Half-casting prestige classes: are they ever worth it? [Archive]

RandomPeasant

2022-05-21, 01:35 PM

Just boost them all to full casting. There are a few reason for this, and some arguments that are typically made against it, but overall I think it's the right call.

First, as has been pointed out, there are full casting PrCs that are better than any partial casting PrC. Incantatrix has been mentioned, but Dweomerkeeper, Hathran, and Shadowcraft Mage are out there too. And it's not just high-OP PrCs. Even something completely inoffensive like Divine Oracle or Mage of the Arcane Order or Loremaster is better than most of the PrCs that are saddled with 5/10 casting. Would you really pick Green Star Adept over Contemplative even if they had the same casting progression?

Second, partial casting PrCs are worse than the best things you could be doing as a spellcaster. If you're a Wizard/Acolyte of the Skin, very little of your power is coming from being an Acolyte of the Skin. No one's here for the cold resistance or 1/day Fiendish Glare, they're looking for teleport or finger of death or polymorph. Honestly, this extends even to the high-op full casting PrCs that get people all worked up. At the limit, what you can do with planar binding is better than what you can do with Incantatrix.

Third, encouraging people to take PrCs is good because PrCs make characters interesting. Do you know how many class features a Sorcerer gets after 1st? Zero. Ditto for a Cleric. People's characters should be interesting, and reflect the vision they have for the character. PrCs are the best mechanism the game provides for that, and the idea that it should be a difficult choice whether or not to take one encourages people to play characters that are less interesting.

Fourth, one of the premises of 3.5 is the idea of Open Multiclassing. You can take whatever combination of classes you want, and you get a workable character out at the other end. To be frank, that mostly doesn't work. Wizard 4/Druid 2/Rogue 1/Fighter 1 is a crap build. But Wizard 5/Divine Oracle 2/Shadowcraft Mage 1/Mage of the Arcane Order 1? That's a playable character. So, based on the design intent of the game, we really should be making things more like full casting PrCs, not less.

Fifth, the power loss from giving up levels of casting is inherently unbalanced, particularly if you multiclass. At 6th level, a PrC'd Wizard that gave up a level of casting has lost a 2nd level spell slot and a 3rd level spell slot. At 15th level, she's lost a 5th level spell and access to 8th level spells. What one thing could possibly be worth both of those prices, especially since there's no guarantee that all those levels have to be from the same PrC? If you really want to balance casting PrCs, the model you want is the Archmage, which trades fixed costs (spell slots) for fixed benefits (the various High Arcana).

That seems like a pretty compelling case to me, to be honest. But there are arguments against it, and they deserve to be engaged with.

The most common is "casters are powerful enough already". And while that's true, it's not true of the casters that take these PrCs, so it's mostly a red herring. You're not giving anything to the Wizard/Incantatrix/IotSFV/Shadowcraft Mage when you make the Warmage/Green Star Adept not suck.

A variant on this is "you'll just make the game less balanced". But that depends pretty heavily on how you think people will respond to the changes. It's true that Beguiler/Mindbender gets better if Mindbender becomes full casting. But it's both weaker than Beguiler/Rainbow Servant and closer to the power level of a straight Wizard, so it's entirely possible that the observed power band gets narrower, because no one was playing Mindbender before.

Another argument is "we should just nerf stuff". To which I say: do you want to do all that work? How many partial casting PrCs do people take now? Do you want to try to tune every casting PrC to a balance target that, at most, a handful successfully hit? Or do you want a quick fix to casting PrCs so you can spend time making life easier for non-casters?

And, finally, you get some people saying "it'll make single-classed casters suck". Which, sure, but keep a few things in mind. First, those builds already kinda suck. As noted, Cleric 20 gets no additional class features compared to Cleric 1. It's not really clear to me why you'd want to preserve that. Second, casters that do get class features are perfectly capable of competing with full casting PrCs. Druid 20 is a fine build, because you get rewarded for sticking with Druid. Want more Wizard 20s? Make Wizard 20 as tempting as Druid 20. Third, while it's true that universal full casting hurts the relative standing of single-classed caster builds, that's ultimately only a single build per class. What makes that a build we should protect more than the various partial-casting PrCs that suffer today?

sleepyphoenixx

2022-05-21, 02:10 PM

Unless it gives a very strong benefit all PrC's should offer full casting imo.
Swiftblade is only 6/10 casting, but it's still worth taking for a gish because the benefits are just that good. That's a case where losing casting progression to balance it makes sense.

Other than that though most half-caster PrC's are mediocre at best even with full casting.
Most of the caster PrCs with really good abilities already have full progression as far as i know.

loky1109

2022-05-21, 02:23 PM

Gruftzwerg

2022-05-21, 03:11 PM

Imho they can be worth it.

Most people don't want to always play a T1 or T2 character (to the full extend of that tier level!). And if you want to do that, nothing stops you. There are plenty full caster options.

But others like to sacrifice some of the already to strong feeling spellpower in exchange for medicore but flavorful abilities. Take gishes as example. While the original thought was melee char + 9th lvl spell, there are plenty of people running builds who will never reach 9th and are fine with that. Not every build needs Wish/Miracle and whatnot.

You also have to consider that these kind of changes would give full casters even more optimization power and would further increase the gap between casters and non casters. Unless everybody wants to play a full caster, this is another point that will break your game balance.

If you want to see an extreme example of non-full-casting prc for TO purposes, have a look at my BoBaFeat build. Wyrm Wizard is a half-progress prc which gives you access to spells from other class lists. This is a very strong ability that imho needs some kind of sacrifice. Thus the caster lvl loss is justified.
Void Disciple has unique abilities that can give you temporary feats or even skill ranks (yeah RANKS!). This has so much abuse potential that giving this prc also full casting would be nuts.
Combine the two otherwise weak looking prc and conquer the multiverse with your clone army of wannabe pun-puns..

Sure not all classes will have that potential and BoBaFeat was never meant to be played. But neither do most people play on high optimization lvls.
So the question(s) should be: "Do really all your PCs at your table sole play T1-2 builds to their full extend (and annoy the DM by constantly skipping his prepared stuff)? Or you do maybe have some mundane T3-5 builds and a half casting prc with some cool fluff would fit your game balance more?"

RandomPeasant

2022-05-21, 03:33 PM

But others like to sacrifice some of the already to strong feeling spellpower in exchange for medicore but flavorful abilities.

People aren't playing partial casting PrCs because they lose casting. They are playing them despite the fact that they lose casting. No one looks at a PrC like Mage of the Arcane Order and says "you know, this is cool, and I could see myself playing a character based around it, but it just doesn't kick me in the teeth enough".

You also have to consider that these kind of changes would give full casters even more optimization power and would further increase the gap between casters and non casters. Unless everybody wants to play a full caster, this is another point that will break your game balance.

Would they? Suppose I really like Incantatrix and Green Star Adept, but don't like the latter enough to play it if it costs me casting. Wouldn't buffing it reduce the power gap between casters and non-casters, because it would lead to me playing a character who was less powerful overall by taking Green Star Adept instead of Incantatrix. But even if we accept that buffing partial casters would, in all cases, result in increased observed imbalance, this is just crab bucketing. If martials are underpowered, fix that by making martials better, not by nerfing optional abilities that casters can just not take if they aren't good.

Wyrm Wizard is a half-progress prc which gives you access to spells from other class lists. This is a very strong ability that imho needs some kind of sacrifice. Thus the caster lvl loss is justified.

This is an ability you can get by just buying items, and which is weak 99% of the time. Yes, it's abusive with body outside body, but that's because body outside body is abusive. It's like saying that "being a Wizard" should cause you to lose casting because polymorph exists. The problem is polymorph, not the existence of Wizards. Just nerf that. Justifying partial casting progression on the basis that you can do abusive things with it just results in PrCs that are only used to do abusive things, rather than being used in interesting, balanced builds.

"Do really all your PCs at your table sole play T1-2 builds to their full extend (and annoy the DM by constantly skipping his prepared stuff)? Or you do maybe have some mundane T3-5 builds and a half casting prc with some cool fluff would fit your game balance more?"

Half-casting and game-breaking are separate things. Wizard 6/Green Star Adept 10 gets the same planar binding as Wizard 11 and breaks the game just as hard with it. Whereas Warmage 5/Green Star Adept 10 is totally fine even at full casting. If you're playing in a low-power environment, you can just let people have full casting progression, because casters are not doing abusive things. The guy slinging fireballs and lightning bolts doesn't also need to lose half his casting, he's already fine.

Gruftzwerg

2022-05-21, 04:29 PM

Would they? Suppose I really like Incantatrix and Green Star Adept, but don't like the latter enough to play it if it costs me casting. Wouldn't buffing it reduce the power gap between casters and non-casters, because it would lead to me playing a character who was less powerful overall by taking Green Star Adept instead of Incantatrix. But even if we accept that buffing partial casters would, in all cases, result in increased observed imbalance, this is just crab bucketing. If martials are underpowered, fix that by making martials better, not by nerfing optional abilities that casters can just not take if they aren't good.
Would you believe me that I never have seen anyone in over 20years of 3.5 ever playing an Incantatrix? But I've seen some Green Star Adepts in the meanwhile, because the players just did like the fluff and didn't powergame. 95% of the games that I played was low optimization and low tiers (or at levels where caster aren't demigods). Most players I know optimize for fluff and not for power when it comes to their characters.

