality.

The Axe of the Dwarvish Lords seems to commemorate an achievement of conquest & culture rather than a technological or magical peak. Many relics follow that pattern: an important thing happened, therefore some part of that important thing is now a powerful item. For example, Dhalver-nar was a historically important Cleric, so now each of his teeth has a power. It's not about advanced dental technology, it's just an association with a fateful historical event.

Artifacts generally have an association with particular historical periods or events, sure, that's how they get famous. But the point I was originally making, you may recall, is that the fallen civilizations are generally assumed to be more advanced than current ones because they leave axes of dwarvish lords and Tovag...Baragus? Baragii? lying around in excellent condition and perfect working order for later generations to find, as opposed to real-world less-advanced civilizations that might leave some ruins and fragments of cuneiform and that's it because their materials and construction practices aren't up to snuff.

Whether Tovags Baragu are artifacts because they make gates themselves or because they harness and channel natural gates doesn't actually matter, because in either case modern Oeridian arcanists don't know how they work and can't recreate them. If the actual Stonehenge was made of pillars of an unknown type of stone that could take nuclear bombs to the face without a scratch and looked like they hadn't aged a day over the past five millennia, and walking through a Stonehenge arch could teleport someone to Mars with a step, we'd consider the Stonehenge-builders pretty darn advanced even if we discovered that Stonehenge was "merely" a control mechanism for some sort of natural teleportation phenomenon.

And, more importantly for general setting fluff, once you've established that Ancient Baklun and Suel and all those other fallen high-magic civilizations left a bunch of artifacts lying around, it's easy to justify any number of new artifacts and relics with "Oh, those silly Baklunish, look what else they got up to" without having to have one-off spaceship crashes or planar-conjuctions-of-the-week for each one.


Thanks for looking those up, it seems that one source gives details, one gives a modestly supportive broad stroke, and the other ~7 do not support your point at all.

That's well within the bounds of what I had originally said:



So, I think in the final analysis your sources agree with my point.

:smallannoyed: You said one "could" write up a backstory where the Ro7P is from a more advanced civilization and there could be other reasonable explanations. I pointed out that that's already the case because the Vaati had an interplanar empire, and that the Rod already has a singular official backstory. You objected to that by saying they were just an allusion in most sources, which doesn't say anything about whether they actually had such an empire. I said they explicitly had an interplanar empire. You found a single source that was merely an allusion that didn't actually disprove them having an empire while claiming to have more sources. I showed there were multiple other later sources on the Vaati that you weren't considering. You pulled out another source that didn't disprove them having an empire. I provided quotes showing that they did, indeed, have an interplanar empire. Your "final analysis" that you'd have to invent the Vaati civilization that already explicitly exists is wrong.

It's as if you said "Sure, you could come up with an interpretation that Darth Vader is secretly Luke Skywalker's father, I guess," and I pointed out the "No, I am your father!" line in ESB and the pregnancy plotline in AotC, and you insisted that because only 2 of the 9 Star Wars episodes refer to him being Luke's father and Vader and Luke are merely mentioned in other context in the other movies that they're not actually related.


3e systematized things which had been ad-hoc in 2e, just as 2e systematized things which had been ad-hoc in 1e.

The 3e systematization did simplify some things, but also allowed for new types of complexity.

By the end of its run, 3.x was probably just as complicated as 2e had been, albeit in different ways.

Oh, it definitely ended up on the more complex end, I was just objecting to the idea that people were attracted to 3e because of its complication when in fact people switched over originally because, comparing 3e core to 2e core at the time of 3e's release, 3e was vastly simpler and more approachable.


One value I see in PrCs is giving players something to aim their builds at.

It's potentially negative value if you never homebrew, but if you do homebrew then you can give campaign-appropriate and setting-specific targets for the players to hit.

(Which they're free to ignore, of course -- but when they later see these PrCs in the wild, they'll have a ballpark for capability and organizational details.)

Agreed. "Red Wizard" is a cool thing to want to be in a way that "random normal specialist wizard with some sort of Circle Magic feat" is not, and the fact that one must be 6th+ level to officially be a Red Wizard automatically gives them a minimum threat level in a way that "here's a bunch of normal specialist wizards who wear red a lot" does not. Not all PrCs should be associated with an organization in that way, certainly, but such PrCs do have tangible advantages over setting-based archetypes/subclasses/paragon paths/etc.