And I say all that while claiming to be "theorycrafter" and building high TO builds here (in the forum) non stop just for fun's sake and to share em with the community.

As I said, if "everybody" in your group likes to play full casters, go for it. But if there should be people who just want to play mundane characters and not demigods, you have to make compromises.

And by saying "make martials better" you only show that you don't get the problem between Tiers and that there is no other way than magic/Psionics to get to the higher tiers. We already have ToB maneuvers, which already are like magic to some degree. But even that didn't help them to get to the higher Tiers (1 & 2). (Note that the gap between T2 & T3 is the biggest power gap between the tiers).
The problem is just that T1/2 classes have access to spells reaching into the thousands to chose from. There is something for anything. Do you really want to do the silly amount of paperwork for homebrewing that many options for your mundane classes? GL & HF

And what do you do if a player doesn't want a casting class? How is the full T1/2 caster not gonna either hold back or overshadow the mundane character. I mean, you should try to avoid playing as BMX Bandit and Angel Summoner (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFuMpYTyRjw) ;)

Half-casting and game-breaking are separate things. Wizard 6/Green Star Adept 10 gets the same planar binding as Wizard 11 and breaks the game just as hard with it. Whereas Warmage 5/Green Star Adept 10 is totally fine even at full casting. If you're playing in a low-power environment, you can just let people have full casting progression, because casters are not doing abusive things. The guy slinging fireballs and lightning bolts doesn't also need to lose half his casting, he's already fine.

So lets see: Assuming I as DM would struggle with the thought that one of my players could get Planar Binding, because it would kill to many plot relevant thing. Either by making em to easy or even irrelevant. Shortening the entire adventure also kills potential funny moments. If my player picks the Wizard 6/Green Star Adept 10 build, I have 5 more lvl to end the campaign. Sounds like a good deal for a DM who would struggle with optimization/powerful PC abilities.

And the guy who likes to just blast dmg spells, he already did choose to not play the T1/2 class to its full extend. And yeah, for a blasting spell oriented build, loosing caster levels is to be avoided. Thus most blasting focused prc already have full casting. I can't recall any blasting focused prc without full casting atm (can you point to any?; I got curious now).
edit: Rage Mage comes to my mind, but that has a class feature to raise the caster lvl to "normal" values. Anything else?

RandomPeasant

2022-05-21, 04:50 PM

Would you believe me that I never have seen anyone in over 20years of 3.5 ever playing an Incantatrix? But I've seen some Green Star Adepts in the meanwhile, because the players just did like the fluff and didn't powergame.

That is, of course, not what you said. I am sure there are people who don't care very much about power level. The claim I am contesting, the claim you made, is that people are intentionally choosing the lower power option because it is lower power. Certainly some people are indifferent to power level, but those people are indifferent to power level, so why are their concerns persuasive to us in discussions of power level?

Most players I know optimize for fluff and not for power when it comes to their characters.

But who does it benefit for that to be a tradeoff people are asked to make? Suppose there's someone who both wants to be a green robot man and have a reasonably effective character at high levels. Why not just let him have both those things?

And by saying "make martials better" you only show that you don't get the problem between Tiers and that there is no other way than magic/Psionics to get to the higher tiers.

I'm not sure I follow the logic here. We can't fix the problem that non-casters aren't good enough because all the things that are currently good enough are casters?

The problem is just that T1/2 classes have access to spells reaching into the thousands to chose from. There is something for anything. Do you really want to do the silly amount of paperwork for homebrewing that many options for your mundane classes? GL & HF

If the problem is the thousands of spells, why are we wasting time fiddling around with the dozens of PrCs? Target the thing that's the actual problem, and let the guy who wants to wear a demon do that without needing to worry about whether or not that's the "right" choice mechanically.

And what do you do if a player doesn't want a casting class?

How does making some PrCs suck help you with that? Maybe Wizard/Green Star Adept is at the right power level for the guy looking to play a sword and board Fighter. But straight Wizard sure isn't, and it's not like we're forcing people to take half casting PrCs. If you can fix a balance problem by giving people the option to be worse if they want to, you don't have a balance problem to begin with, because people are self-regulating.

I have 5 more lvl to end the campaign. Sounds like a good deal for a DM who would struggle with optimization/powerful PC abilities.

Or you could ban planar binding and have infinity more levels to end the campaign. What gives? Why are we picking the solution that tells the guy who likes being a green robot that his character needs to suck when all it does is forestall the problem? Why not fix the problem with a solution that fixes only the problem?

And the guy who likes to just blast dmg spells, he already did choose to not play the T1/2 class to its full extend. And yeah, for a blasting spell oriented build, loosing caster levels is to be avoided. Thus most blasting focused prc already have full casting. I can't recall any blasting focused prc without full casting atm (can you point to any?; I got curious now).

That's just rejecting "blaster Green Star Adept" as a character concept. What if the thing I want to do is play a green statue that shoots fire at people? Why should that concept suffer mechanically? Which is not to say you're right about your factual claim either. Elemental Savant loses casting. Holy Scourge loses casting. Argent Savant looses casting. And, if we go beyond just "blaster PrCs", it's hard to see that the general principle holds up at all. You could look at Mindbender and Master Transmogrifist and see PrCs that lose casting because they attach to powerful concepts. But is the full-casting Alienist really doing anything less powerful than the partial-casting Effigy Master? What is the concept Acolyte of the Skin is gunning for that justifies losing five levels of casting?

Seward

2022-05-21, 08:12 PM

What you have to look at to make this determination is "Do the class features give you something that just more casting can't give you".

An example of a decent half-casting class, one used in actual builds, is Nature's Warrior. If you are a wildshape-oriented melee character, full bab, fast healing, a quite large natural armor boost if you stay with the class for all 5 levels and, if you have a lot of natural attacks, +2 untyped to each natural attack is actually superior to 3/4 bab and more druid spells, particularly if you find wild-shape-huge awkward. (combined with warshaper2, you can put up better numbers than a huge combat form with less vulnerability in a similar number of levels).

You won't be a tier 1 anymore, you'll be a tier3 (a melee character with a ****-ton of alternate class utility who can vaporize any enemy in full attack range as melee characters do in the teens and later, and can be built to either light or heavy infantry role, or switch-hit based on spell selection to do either role pretty well, plus some sidelines of buffing/utility magic/battlefield control). But that's the same tradeoff any gish makes, and as I can attest having played such a character it is plenty fun (including the ability to contribute quite a bit out of combat, even if you complain about wasting spell slots for Easy Trail instead of Barkskin on a travel day etc).

The Pathfinder version of Dragon Disciple is another decent example, it's got some caster advancement but also significant attribute boost and natural weapon/armor advancements that can build several styles of Gish (the statboosts work great with Pathfinder Polymorph, your caster levels get high enough to mix that with dimensional dervish or you can be just all about the strength and stack a variety of unarmed strike strength multipliers intended for much weaker monks and brawlers, including the str-based "knockout" attack while still advancing casting enough to get good Gish defense/mobility/utility stuff).

It is easier to find decent half-casters in the 3-5 level range than the 10 level range. (Magical Trickster, Ultimate Trickster and Human Paragon are some 3 level classes that lose a caster level at L1 that are still decent building blocks for some builds, even otherwise full caster builds).

Most full caster builds can't lose more than 1 level, and when doing that usually start with a prepared caster class, not the delayed casting of spont casting. Still it can make sense sometimes depending on what you're trying to do (a level of beastmaster is really necessary for a druid who is all about the animal companion, and is worth it. Stormcaster gives you at L5 nearly everything Born of 3 Thunders does without the daze effect, and if that's your jam, might be worth a level. There are others, just 2 I worked with recently when fooling about).

What it is important to realize is that if you commit to a half caster class you are no longer a primary caster after 4 levels and need to start adjusting your role in the party and playstyle to this if you formerly were a primary caster. While it is common to enter as a multiclass build, some have high enough caster level requirements that you go from L5 wizard/cleric/druid to something else by L8 and you need to adjust accordingly in play, and your party also has to adjust.

I was actually pretty impressed with a really terrible Secret Ingredient (Imaskari Vengeanc Taker) in how fast you shifted from a bog standard generic wizard (in a less exotic entry approach) to an assassin really good at killing your designated target in the surprise round, to the point of survival being statistically nearly impossible a few levels in, to being strictly less useful when not facing that target, being an arcane/assassin hybrid who is at about the level of Scar Faced Enforcer the rest of the time.

The point being if that killing a well researched opponent is your jam, as opposed to being a typical adventuring murder-hobbo this class is REALLY attractive.

If you read a half-caster class and don't go "OMG this is PERFECT for my character" you probably should set it gently aside.

But I'm the kind of contrarian who will sometimes take one of these horrible classes and see if I can make a character I'd enjoy playing, just as I did back in the day with fewer choices out there with other unpopular picks like Strength 18/Wis 8 Monk, a sorceress who picked all utility spells for her first couple levels and who didn't have an offensive spell stronger than magic missile till L10, a dwarf bard-barian with 12 charisma who grew into a warchanter, a straight-up arcane archer who outshot nearly every archer he ever encountered (mostly via system mastery, a bit via chasse before he became an AA) etc.

So if I was invited to a 3.5 campaign tomorrow I might just dig out all the horrible half caster classes and see what I could do with them, see if any sang to me, because I've kind of mined out all the other character ideas from more normal sources. This would be especially true if the campaign started at level 6+, since I prefer my characters play similar at low levels and high levels and unless you enter at L10, half caster classes tend to have a rather jarring shift in party role between L6-10.

Darg

2022-05-21, 09:17 PM

Ever try a warlock mindbender? You get a lot out of the class even if you lose out on blast damage and invocation progression. It's a fantastic class for interacting with the world even if not the best for dungeon crawls. Plus, who doesn't want their own permanent pet tarrasque following them around?

Biggus

2022-05-21, 09:28 PM

Just boost them all to full casting. There are a few reason for this, and some arguments that are typically made against it, but overall I think it's the right call. <snip>

You make some good points, but that's not what I want to do. I think it's largely a matter of taste, and what type of people you play with.

Another argument is "we should just nerf stuff". To which I say: do you want to do all that work? How many partial casting PrCs do people take now? Do you want to try to tune every casting PrC to a balance target that, at most, a handful successfully hit? Or do you want a quick fix to casting PrCs so you can spend time making life easier for non-casters?

Odd as it may sound, yes I do want to do all that work. I've already done a lot of it in fact, it's an ongoing project I've been doing for years now. I've fixed the most broken stuff in core to my own satisfaction, and quite a big chunk of non-core stuff as well.

It's not my goal to make every class exactly equal, that's an impossible task. What I'm trying to do is make every class playable, and no class so good it breaks the game completely.

First, as has been pointed out, there are full casting PrCs that are better than any partial casting PrC. Incantatrix has been mentioned, but Dweomerkeeper, Hathran, and Shadowcraft Mage are out there too. And it's not just high-OP PrCs. Even something completely inoffensive like Divine Oracle or Mage of the Arcane Order or Loremaster is better than most of the PrCs that are saddled with 5/10 casting. Would you really pick Green Star Adept over Contemplative even if they had the same casting progression?

Second, partial casting PrCs are worse than the best things you could be doing as a spellcaster. If you're a Wizard/Acolyte of the Skin, very little of your power is coming from being an Acolyte of the Skin. No one's here for the cold resistance or 1/day Fiendish Glare, they're looking for teleport or finger of death or polymorph. Honestly, this extends even to the high-op full casting PrCs that get people all worked up. At the limit, what you can do with planar binding is better than what you can do with Incantatrix.

Like Gruftzwerg, players who make all their decisions about their character on the basis of power are extremely rare in my experience, I can only think of one I've ever played with in fact. The typical thought process is "this looks cool, how can I make it work well?" not "is this the strongest option available?". Most people do avoid things that suck horribly though, which is why I want to bring everything at least to the point where it's not a major self-nerf to take it.

What you have to look at to make this determination is "Do the class features give you something that just more casting can't give you".

An example of a decent half-casting class, one used in actual builds, is Nature's Warrior. If you are a wildshape-oriented melee character, full bab, fast healing, a quite large natural armor boost if you stay with the class for all 5 levels and, if you have a lot of natural attacks, +2 untyped to each natural attack is actually superior to 3/4 bab and more druid spells, particularly if you find wild-shape-huge awkward. (combined with warshaper2, you can put up better numbers than a huge combat form with less vulnerability in a similar number of levels).

You won't be a tier 1 anymore, you'll be a tier3 (a melee character with a ****-ton of alternate class utility who can vaporize any enemy in full attack range as melee characters do in the teens and later, and can be built to either light or heavy infantry role, or switch-hit based on spell selection to do either role pretty well, plus some sidelines of buffing/utility magic/battlefield control). But that's the same tradeoff any gish makes, and as I can attest having played such a character it is plenty fun (including the ability to contribute quite a bit out of combat, even if you complain about wasting spell slots for Easy Trail instead of Barkskin on a travel day etc).

The Pathfinder version of Dragon Disciple is another decent example, it's got some caster advancement but also significant attribute boost and natural weapon/armor advancements that can build several styles of Gish (the statboosts work great with Pathfinder Polymorph, your caster levels get high enough to mix that with dimensional dervish or you can be just all about the strength and stack a variety of unarmed strike strength multipliers intended for much weaker monks and brawlers, including the str-based "knockout" attack while still advancing casting enough to get good Gish defense/mobility/utility stuff).

It is easier to find decent half-casters in the 3-5 level range than the 10 level range. (Magical Trickster, Ultimate Trickster and Human Paragon are some 3 level classes that lose a caster level at L1 that are still decent building blocks for some builds, even otherwise full caster builds).

Agreed, 5-level or less classes with half-casting don't lose you enough that you've completely crippled your spellcasting; consequently I've seen them used a lot more than 10-level half-casters. It was because of that I specified 5/10 casting in my OP, I probably should have also done so in the thread title.

The PF Dragon Disciple (and Arcane Archer) was one of the things which made me settle on 7/10 casting (or more precisely, since we play up to epic levels, 3/4 casting) as the acceptable minimum; when I look at those classes I think "not optimal, but could work perfectly adequately and be lots of fun". With 5/10 casting I pretty much always think "anything more than a dip is going to be too much of a price to pay".

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

Getting back to my original question: are there any 5/10 or 6/10 casting prestige classes which give such awesome class features they're worth taking for more than a level or two?

Seward

2022-05-21, 09:45 PM

The typical thought process is "this looks cool, how can I make it work well?" not "is this the strongest option available?"

This is me. Partly the reward is that when it comes together people go "How do you DO that?!"

Partly it is just internal satisfaction, contributing well to a party while using building blocks nobody in their right mind reach for under normal circumstances.

It is also slightly a restriction on the fact that I'm able to design higher charop PCs than most people I game with, so it's better to use my powers to make a bizzare concept cool, than to just break the expected limits of the game. However.

Sometimes, very rarely, you stumble on high charop by accident. As was the case with my dex-based Pathfinder tank, which started as an attempt to make a duelist that didn't suck. She became by far my highest charop build ever used in play in spite of being objectively a tier 3 kind of character. She was JUST THAT GOOD at being a tank, while being adequate at melee+random utility stuff. As in brutes were no threat, save/xxx spammers were no threat, touch attacks/rays were no threat, combat maneuvers were only a threat if you were really good, aoes were no threat and you could not just ignore her, she had offense that could do moderate but steady damage to anything, plus she looked just like a stupid barbarian who charged in and should be torn to shreds. She was a one-halfling action-economy destroyer, tempting people to waste actions on her and having no reason to think those actions would be wasted until the fight is half over because her party has run wild in the meantime.

Ironically, she never took a duelist level. Or even a PRC level. She got to about level 10 with 1-2 level dips in various base classes, then started adding barbarian levels till 15, which was the last play she got (Pathfinder Society play past L11 is rare). All those dips were needed to keep her offense relevant, but they gave her a huge boost to saving throws and tossed in a bunch of +2 to XXX limited abilities per day that stacked and access to basically every spell list but druid for minor buffs. Plus evasion, uncanny dodge and most of her AC being touch AC, trapfinding, disable device to L9 magic traps, lockpick to +40 locks+high perception. She could have been an amazing scout except following a god of the sun she insisted on multiple light sources always on around her, mundane and permanent magic item and temporary spells ranging from dancing lights to daylight.

RandomPeasant

2022-05-21, 09:53 PM

If you read a half-caster class and don't go "OMG this is PERFECT for my character" you probably should set it gently aside.

And that is exactly the problem. Many half-caster PrCs have really cool concepts. You shouldn't have to align exactly with what the PrC is trying to do for it to be worth taking. If your character would be cooler as a jade statue, you should make the call to become a jade statue without hesitation. The default should be "take a weird cool PrC that does a weird cool thing", and it should be a choice that requires real thought to deviate from that.

Ever try a warlock mindbender? You get a lot out of the class even if you lose out on blast damage and invocation progression. It's a fantastic class for interacting with the world even if not the best for dungeon crawls. Plus, who doesn't want their own permanent pet tarrasque following them around?

This is exactly the issue I was talking about earlier. If someone said "hey, I got a pet tarrasque" as a regular Wizard, that would be clearly identified as broken. Don't let people do broken things because they suffered through an underpowered build. Just make everything strong enough to work on its own.

Odd as it may sound, yes I do want to do all that work.

Well, if you're willing to do all the work, I'd ask why you're settling for the hackish solution of taking away whole levels of casting instead of having people trade off individual spell slots. That's balanceable to an essentially perfect degree, and the only reason to take away caster levels instead is that it's more work.

Like Gruftzwerg, players who make all their decisions about their character on the basis of power are extremely rare in my experience, I can only think of one I've ever played with in fact. The typical thought process is "this looks cool, how can I make it work well?" not "is this the strongest option available?".

Like I said to Gruftzwerg, if that's the kind of player you're dealing with, you don't need to worry about power and should make things easier for them and for you by just making it easy to make the cool thing work well. The guy who takes the strongest option available is never going to take Green Star Adept. He's never going to take Elemental Savant or Seeker of the Misty Isle. He's going to take Incantatrix. The only PrC you might get that guy to take by bumping it up to full progression is Swiftblade. So if you're not worried about that guy, stop worrying about him. Stop letting the chance he will abuse an option cause you to down-tune it for everyone else.

when I look at those classes I think "not optimal, but could work perfectly adequately and be lots of fun".

The question I would ask you is what you think when you look at Mage of the Arcane Order or Master Specialist. If it's not "this needs to be nerfed", why are you making classes with comparable or worse class features worse overall simply because the designers made them terrible?