Nifft
2020-05-21, 02:26 PM
Artifacts generally have an association with particular historical periods or events, sure, that's how they get famous. But the point I was originally making, you may recall, is that the fallen civilizations are generally assumed to be more advanced than current ones because they leave axes of dwarvish lords and Tovag...Baragus? Baragii? lying around in excellent condition and perfect working order for later generations to find, as opposed to real-world less-advanced civilizations that might leave some ruins and fragments of cuneiform and that's it because their materials and construction practices aren't up to snuff.

Whether Tovags Baragu are artifacts because they make gates themselves or because they harness and channel natural gates doesn't actually matter, because in either case modern Oeridian arcanists don't know how they work and can't recreate them. If the actual Stonehenge was made of pillars of an unknown type of stone that could take nuclear bombs to the face without a scratch and looked like they hadn't aged a day over the past five millennia, and walking through a Stonehenge arch could teleport someone to Mars with a step, we'd consider the Stonehenge-builders pretty darn advanced even if we discovered that Stonehenge was "merely" a control mechanism for some sort of natural teleportation phenomenon.

And, more importantly for general setting fluff, once you've established that Ancient Baklun and Suel and all those other fallen high-magic civilizations left a bunch of artifacts lying around, it's easy to justify any number of new artifacts and relics with "Oh, those silly Baklunish, look what else they got up to" without having to have one-off spaceship crashes or planar-conjuctions-of-the-week for each one. At this point, though, what you've done is some sleight-of-hand.

Your argument is now:
- Advanced civilizations once existed, and they're gone now.
- Here's a thing we don't understand and can't reproduce.
- Since nobody can prove the thing didn't come from the advanced civ, therefore it did.

I think this falls under confirmation bias.



:smallannoyed: You said one "could" write up a backstory where the Ro7P is from a more advanced civilization and there could be other reasonable explanations. I pointed out that that's already the case because the Vaati had an interplanar empire, and that the Rod already has a singular official backstory. You objected to that by saying they were just an allusion in most sources, which doesn't say anything about whether they actually had such an empire. I said they explicitly had an interplanar empire. You found a single source that was merely an allusion that didn't actually disprove them having an empire while claiming to have more sources. I showed there were multiple other later sources on the Vaati that you weren't considering. You pulled out another source that didn't disprove them having an empire. I provided quotes showing that they did, indeed, have an interplanar empire. Your "final analysis" that you'd have to invent the Vaati civilization that already explicitly exists is wrong. Uh, no, what I'm saying is that using the Rod in your game doesn't require owning every source that ever existed, nor poring through them to find one which contains more detail, and then importing that one source into your home game.

I'm saying that the artifact appeared in many places, and having any one of those places available gives you enough to use the artifact -- but most do not contain your preferred backstory, and that means the artifact can and will appear in many games run by people who never even read, let alone accepted, that backstory.



It's as if you said "Sure, you could come up with an interpretation that Darth Vader is secretly Luke Skywalker's father, I guess," and I pointed out the "No, I am your father!" line in ESB and the pregnancy plotline in AotC, and you insisted that because only 2 of the 9 Star Wars episodes refer to him being Luke's father and Vader and Luke are merely mentioned in other context in the other movies that they're not actually related. That's not an honest comparison, and you ought to be smart enough to have known that already.

D&D modules are optional supplements, which are not at all like sequels to the DMG.



Oh, it definitely ended up on the more complex end, I was just objecting to the idea that people were attracted to 3e because of its complication when in fact people switched over originally because, comparing 3e core to 2e core at the time of 3e's release, 3e was vastly simpler and more approachable. 3e was very approachable early because it addressed the best-known problems and issues of 2e. That created new areas for complexity to emerge, and of course that's exactly what happened.

4e did the same thing, and so did 5e.

The surprising thing 5e seems to be doing in contrast to all previous editions is tightening its publication belt and not pushing out too many new books -- though I guess it could be argued that oD&D and BECMI kinda did that already.