Seward

2022-05-21, 10:11 PM

The question I would ask you is what you think when you look at Mage of the Arcane Order or Master Specialist. If it's not "this needs to be nerfed", why are you making classes with comparable or worse class features worse overall simply because the designers made them terrible?

I think "This is a full caster PRC" and the comparison is wizard20, Cleric20, Druid20, and generally the class features don't really change the overall power equation that much, barring weird combos that usually get banned, just like the worst Core abuses get banned.

I don't rate full caster builds on the same yardstick as a gish build (or divine gish) because the expected party role is different, plus so much depends on spells chosen on a given day (for tier 1) or at level up. (for tier2) and if I'm worried about my game balance I talk to the player about his spell build for a spont caster or his usual spells chosen for a prep caster when worried about party role and balance. Spells matter more than feats or classes for any full caster build, although anything that reduces metamagic cost (gear, feats, prcs, similar) will always get my full attention and we'll be having a discussion about how that is intended to be used. I give similar attention to things that boost caster level because there are spells with game assumptions about caster levels that break if you exceed character level by more than about 2.

As an aside, Pathfinder 1e made most classes a lot more like Druid, where taking a PRC is usually a choice about doing something significantly different from what the core class can do, with or without archetypes, not just "more plusses" on the base class. You give up something to get something. To the point where PRCs aren't actually that popular unless they really change your character somehow (eg, Dragon Disciple is a rare way to get accellerated stat boosts in important stats for a spontaneous caster gish. It sees use. Arcane archer is a way to cope with a game where your GM doesn't give out enough gear and you want to play an archer. It sees use. No base class lets you advance divine and arcane casting, so you need a mystic theurge type class if that is your kind of multiclass. It sees use, not that a charop type would usually choose it). So I see this problem a lot less in Pathfinder 1e builds than in 3.5 builds. You can usually see why somebody took a PRC in Pathfinder.

Gruftzwerg

2022-05-22, 02:22 AM

Just make everything strong enough to work on its own.

You see, it's not that I have never played highly optimized, high tier and high level parties. I did, but they get quickly boring. In the end, often it becomes an arms race where the question is something like: "who did worded his contingency spell trigger better" or has picked up "craft contingent spell". Or something similar extreme like who breaks the action economy better. And everything becomes a pain in the ass to DM since anything you prepare can and will be denied by a good selection of spells.

Gathering Information?
we have spells that can do that better

Random Encounters?
We have divination and teleport spells.

mundane encounters?
we have spells to skip that encounter.

....

The amount of high lvl spells that kills an arbitrary amount of possible plot devices is way to much.
Most epic stories from media (films, books, manga, comics..) can be fitted into 5~10 lvls in 3.5, and most are more towards lvl 5 than 10, because full casters already start to get their first tools to skip things and annoy the DM.

At even higher lvls you would skip 95% of the story by casting the right spells and the story wouldn't feel epic anymore. Your PCs abilities might look and feel epic, but all the interesting plot devices become irrelevant or boring.

High lvl casters forces you to play the "spell chess game" (DM vs PCs) and stop playing the "plot game". This or they actively ignore their true power. (and it's power you are asking for here).

My conclusion is that the most fun and epic feeling adventures imho are in the lvl range of lvl 5-10 with not to much optimization (or no high tier builds).

What you are doing here is increasing the amount of plot device killing builds. If that is what you want, do it. As said, I've been there at a time, and it's not that I advice against it. Everybody should give it a try (to play at higher optimization lvls). And for a few plots, they are even necessary. But that doesn't mean that it should become a new "standard" if you get what I mean.

Imho every campaign (!) should decide at the start the intended power lvl for this specific game. The DM's voice should bear more weight here, because he has to keep the game balance together and needs the XP to come up with a plot for that kind of optimization and be able to handle it.
Every campaign needs some kind of (maybe unspoken^^) gentlemen agreement to aim for some party balance where everybody is happy with it.

noce

2022-05-22, 04:21 AM

Biggus

2022-05-22, 06:06 AM

There are not-full casting prcs that are worth it. For example, the aforementioned Swiftblade, but also Jade Phoenix Mage, War Weaver, Ruby Knight Vindicator, Ordained Champion, Recaster and Fiendblooded are all good prcs.
It depends on a case by case basis.

Of those, only Swiftblade is 5/10 or 6/10. Do people often take all ten levels in your experience or do they just dip into it for a few levels?

Crake

2022-05-22, 07:30 AM

RandomPeasant

2022-05-22, 10:41 AM

I think "This is a full caster PRC" and the comparison is wizard20, Cleric20, Druid20, and generally the class features don't really change the overall power equation that much, barring weird combos that usually get banned, just like the worst Core abuses get banned.

So it's okay to lose casting because we are explicitly employing a double standard for partial casting PrCs? That seems like a terrible argument, and it doesn't really hold up to empirical scrutiny. Are you telling me that Blood Magus or Entropomancer are gish PrCs? Or to pick the most extreme example, Archmage and Hierophant are, for all practical purposes, the same PrC, except the former is full casting and the latter zero-casting.

As an aside, Pathfinder 1e made most classes a lot more like Druid, where taking a PRC is usually a choice about doing something significantly different from what the core class can do, with or without archetypes, not just "more plusses" on the base class.

As I said, this is viable approach for making PrCs less tempting. But if you do this, you don't need to make PrCs cost casting. There are plenty of full casting PrCs the Druid isn't interested in at all.

Most epic stories from media (films, books, manga, comics..) can be fitted into 5~10 lvls in 3.5, and most are more towards lvl 5 than 10, because full casters already start to get their first tools to skip things and annoy the DM.

This is just not remotely true. In the MCU, which is substantially less powerful than the comics, Doctor Strange has at-will teleportation. If we're talking about "plot breaking" powers, that's past anything pre-Epic D&D characters can do. And then he divines 14 million possible outcomes, on a timescale stretching out at least five years, which makes the entire school of Divination look like a joke. The backstory of the Mistborn trilogy is that a guy found an infinite power loop and used it to conquer the world. Don't get me wrong, there are certainly stories that you can fit in the 5-10 level range, but the idea that that's most of the genre or that high level D&D is some unprecedented outlier is just completely unsupported.

Of course, it's also totally irrelevant to the argument. If you want to play in the first half of the game because that's the part that you can handle as a DM, you can just do that. Play E10, and you never have to worry about a Wizard casting planar binding. And if you don't play E10, making Green Star Adept suck won't stop you from worrying about planar binding, because no one is forcing people to take Green Star Adept. You cannot balance the game by adding optional abilities that make characters worse. Because if people are behaving in ways that unbalance the game, they will just not take those options and go on their merry way.

High lvl casters forces you to play the "spell chess game" (DM vs PCs) and stop playing the "plot game".

High level casters require the DM to create a plot that respects the ability of players to interact with it. This is a good thing. If I wanted to have a series of events presented to me for me to react to, I would play a video game. The reason (well, a reason) I play TTRPGs is so that I can take actions that move the plot in directions the person creating it might not have anticipated.

What you are doing here is increasing the amount of plot device killing builds.

Why does increasing the amount of those builds matter? Those builds exist whether Green Star Adept is good or bad. You have to deal with them either way, and Green Star Adept being bad fixes zero things that might break the game. In fact, the argument you are making when you assert that blasting PrCs are full casting is that someone who takes Green Star Adept will balance their character toward game-breaking uses of spells to make up for the fact that their usage of fair spells is worse. Isn't that exactly the sort of thing you ought to be discouraging? If the goal is to avoid dealing with teleport because you can't write adventures that survive it, isn't a character who casts 9th level spells but never gave teleport the time of day less of a problem than one who casts 7th level spells but had to find the best ones to be effective?

Honestly, If you want to balance casting prestige classes, instead of losing out on full levels, instead have it lose spell slots. That way you don't lose out on power level, just your ability to sustain power, and ideally, the bonuses that the prestige class offer should help alleviate that.

This is how to do it if you really feel that full casting PrCs are a problem. It fixes the cost scaling issues, and it makes it less punishing to combine PrCs if someone has a concept that involves a little bit of mind magic from Mindbender and a little bit of blood magic from Blood Magus (or whatever multi-PrC build).

noce

2022-05-22, 11:13 AM

Of those, only Swiftblade is 5/10 or 6/10. Do people often take all ten levels in your experience or do they just dip into it for a few levels?

To be honest I remembered most of them were losing more levels than what they do, and this alone could be an indicator that I perceive the loss of caster levels as hurting more than it does.

Anyway, Ordained Champion is 3/5, which is the same ratio of 6/10, while both initiator prcs are 8/10 but lose at least another level for entering.

Regarding your question, I didn't see many of them in play.
The Fiend-Blooded was a sorcerer taking the full prc, capstone included; the character however was retired before taking all levels because the player left.
The Jade Phoenix Mage was a warforged Wizard/Crusader which dipped Spellsword and then full JPM; he was unsatisfied by the character for the lack of hp, AC, saves, maneuver diversity and spell slots, but despite his feeling he was doing fine.

Zombulian

2022-05-22, 11:25 AM

Eh, increasing them all on a general basis is probably a bad idea. It’s probably better to just tell your players to bring you examples of PrC’s they would want to try but think are underpowered and examine them on a case-by-case basis. I do the same with level adjusted races, for example. If one player brings you Greenstar Adept, and one brings you Void Disciple, it seems fairly clear that they’re on different levels and should be adjudicated differently.

Biggus

2022-05-22, 04:42 PM

Honestly, If you want to balance casting prestige classes, instead of losing out on full levels, instead have it lose spell slots. That way you don't lose out on power level, just your ability to sustain power, and ideally, the bonuses that the prestige class offer should help alleviate that.

This is how to do it if you really feel that full casting PrCs are a problem. It fixes the cost scaling issues, and it makes it less punishing to combine PrCs if someone has a concept that involves a little bit of mind magic from Mindbender and a little bit of blood magic from Blood Magus (or whatever multi-PrC build).

1) As I've already mentioned, I'm not trying to make every class exactly equal, that's just not realistic. What I'm trying to do is make every class not suck.

2) While I'm quite happy to do a lot of work to improve the game (as I see it), I'm not looking to deliberately make loads more for myself, and as far as I can see this would involve individually evaluating thousands of class features to try and work out what spell level they equate to. Unless there's a shortcut I'm not seeing?

To be honest I remembered most of them were losing more levels than what they do

Ah OK, no worries.

Anyway, Ordained Champion is 3/5, which is the same ratio of 6/10

This is true, but in total you only lose two caster levels, which in my experience is a price quite a lot of people are willing to pay if it means you get some decent class features in return. Very few are willing to lose four caster levels though.

Eh, increasing them all on a general basis is probably a bad idea.

Based on the responses so far in this thread, this doesn't seem to be the case. There's only been one class (Swiftblade) that anyone's suggested so far that's arguably worth taking all the way with 6/10 casting, and none with 5/10 casting. Most people seem to think that even 7/10 is still too weak, if anything.

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

Edit: this (http://minmaxforum.com/index.php?topic=1573.0) might help to clarify what I'm trying to do a bit. To my mind, a well-designed prestige class either makes you a bit better overall ("Good to Great tier") but not so much that it breaks the game, or gives you some interesting new abilities/helps you specialise without affecting your power level much ("Mediocre tier").

The Marvellous tier are mostly too good and need rewriting, but this isn't a major problem because there aren't many of them, and some (the ones which improve low-tier classes) are probably fine as-is.

At the other end, extrapolating from the numbers here there are probably over 200 classes total in the "bad to awful" and "catastrophic" tiers. I don't think a prestige class should ever make you worse off than you started, but it would be the work of years to rewrite each one individually. With some of the truly awful ones, like for example the Duelist, there's no alternative I can see to a complete rebuild, but in other cases (such as Dragon Disciple and Arcane Archer) just giving them 7/10 casting instantly changes them from a bad class to an OK one. Observing this, and the fact that people rarely seem to take classes with less than 7/10 casting progression, it occurred to me this might be a simple way to make a lot of the substandard classes decent.

sleepyphoenixx

2022-05-22, 05:11 PM

Based on the responses so far in this thread, this doesn't seem to be the case. There's only been one class (Swiftblade) that anyone's suggested so far that's arguably worth taking all the way with 6/10 casting, and none with 5/10 casting. Most people seem to think that even 7/10 is still too weak, if anything.

Master Transmogrifist is another 6/10 class that doesn't really need a buff.

And it's less 7/10 being too weak as it is the fact that most half-caster PrC's don't even get good class features to make up for the lack. You're just crippling your casting for some crappy fluff abilities.
Almost every caster PrC with good abilities already has full or near-full casting progression.

Biggus

2022-05-22, 05:40 PM

Master Transmogrifist is another 6/10 class that doesn't really need a buff.

Thanks, I'll have a look.

And it's less 7/10 being too weak as it is the fact that most half-caster PrC's don't even get good class features to make up for the lack. You're just crippling your casting for some crappy fluff abilities.
Almost every caster PrC with good abilities already has full or near-full casting progression.

Well, it depends what you're looking to do. That may be true if you're looking at classes which essentially mean you stay in the full caster mould but just get some different abilities, but there are several gish-type classes for example which give no or poor casting progression.

pabelfly

2022-05-22, 06:18 PM

Elfritch Master is a Dragon Magazine PrC with roughly 2/10 progression (it's done really weirdly), but you can add all the spells from two other classes to your spell list at 4th and 8th level. You could readily justify dropping 4 levels of spellcasting to have eighth-level spells of two classes like, say, Wizard and Cleric in one build.

RandomPeasant

2022-05-22, 06:53 PM

1) As I've already mentioned, I'm not trying to make every class exactly equal, that's just not realistic. What I'm trying to do is make every class not suck.

Then why are you so worried about creating new options within the range of existing caster options? Full progression Green Star Adept definitely doesn't suck, and also is clearly less powerful than existing full-progression PrCs, even inoffensive ones like Master Specialist. Partial-but-better-than-half progression Green Star Adept might or might not suck. So if the goal is just to make things not suck, bumping classes to full casting still looks like an easy win to me.

2) While I'm quite happy to do a lot of work to improve the game (as I see it), I'm not looking to deliberately make loads more for myself, and as far as I can see this would involve individually evaluating thousands of class features to try and work out what spell level they equate to. Unless there's a shortcut I'm not seeing?

You could always define a standard set of spell slot losses. But, yes, individually tuning PrCs is going to take a lot of work. But it takes a lot of work whether that tuning is changing casting progression or adding per-ability costs. The question is whether the benefit is worth the cost, and if your goal is to make casting PrCs more appealing Archmage (which people are reasonably interested in) seems like a better target than partial caster (which, as we can see, has an incredibly mixed track record even by favorable standards).

To my mind, a well-designed prestige class either makes you a bit better overall ("Good to Great tier") but not so much that it breaks the game, or gives you some interesting new abilities/helps you specialise without affecting your power level much ("Mediocre tier").

So let's take a look at those "good to great" options. Abjurant Champion, Church Inquisitor, Contemplative, Divine Oracle, Frost Mage, Loremaster, Mage of the Arcane Order, and Unseen Seer are all full casting. So anything with worse class features than those should be able to be bumped up to full progression without needing to figure out what it "should" cost. And that's just me tagging things I recognized, there's probably more I missed. Certainly most of the things that do cost casting are either theurges (which are their own can of worms) or cost only a single level of casting (often somewhere other than 1st).

Observing this, and the fact that people rarely seem to take classes with less than 7/10 casting progression, it occurred to me this might be a simple way to make a lot of the substandard classes decent.

Isn't that just the exact same line of argument for making them 10/10 casting but arbitrarily capped lower? If we're talking about "PrCs casters take", 10/10 is far better represented than 7/10. Hell, Mystic Theurge is considered a bad deal for giving you (effectively) two sets of 7/10 casting.

Master Transmogrifist is another 6/10 class that doesn't really need a buff.

Eh. Master Transmogrifist is a 6/10 class that interacts with a broken subsystem and is therefore easily abusable. The polymorph rules need to be better than they are, and those changes would likely move the system around Master Transmogrifist such that it would need to work in a different way.

And it's less 7/10 being too weak as it is the fact that most half-caster PrC's don't even get good class features to make up for the lack.

This is exactly the point. Green Star Adept or Acolyte of the Skin would be mediocre PrCs if they gave full casting progression.

Elfritch Master is a Dragon Magazine PrC with roughly 2/10 progression (it's done really weirdly), but you can add all the spells from two other classes to your spell list at 4th and 8th level. You could readily justify dropping 4 levels of spellcasting to have eighth-level spells of two classes like, say, Wizard and Cleric in one build.

Not really. People way overestimate how good getting to pull off of multiple lists is. As a Wizard, you don't really need to have access to more spells that you can maybe scribe into your spellbook and then maybe prepare. The Archivist can already do that, and in a lot of games it's not even going to be better than a Wizard. If you hit it with a four-level casting penalty, it's not even close.

loky1109

2022-05-22, 07:21 PM

1) As I've already mentioned, I'm not trying to make every class exactly equal, that's just not realistic. What I'm trying to do is make every class not suck.

As I've already mentioned, you shouldn't talk about every class, but about some specific classes. They all are too different.

pabelfly

2022-05-22, 07:34 PM

Not really. People way overestimate how good getting to pull off of multiple lists is. As a Wizard, you don't really need to have access to more spells that you can maybe scribe into your spellbook and then maybe prepare. The Archivist can already do that, and in a lot of games it's not even going to be better than a Wizard. If you hit it with a four-level casting penalty, it's not even close.

If it were my character, I'd use Cleric and Divine Metamagic to persist the best buff spells and treat Wizard and some Cleric spells as the active spellcaster part. It isn't the most powerful option but I think it would be a pretty fun build concept.

RandomPeasant

2022-05-22, 08:45 PM

If it were my character, I'd use Cleric and Divine Metamagic to persist the best buff spells and treat Wizard and some Cleric spells as the active spellcaster part. It isn't the most powerful option but I think it would be a pretty fun build concept.

But you can just do that. A Cleric can persist buff spells and cast Cleric spells. If you really want to get some specific Wizard spells, you could be an Archivist instead and grab turning from Sacred Exorcist. You don't have to light four levels of casting on fire to cast a wide variety of spells, many classes can do so from 1st level, or by taking PrCs that advance their spellcasting fully.

noce

2022-05-23, 01:36 AM

Mythic Exemplar can be a 4/10 PrC depending on the chosen patron. I wouldn't say it would be too strong at 7/10, but is otherwise fine for a gish. I mean, it's a flavourful pick that doesn't make your build strictly worse, just different.