Agreed. "Red Wizard" is a cool thing to want to be in a way that "random normal specialist wizard with some sort of Circle Magic feat" is not, and the fact that one must be 6th+ level to officially be a Red Wizard automatically gives them a minimum threat level in a way that "here's a bunch of normal specialist wizards who wear red a lot" does not. Not all PrCs should be associated with an organization in that way, certainly, but such PrCs do have tangible advantages over setting-based archetypes/subclasses/paragon paths/etc. Organizational PrCs were an idea with some merit, which was executed poorly, perhaps due to the conflicting uses each was supposed to present.

Paragon Paths could in theory capture a lot of the good parts, and avoid most of the conflict factors, but they have too much 4e on them to make much headway in the current emotional meta-game.

NigelWalmsley
2020-05-21, 04:35 PM
Paragon Paths could in theory capture a lot of the good parts, and avoid most of the conflict factors, but they have too much 4e on them to make much headway in the current emotional meta-game.

I'm pretty sure if you named them Prestige Classes, but used the mechanics for Paragon Paths where they're better, no one would care. The people who are going to do that kind of hate by association are not the people who will dig deep enough to notice, provided you make a game that is good instead of bad.

PairO'Dice Lost
2020-05-24, 04:45 AM
Spoilering the increasingly-tangential aside about fallen civilizations:


At this point, though, what you've done is some sleight-of-hand.

Your argument is now:
- Advanced civilizations once existed, and they're gone now.
- Here's a thing we don't understand and can't reproduce.
- Since nobody can prove the thing didn't come from the advanced civ, therefore it did.

I think this falls under confirmation bias.

I didn't change my argument at all. Here's how this tangent started:

Any fallen civilizations of note in D&D settings are generally assumed to be more advanced than current because an equivalent or less-advanced civilizations wouldn't leave eternally-powered nigh-impervious relics around for the modern era to find.

D&D magic being a thing means that an individual can create an eternally-powered nigh-impervious relic without the aid of any particular infrastructure.

Anyone can do the "eternally-powered" part, but by "nigh-impervious" I was referring to actual minor and major artifacts, which are head and shoulders above modern items power-wise, generally unique in capability, and specifically no longer creatable in the modern era.

The first two bullets are things I've been saying the whole time, and the last bullet is you taking my claiming "fallen advanced civilizations are a generic piece of background flavor used for a bunch of artifacts in a bunch of settings" and turning that into me claiming "all artifacts always and forever come from fallen advanced civilizations because that's the only possible explanation given" for some reason.


Uh, no, what I'm saying is that using the Rod in your game doesn't require owning every source that ever existed, nor poring through them to find one which contains more detail, and then importing that one source into your home game.

I'm saying that the artifact appeared in many places, and having any one of those places available gives you enough to use the artifact -- but most do not contain your preferred backstory, and that means the artifact can and will appear in many games run by people who never even read, let alone accepted, that backstory.

That's not an honest comparison, and you ought to be smart enough to have known that already.

D&D modules are optional supplements, which are not at all like sequels to the DMG.

You're claiming that a few paragraphs of DM-fills-in-the-blanks flavor about the Rod in the 1e DMG are more influential and accepted than the 2e adventure module that literally revolves around the Rod and has multiple Vaati actually show up and meet the PCs or the two 3e adventures in a hugely popular adventure path that literally revolve around discovering the lore of the Vaati. Of those three sources, I doubt it's the latter two that run into the the "never even read" issue for people using the Vaati in their games. :smallamused:

Further, if I google "Rod of Seven Parts" the first hit I get is the Wikipedia page for the module, not the artifact itself, and the 1e DMG entry for the Rod isn't even cited anywhere on the page; if I google "Vaati D&D" the first official source I get is an online copy of the 2e Monstrous Manual entry, from which the later Dragon writeup on the Vaati was copy-pasted almost verbatim. Anyone coming into the game fresh who hasn't read any of those sources is going to get pointed to the full 2e and 3e sources rather than the sketched-out 1e source.

Saying that the Wind Dukes were a well-known advanced ancient civilization based on what have been the definitive sources on them for the past 24 years shouldn't really be a controversial statement, and comparing ignoring all that to ignoring ESB and RotS in favor of ANH and TPM is, I'd say, plenty fair.


Organizational PrCs were an idea with some merit, which was executed poorly, perhaps due to the conflicting uses each was supposed to present.

Paragon Paths could in theory capture a lot of the good parts, and avoid most of the conflict factors, but they have too much 4e on them to make much headway in the current emotional meta-game.