Sanctified Mind is a 2/5 PrC. I've seen it suggested and used to build effective characters, even if often only as a dip. Anyway, without the bias we have about losing caster levels, it's a good pick in the right build, and can add a lot of flavour while keeping your power level (in particular I remember Kord and Olidammara as viable).

Flayerspawn Psychic is a 6/10 psionic class that's not awful. It gives you 4 bonus feats and improves one of them. It's obviously ok for an Ardent (due to how Ardent manifesting interacts with Practiced Manifester) but it's also good for a Wilder (since illithid feats grant you bonus powers known not on your list). I'd leave it as it is, but 7/10 or even 9/10 wouldn't brake it.

Gray Guard is a 5/10 Paladin PrC that is considered ok, maybe because paladin casting is not seen as a big deal in the first place. However, I don't agree and I don't particularly like this PrC. If I remember correctly also Platinum Knight is considered good as a 5/10 Paladin PrC.

Master of Masks is a 4/10 PrC which is often talked about for how strange it is. It's a lot of flavour with not a lot of crunch. Raising it to 7/10 maybe would give it a better shape, but it's also used as is.

Doomlord is a 5/10 PrC which is more a melee bruiser with 5 bonus caster levels rather than a casting class. You basically end up with a casting similar to PrC with own list, and given the focus of the PrC I think it's perfectly fine as is.

Dragon Devotee is a 2/5 PrC that grants (Sorcerer) casting even if you don't have it. It can be good and effective, since its main draw is not casting but the template and the two bonus feats/sneak attacks.

Psionic Weapon Master is similar to a Kensai, but with full bab and 5/10 manifesting. If it weren't for the incredible number of days it takes to improve your weapon, it would be one of the best melee PrCs for both Ardents and Psychic Warriors.

Elocater is 7/10, with a good chassis and nice class features. I think it's balanced as is.

I certainly have missed a couple of other good PrCs that don't deserve or aren't in desperate need of a caster level improvement.

Biggus

2022-05-23, 06:16 AM

Wonton64

2022-05-23, 06:37 AM

Void Disciple is an interesting one. It's 8/13, but there's some ambiguity in the description of their class features that make it range from just okay to incredibly strong, depending on DM ruling.

bekeleven

2022-05-23, 07:42 AM

remetagross

2022-05-23, 09:37 AM

Psion Uncarnate is a 6/10 PrC that gives very special abilities and a very good flavour and is somewhat worth the trade in my opinion.

vasilidor

2022-05-23, 11:25 AM

In answering the original question: it depends on the campaign.
In a more challenging game half casting is probably a mistake.
In a more relaxed campaign that does not require as high of optimization it can be fun to play them.
Monks are still a mistake though.

RandomPeasant

2022-05-23, 01:19 PM

Flayerspawn Psychic is a 6/10 psionic class that's not awful. It gives you 4 bonus feats and improves one of them. It's obviously ok for an Ardent (due to how Ardent manifesting interacts with Practiced Manifester) but it's also good for a Wilder (since illithid feats grant you bonus powers known not on your list). I'd leave it as it is, but 7/10 or even 9/10 wouldn't brake it.

I would say the "okay with Ardent" thing is an argument against lost casting. If the people who take the partial casting PrC are the people for who it is effectively full casting, maybe it should just be full casting.

Gray Guard is a 5/10 Paladin PrC that is considered ok, maybe because paladin casting is not seen as a big deal in the first place. However, I don't agree and I don't particularly like this PrC. If I remember correctly also Platinum Knight is considered good as a 5/10 Paladin PrC.

I genuinely do not understand why people consider Gray Guard good. While you get some goodies that a Paladin doesn't (like getting to use Smite on anything as a 14th level character), you get less stuff overall even discounting the casting loss. It's just... not good.

Master of Masks is a 4/10 PrC which is often talked about for how strange it is. It's a lot of flavour with not a lot of crunch. Raising it to 7/10 maybe would give it a better shape, but it's also used as is.

It's also enterable without any casting at all, which warps things somewhat. I probably would not take Master as a spellcaster. Maybe two levels to get a couple of cool masks (though that's only one lost level of casting). I would be more interested in entering as a Rogue or something, which doesn't care about the casting progression.

Edit: re: Grey Guard, it had occurred to me that prestige classes aimed specifically at Paladins and Rangers probably didn't need 7/10 casting to be decent for the reasons you state.

IMO this is backwards. Paladins and Rangers need full casting more than regular casters, not less. 4/9 casting is already bad. If you let that slip, it becomes essentially irrelevant.

So what happens if you take every half-casting PrC and replace every level where they don't get casting with "You get casting, but you lose 1 spell slot of the highest-level spell currently on your progression?"

They become vastly more playable. But as I've been saying repeatedly, plenty of them are still bad even at full casting and go straight to insulting if they're at any kind of penalty, unless you are also applying that penalty to every existing full-progression PrC. Acolyte of the Skin is just not good. Probably the most powerful thing you get is a 1/day stun with a save and downscaling based on target HP. Compare that to power word stun or stun ray, both of which are clearly better, and it's hard to imagine it being something you're happy to pay even a 6th level spell slot for. As 9th level Acolyte you get the ability to summon a Babau or Chain Devil once per day. Except that you could summon a Chain Devil with summon monster VI and a Babau with summon monster VII. So that's, at best, strictly worse than a 7th level spell you could just cast if you had chosen to be something that lost no levels of casting.

Psion Uncarnate is a 6/10 PrC that gives very special abilities and a very good flavour and is somewhat worth the trade in my opinion.

Asking people to trade off power for flavor is just codifying the Stormwind Fallacy.

pabelfly

2022-05-23, 02:25 PM

Asking people to trade off power for flavor is just codifying the Stormwind Fallacy.

Psion Uncarnate has a bunch of abilities that let the player be incorporeal, get perfect flight, do damage to opponents while incorporeal with touch attacks, and make their gear and armor incorporeal too. Some abilities in there are pretty hard to come by. It's a bit more than flavour being offered.

sleepyphoenixx

2022-05-23, 03:14 PM

Psion Uncarnate has a bunch of abilities that let the player be incorporeal, get perfect flight, do damage to opponents while incorporeal with touch attacks, and make their gear and armor incorporeal too. Some abilities in there are pretty hard to come by. It's a bit more than flavour being offered.
All of those are pretty standard for mid-level casters, including manifesters. Or cheaply available from items.
And becoming incorporeal isn't all that great even if you weren't limited to 2 minutes a day. Which Psion Uncarnate is, which makes it even more terrible than it'd be otherwise.

A full caster like a psion also really has better things to do than make melee touch attacks that do piddly damage. Even if those weren't also limited to 3/day outside your short-lived incorporeality.

I don't think you really appreciate the price you're paying for those (very disappointing) abilities.
You're trading your ability to get 9th level powers and delaying 7th & 8th level powers by 2-3 levels for something you could do with a few low level powers or cheap magic items.
Added to that as a manifester you're also crippling all your other powers since your ability to augment them is dependant on your ML.

You're giving up a massive amount of power, stamina and versatility for... 2 minutes of incorporeality per day and a few crappy touch attacks basically.
That makes Psion Uncarnate a textbook example of "badly designed half-progression PrC".

RandomPeasant

2022-05-23, 03:49 PM

Exactly. A bunch of the Psion Uncarnate's class abilities are things you can just have as powers. I don't need to take seven levels of a PrC and give up three levels of manifesting progression to use telekinetic force. I can just use telekinetic force, because it is a third level power and I have to be able to manifest those to be a Psion Uncarnate. Assume Likeness technically isn't the exact same as an existing power, but it's pretty much "worse alter self", and while alter self is an overpowered 2nd level spell, it's not overpowered enough to be a big deal for a 10th level character. "Psionic presence without physical form" is a cool concept. But it's not really clear to me that being a Psion Uncarnate is even the best way to go about achieving that.

remetagross

2022-05-24, 05:26 AM

Asking people to trade off power for flavor is just codifying the Stormwind Fallacy.

Dude, I've never asked anyone to do that. I'm just pointing out that this one PrC has, to my mind, decently useful class features, in addition to having a cool flavour.

Besides, the capstone is powerful. It's all-day Psionic Etherealness, except it can't affect your friends but it does not cost you 17 power points nor is it limited to 1 minute/level. It does not make you susceptible to attacks of opportunity when you manifest it in combat nor does it take you an action. It cannot be dispelled. It does not halve your land speed and instead grant you a real flight speed at perfect maneuverability. It does not limit your sight to 60ft into the Material plane. At-will Telekinetic Force as a (Su) ability is also a great boon: no AoO, no duration limit, and this power is one of the most useful ones at all levels (I'm playing a Wilder with this power and I find the versatility it brings really amazing).

So...that's some stuff that's not easily replicated by a bunch of added power points, unless the PC wants to spend 1 standard action and 17 power points at the beginning of each and every encounter, in addition to blowing that in noncombat situations where incorporealness comes in handy. Besides, Practised Manifester bumps up your CL back to 20 again, and if you've started with Ardent as the base class, then you still keep your 9s.

Endarire

2022-06-02, 06:56 PM

(I split this post from Half-casting prestige classes: are they ever worth it? (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?646023-Half-casting-prestige-classes-are-they-ever-worth-it) due to this being a long post and had some points others seemingly agreed with.)