I'm pretty sure if you named them Prestige Classes, but used the mechanics for Paragon Paths where they're better, no one would care. The people who are going to do that kind of hate by association are not the people who will dig deep enough to notice, provided you make a game that is good instead of bad.

Agreed. 5e subclasses already resemble 4e's Theme+Path+Destiny setup more than any other "advanced class option" setup to someone only looking at D&D and not considering PF archetypes or other third-party takes on the same idea, and 5e explicitly divides the game into explicit tiers with pretty sharp breakpoints similarly to 4e, and both things seem to be pretty well received even by virulently anti-4e players. If 5e Unearthed Arcana were to come out tomorrow with an article on making separate "heroic subclasses" and "paragon subclasses" and "epic subclasses" for more class customization options, I bet most players wouldn't even blink.

Segev
2020-05-29, 12:37 PM
Agreed. 5e subclasses already resemble 4e's Theme+Path+Destiny setup more than any other "advanced class option" setup to someone only looking at D&D and not considering PF archetypes or other third-party takes on the same idea, and 5e explicitly divides the game into explicit tiers with pretty sharp breakpoints similarly to 4e, and both things seem to be pretty well received even by virulently anti-4e players. If 5e Unearthed Arcana were to come out tomorrow with an article on making separate "heroic subclasses" and "paragon subclasses" and "epic subclasses" for more class customization options, I bet most players wouldn't even blink.

While I know this is "Segev's opinion" as much as anything, my reactions to 4e have been pretty spot-on with the majority anti-4e reactions, so I will use my own metrics to explain why I think think you're right, PairO'Dice Lost. What drove me away from 4e was how every class felt the same, mechanically. They all used the same subsystem, one based on 3e's Martial Adepts. And I liked 3e's Martial Adepts, but I didn't want them to be the only subsystem in the game.

5e moved away from that, and gave different subsystems to different classes and subclasses, which lends to feeling like you're playing something different when you play a cleric versus when you play a fighter vs. when you play a rogue. So long as these hypothetical "paragon subclasses" and "epic subclasses" preserved 5e's existing approach to subsystems, you're right: nobody would bat an eye at them in the "3e v 4e wars" sense. (There would be lots of criticism and lots of praise as people digested the new mechanics and argued over whether they were any good or not, but that's something that's been true since AT LEAST 3e.)

El Dorado
2020-05-29, 06:58 PM
I had one really good experience with one of my characters achieving a prestige class, specifically the eldritch knight. This was prior to Pathfinder debuting the magus class, so armored melee fighter/wizard combos took some work. I had built into my character's backstory as a driving goal so he was always laser-focused on making it happen.

Mechanically, it was definitely rocky. First level as wizard to get a masterwork sword as a starting item (and a bonded item at that). I insisted that the character wear armor, but even with the arcane armor feats, more than one spell fizzled in combat. Also, it was a homebrew setting so special materials (like mithral) or specific items (elven chainmail) that could help with ASF% weren't available.

Due to campaign events, he didn't achieve eldritch knight until after wizard 5/fighter 3 but it was memorable. The DM portrayed EKs as an arcane paladin order of sorts, complete with a code of conduct and having the other PCs speak on my character's behalf during the initiation ceremony.

The journey was sometimes frustrating because the mechanics and available items weren't what I envisioned. But the prestige class format (it's not something you start with but build to) helped keep me engaged despite any shortcomings.

Psyren
2020-05-30, 05:17 PM
Even after the debut of hybrid classes like Magus, there are some concepts that Prestige Classes can help with. For example, one of my favorite uses for Eldritch Knight is alongside a White-Haired Witch. The opportunity cost is low (you have no hexes to give up, and your hair gains all its powers along with 15ft. reach by 8th level) but in return you get nearly double the BAB you would have gotten with straight witch, a stronger fort save, access to fighter-only feats, and the spell critical ability.

Segev
2020-05-30, 09:39 PM
Even after the debut of hybrid classes like Magus, there are some concepts that Prestige Classes can help with. For example, one of my favorite uses for Eldritch Knight is alongside a White-Haired Witch. The opportunity cost is low (you have no hexes to give up, and your hair gains all its powers along with 15ft. reach by 8th level) but in return you get nearly double the BAB you would have gotten with straight witch, a stronger fort save, access to fighter-only feats, and the spell critical ability.