A notable problem with losing casting via PrCs and calling it balanced is similar to requiring spells have expensive EXP/G costs and calling it balanced: People tend not to pay the costs.

For PrCs, if my choices are "more of this full casting base class" or "multiclassing into a PrC that doesn't fully progress my casting," I'm very likely to just not pay the cost in terms of casting (or making it up via Pathfinder's Favored Prestige Class + Prestigious Spellcaster/Eclectic Learning/Esoteric Learning). As has already been stated, a caster's worth primarily comes from his spells, and the game is seemingly balanced around the notion of level X characters being able to produce Y effects. It's for good reason that neutralize poison comes online for parties well before they face the most severe poisons in the game, and it's also for good reason that using a 3.5 CR3 Cockatrice against a low level party may result in a TPK due to low Fortitude saves from the party when they can't reasonably be expected to prevent or counter petrification.

Similarly, having someone pay the full cost to cast wish is rare when that some Wizard could also likely use planar binding and pay or mind control a genie to get a bunch of 'free' wishes, or use shapechange to turn into a Zodar for a free wish at least once per year. (I put free in quotes because the GM is also free to (mis)interpret these wishes.)

To clarify, exceptions exist depending on context. War Weaver (Heroes of Battle) may be very worthwhile if you want to focus on buffing your party quickly despite the lost casting at War Weaver1. Thrallherd is likely worthwhile since Thrallherd1 and 10 each lose a manifesting level but gain an extra character at each of these levels. However, to agree with what was already stated, class features need to be wonderful and disproportionately powerful to make up for the loss of even one caster level!

For certain classes, it isn't just caster level that makes multiclassing a generally bad idea. As a Druid, I like my casting, Wild Shape, and animal companion. This means that to me losing even a single level of progression for any of these must be very worthwhile, and for example, I'm unlikely to lose more than a level or 2 of animal companion and Wild Shape progression to dip into Holt Warden and Contemplative (Spell Domain) just because these other class features as so useful to me. This 2 level dip is still contextually worthwhile because it grants me access to more spells per day and the ability to occasionally cast arcane spells from a spellbook. This also means that Planar Shepherd, even if the plane I chose was weak, is still a viable PrC for my Druidic mentality because it fully progresses casting, Wild Shape, and animal companions.

Again, the question of, "Is losing caster levels balanced?" is typically a poorly considered question because casters shouldn't normally be losing caster levels at all, just like people shouldn't normally be streaking (running around naked) in public because of the associated penalties. PrCs became a way for full casters to gain class features in addition to full casting for a variety of reasons, and I just like the notion of being able to do useful and fun stuff as a caster that doesn't require spell slots. D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder 1e are seemingly not balanced around the notion of "power now vs. power later." They are instead balanced around the notion of "power now and power later." My player experience has taught me that campaigns have normally stopped at level 6 or within 4 character levels of starting, whichever comes first, and that trying to prepare for a character who levels even 7 times in a campaign is likely a multi-month or a year+ endeavor, whereas a character who levels 19 times is likely a multi-year endeavor. Note also that a weaker character also leads to a weaker party, and is a similar reason why the as-written Vow of Poverty feat is just a bad idea because it generally weakens a character, and, by extension, the party as well.

Master Transmogrifist is an awkward example with less-than-full casting because shapechange exists in its current form and somewhat but not totally replaces 10 levels of classes with a single spell that those who can cast shapechange are encouraged to do.

Note that unlike BAB or accuracy, there's no easy way to make up lost casting in 3.5. Pathfinder has some abilities to make up for lost casting (Favored Prestige Class/Eclectic Learning/Esoteric Learning) and those are considered essential for the builds that lose casting and where these abilities are allowed. If you're a martial who's a BAB or 2 (or maybe even more) behind, you can get a higher accuracy via many means like a higher STR/DEX, then make up for lost BAB-based attacks with polymorph, haste, Whirling Frenzy, and other means of getting more attacks.

If we consider that BAB is a main feature of martial classes seemingly like how 3.x's design team did, we can tell that BAB normally comes with a variety of class features. For casters, BAB may still matter, but it's the casting progression that matters more, and a variety of base classes and PrCs still grant class features in addition to casting progression.

Let's consider this hypothetical scenario where all caster and manifester PrCs lose a caster/manifester level at class level 1, but try to make up for it with awesome capstones. (By 3.5's rules as written, Incantatrix is already a full casting PrC but let's assume it's a 9/10 casting PrC that fits this scenario.) Remembering that characters tend to gain a level every 3 to 5 sessions or 3 to 5 real world weeks, let's average that to a month and say that Ix the Incantatrix enters Incantatrix ASAP (level 6 since he's a Wizard) and his fellow party Wizard (nicknamed Wiz) goes full Wizard. (Having played Incantatrix at low, mid, and high levels, it's likely the best Sor/Wiz PrC because it progresses casting and offers at least 1 class feature every level, and even for levels where its class features are weak, there's something better coming soon.)

Ix is initially excited to take this legendary PrC due to its class features, but also feels the immediate hurt of being a month of casting behind Wiz, even moreso if the Incantatrix still loses access to another school of magic. The extra metamagic feat is a sort of consolation prize. Meanwhile, Wiz gets more spells known, more spell slots, and a slightly higher caster level. At level 7, Ix is able to spontaneously apply metamagics he knows to other creatures without increasing the spell slot level if he makes a high enough Spellcraft check. Wiz instead gets a higher level of spells which includes improved invisibility, polymorph, and celerity, among others. Wiz is also better able to use the metamagic feats he has due to higher spell level access. Level 8 has the pair be able to cast level 4 spells and Ix can also apply metamagics he knows to spells he casts via Spellcraft checks. Incantatrix3 grants the best ability in the class until level 7 or 10, and debatably the best in the class due to Persistent Spell shenanigans, and it's available in an E8 game. This back and forth over who can cast what spell level continues until the game ends, Wiz loses a caster level, or Ix somehow makes up his lost caster level. Having class features but being 1 casting level behind, Ix is at least implicitly encouraged to act as a support character for the party because he has fewer spells than Wiz. If we instead compare characters who lose more casting levels compared to full casters, the impact becomes bigger.

Consider another case where Ix and Wiz can choose to respec their characters or swap their characters at a notably higher level - let's just say level 15 for the sake of argument. Does this make the sacrifice of a casting level more appealing? Compared to having to be a month behind in casting, yes. Overall, maybe. There's also the matter of 'How fair does this seem?" if Ix chooses to wade through many levels of a PrC and be a casting level behind whereas Wiz just respecs into the same PrC and loses the casting level due to a table or line of text but never feels the bother of being a casting level (or month) behind. A likely similar feeling occurs if Ix is able to prevent or quickly mitigate the casting level loss due to Eclectic Learning, Favored Prestige Class + Prestigious Spellcaster so that Ix has all the class features and casting of Wiz plus the Incantatrix, though he may be down 2 feats due to Favored Prestige Class + Prestigious Spellcaster.

What purely mathematical balancing doesn't seemingly consider is that each spell is effectively a fun button, with higher level spells generally offering far more fun. (For purposes of this subjective metric, I propose that each spell's fun score is equal to its spell level squared with level 0 spells having a fun score of 0.5.) Part of the fun score is the novelty in reaching this spell level, part is learning how to use it in play/from experience, part of it is pure power or potential, and the rest is left to opinion. Thus, being able to cast 2 level 3 spells per day gives a theoretical fun score of 18, or 9 per spell slot, in addition to lower-level spell slots. (At will cantrips will help this matter a bit, but these spells are generally so weak as to be disregarded come character level 5+. Detect magic and sneak attackers are notable exceptions.) This mathematical balancing style also doesn't account for the fact that Ix effectively becomes Wiz's apprentice for the rest of the game, studying what he could be had he remained single-classed since his loss of casting put him a month behind.

Also note that Incantatrix is at least close to an ideal case: Many other PrCs that progress casting - partially or fully - simply lack the class features to even be worth considering losing a casting level over. Malconvoker requires losing a casting level at Malconvoker1, meaning this PrC is for dedicated summoners and creature callers only. Would I normally lose a casting level for this? Never. Sure, summoning an extra creature at Malconvoker5 by passing a Bluff check is useful, but at that point I may just be able to summon a higher level creature. What about War Weaver for extra buffing abilities? The answer is a solid maybe, but only if I were playing a buffer and we were playing at a level where the payoff - the higher level abilities - were worthwhile. In short, losing casting means suffering now - and for the rest of your character's life unless mitigated - for a payoff that may never come due to the game being cancelled.

There's also the matter of meeting a PrC's prerequisites, often requiring some combination of feats, spells, skills, and casting ability. Thus, entering into a PrC - even one with full casting and spiffy class features - has some cost, even if this cost is minor in effect.