While I do not dispute your point, I think that speaks more to a flaw with the White Haired Witch than anything else.

In fact, I wrote an alternative (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?587506-White-Haired-Witch-as-Hexes) where all the white haired witch powers are hexes, and you just play a normal witch to get them.

Psyren
2020-05-30, 09:48 PM
While I do not dispute your point, I think that speaks more to a flaw with the White Haired Witch than anything else.

In fact, I wrote an alternative (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?587506-White-Haired-Witch-as-Hexes) where all the white haired witch powers are hexes, and you just play a normal witch to get them.

That's a fair point. Losing Major and Grand hexes for rogue talents was really an abomination. That, and a combat-focused witch (which even the archetype's blurb said it was trying to be) staying at 1/2 BAB and d6 HD with its signature weapon not scaling in any way other than gaining reach was unfortunate to say the least.

Granted, it's a signature weapon it can use even when shapeshifted, so that's still something.

EndlessKng
2020-06-01, 06:25 AM
No you don't. Against their rough equivalents, sure. But it's fine if there's content that doesn't get used much. You should have a better basic methodology in writing PRCs than was the norm in much of 3e, but there doesn't have to be this tight claw around the content that's allowed to exist so that only the stuff that's part of some perfect, enclosed framework is allowed in.

If the worry is these public events like the adventurers league or whatever, just implement something like Magic where only core content plus current season content is allowed -- or just use pregen characters.

You don't even need to go as far as "core+current season." AL already implements a rule that says you can have only your core book and one other supplement in your build, with I believe an exception for spells. This allows for new content to be tested against only one source - the core books - for official play. If people come up with broken concepts in home games, that's on the DM, but the official games are limited so that any character can individually only pull from two sources.

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As for Prestige Classes, I definitely have grown to see some of the flaws in them, but I still enjoy them. Archetypes are fun and all, but there's a major flaw in the flavoring of archetypes: you're limited in how many you can take. In Pathfinder, you're limited by needing to avoid overlapping feature adjustment; in D&D, you basically get one per class, that's it. And yes, this keeps some mechanical things in check, but it also makes situations where you have difficulty hitting certain themes in the build through a single class or even multiclassing. Yes, I can go off and call my evoker a war wizard if I want to, but if the features of the war wizard subclass, which is mutually exclusive from the evoker, are what define a war wizard in the world, then I can't get both options. You can't be both a samurai and an eldritch knight; you could get some similar effects by dipping to warlock and picking up Pact of the Blade at third level to summon your ancestral weapon to your hand and then unload on your opponent, but that has a different flavor from the Eldritch Knight. With prestige classes, in an ideal situation, I have the opportunity to blend my flavoring more. Now, the fact that later supplements added base classes that tapped into thematic territory of prior prestige classes did throw this off, but when you're looking at the core classes in 3.5, you can see how prestige classes can add extra flavor and back it up with mechanical tweaks.

Pathfinder showed ways to lessen the need for prestige classes as flavor with both the variable archetypes and the psuedo-feats in each class - your hexes and arcana and other choices you made every other level from a class-specific list. That may have been a smarter tack in the long run overall, and does capture a better balance between making one class have a lot of flavor potential and backing it up with some mechanical benefit as appropriate. I also like 4e's ways of using a side mechanic to the class progression like themes and paragon paths and epic destinies, though again that felt a little too limiting (but less so than 5e archetypes because they happened separate from an archetype-like selection - that selection may influence the choices somewhat but they could be made independently if archetype isn't a prereq). But given the context they arose in, Prestige classes conceptually made sense, and I think there could still be some room for them out there with some tweaking.

(Side note: I personally disagree with the idea of just putting the onus on DMs to come up with org benefits rather than having classes or archetypes or something solid in a book represent it; some DMs struggle with homebrewing stuff, and others will just refuse and force you to stick with what's in the book. And while the latter is problematic in its own way, there shouldn't be a stigma against DMs who just lack the mechanical graspings to freely homebrew even small things for fear of unbalancing the game - giving them a bit of a boost in the form of something concrete in the actual rules can help those DMs out a lot and take the stress off of them. If you are confident you can do it well, then great, but don't force someone to have to homebrew when they don't feel confident in their ability to do so).