Remember, if a player wanted to play an archer or a martial type, he would have specced for that instead of using that backup (cross)bow or ranged weapon due to having few spell options. A player who plays a caster primarily wants to cast a lot of high-impact spells with great frequency. Similarly, a player who plays an archer wants to shoot many shots with great impact and high frequency; and a player who plays a Rogue assumedly wants to frequently and with high impact deal lots of sneak attack damage & use a variety of skills (like sneaking and trapping). Diluting that vision mechanically at all is generally most noticeable for casters whose characters' identities are largely defined by their spells known, spells prepared, caster level/spell penetration, and save DCs. This is likely even more pronounced in Pathfinder 1e where certain races (Human, Half-Elf, and other Human-descended races) get bonus spells known for spontaneous classes (Sor, Bard, Oracle, Inquisitor, and maybe more) by simply staying single classed. Since getting extra spells known is so very important, even though full casting and partial casting PrCs exist in Pathfinder 1e, it's hard to for PrCs to mechanically compete with the allure of more spells known just so a player can do the main things he came to the game to do AKA a higher fun score.

There is a practical limit to the number of spells known and spell slots per day, but in my experience, that's normally been in double digit levels where GMs rarely run games. You may never cast spells 4 levels below your highest level spell available to you, but you still have them should you decide they're worthwhile, and perhaps you're feeling nostalgic for the days when magic missile was the best you could do and haste was months away. Then again, the higher level of spell you can cast, the more likely you are to need these higher level spells on a typical basis and not need the lower level ones.

In short, I'm very in favor of making all PrCs that progress casting or manifesting at all instead fully progress them by default. (The same thing goes with certain other class features like Wild Shape, animal companions, familiars, and Turn Undead. This is not at all an exhaustive list.) This way, people can have more viable options with more classes and likely have more fun instead of just being base class characters or the same PrCs that are proven effective, possibly with the occasional dip into something that doesn't fully progress casting such as Wyrm Wizard or War Weaver. To me at least, getting full casting with a side of useful extras makes a class worth continuing, and why Druid and Artificer - and certain other rare classes - are just so viable as single class builds compared to even tier 1 classes like Wizard and Cleric.

Postmodernist

2022-06-06, 01:36 PM

Broadly, I agree with this. My one caveat: I'd suggest balancing this against some early entry shenanigans. Master of Shrouds requires some skills at 5 ranks, 2 feats (easily gotten by 3rd, let alone with flaws or clever domain selection), a spell you'll have anyway, and a +5 will save. You can get take the PrC at 4th level pretty easily (cleric 2, something with a good will save 1. Hell, take Church Inquisitor first and delay it a smidge if you're feeling saucy). Being able to summon 3+ Cha mod shadows a day at ECL 5 with full cleric casting is pretty damn strong in "normal" (ie: from level 1 and progressing, not starting later). I'm sure some dual caster classes and other early entry-able classes might also be potential abuse targets.

But by and large, yeah, this could add a lot to the diversity of PrCs currently seen, especially RAW non-optimal ones. Like, why does an Elemental Savant (a niche, C+ caster class without being nerfed by caster level loss) lose two caster levels? It's kinda silly. I like that they tried to go for balance in many of these cases, but it's so unevenly applied that it's a mess. Balance here, power creep over there.

AsuraKyoko

2022-06-06, 03:12 PM

If, rather than losing caster levels, you sacrifice spell slots (like the Archmage does), you can also balance against early entry. If you require the PC to be able to sacrifice a slot of a particular level in order to access a feature, then you can largely avoid PCs getting access to abilities earlier than they are supposed to. Simply make it so that, if you don't have the required slot to sacrifice, then you don't get the feature until you do have it.

Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, there's a pretty large design space around abilities that are fueled by spell slots. I know there are some feats that let you expend spell slots or prepared spells for various effects, but the aren't very many class features that do it; only a handful of classes really engage with that at all (Ultimate Magus, for example).

Interestingly, sacrificing access to certain categories of spells as a cost for a casting prestige class is also very rare, despite it being a potentially meaningful drawback. To my knowledge it only shows up on a couple of prestige classes (notably, Red Wizard and Incantatrix, two of the most broken casting classes), but I think it could be a good way of doing tradeoffs, in particular because it inherently narrows specialization.

These limitations don't necessarily have to be by spell school, either. You could, say, have a class that bans you from casting spells with a range greater than Close, or spells with an instantaneous duration, or other things like that. Both of those in particular are probably not good ideas, since they are the kind of thing that would be annoying to search out quickly, but they convey the general idea well enough.

I'd like to try converting an existing partial casting progression class to full casting but with sacrificed spell slots instead. Does anyone have any suggestions for me to take a look at?

Endarire

2022-06-06, 03:18 PM

Early entry questions the notion that most PrCs should require 5 HD before entry. Early entry still requires some resources from players, and often ones that are meh or ick just for the sake of getting better class features sooner.

Jay R

2022-06-06, 05:52 PM

If I decided to fix the problems with character progression in D&D, I cannot imagine why I would start by adding more power to wizards with Prestige Classes. "Some wizard builds are too weak" is simply not one of the biggest problems in character progression.

It's true that I won't take a wizard Prestige Class that loses more than one level of spell progression. That's fine; there are lots of options I'll never take. But the basic notion that we have to fix wizards because only some wizard builds are T1 is ... unconvincing. If you want a T1 wizard, there are lots of ways to have one.

Before increasing the power of the lesser, "Tier 2" wizard builds, I'd try to get Rogue, Ranger, Fighter, Monk etc. up to the level of these builds.

RandomPeasant

2022-06-06, 08:02 PM

Being able to summon 3+ Cha mod shadows a day at ECL 5 with full cleric casting is pretty damn strong in "normal" (ie: from level 1 and progressing, not starting later).

Well that's the thing. Master of Shrouds is already problematic. It's true that it gets better with this change, but in the status quo it's a classic power now for power later tradeoff, and neither end of that is a good idea. The class needs to work differently, but being overpowered and then fine is probably better than being overpowered and then underpowered.

That said, my overall stance is pretty much in agreement with Endarire. I think that PrCs should just have a minimum level, and a requirement that you have whatever sort of powers they advance if they advance a specific sort of powers.

I like that they tried to go for balance in many of these cases, but it's so unevenly applied that it's a mess.

I'm not even really convinced they "tried to go for balance". I don't see any rhyme or reason as to which classes lose caster levels and which don't, especially not between different books. Why, for instance, are the Incarnum/Divine and Binding/Arcane theurges full progression on both sides, but the Maneuvers/Divine and Arcane/Arcane theurges not? Did WotC really have a coherent, precisely calibrated theory that those particular combinations were too good, or where they just (as I think is more likely) making things up?

Interestingly, sacrificing access to certain categories of spells as a cost for a casting prestige class is also very rare, despite it being a potentially meaningful drawback.

I would argue that's because it's not nearly as meaningful a tradeoff as people think. Unless you are playing at extremely high optimization, there is no school that is irreplaceable. If you ditch Conjuration, you can get minions from Enchantment or Necromancy. If you lose Illusion, you can get SoDs that target Will from Enchantment. And so on and so forth. Not to mention that you don't even necessarily need to cover every niche as a single character. If you aren't in to blasting spells, there's no particular need to keep Evocation.

If I decided to fix the problems with character progression in D&D, I cannot imagine why I would start by adding more power to wizards with Prestige Classes. "Some wizard builds are too weak" is simply not one of the biggest problems in character progression.

It baffles me how consistently this topic gets people to jump directly to complete crab-bucket takes. Yes, there are other problems. Yes, this doesn't solve them. How on earth does that make it a bad change? Are your players so lacking in attention span that reading the sentence "PrCs with partial casting progression now provide full casting progression" will cause them to tune out before they reach your explanation for how you're buffing the Barbarian and the Scout?

Fero

2022-06-07, 12:17 AM

Losing caster levels is fine if you know what, and more importantly why, you are doing it. After about 3+ lost caster levels, you should consider your character to be fundamentally distinct from whatever class you deviated from. For example, if you play a wizard who takes 4 levels of Master of the Unseen Hand (CW), you should consider yourself as a MotUH first, and a wizard second. Doing so lets you build something new and interesting. If you do the opposite, you will just be playing a bad wizard.

AsuraKyoko

2022-06-07, 12:24 PM

Well that's the thing. Master of Shrouds is already problematic. It's true that it gets better with this change, but in the status quo it's a classic power now for power later tradeoff, and neither end of that is a good idea. The class needs to work differently, but being overpowered and then fine is probably better than being overpowered and then underpowered.

That said, my overall stance is pretty much in agreement with Endarire. I think that PrCs should just have a minimum level, and a requirement that you have whatever sort of powers they advance if they advance a specific sort of powers.

Yeah, I agree. Having a minimum level would be simple and effective way of gating prestige class power. I do think that there should be some other prerequisites, specifically those that tie it to whatever specific niche that the class is supposed to fill, or what role or organization that the class is tied to in the setting.

I would argue that's because it's not nearly as meaningful a tradeoff as people think. Unless you are playing at extremely high optimization, there is no school that is irreplaceable. If you ditch Conjuration, you can get minions from Enchantment or Necromancy. If you lose Illusion, you can get SoDs that target Will from Enchantment. And so on and so forth. Not to mention that you don't even necessarily need to cover every niche as a single character. If you aren't in to blasting spells, there's no particular need to keep Evocation.

That's because it's not a harsh enough tradeoff in some cases. What if Incantatrix limited you to, like, 3 schools total: Abjuration, Divination, and one of your choice? Would it still be worth it? Probably, the class is nuts good, but it would represent a significant tradeoff in flexibility for power. At what point does it become a bad trade? What if the Incantatrix was limited to only Abjuration and Divination? I think that probably makes it stop being worthwhile, except outside of specific builds that don't care about any other schools of magic.

That being said, I think that it's kinda missing the point. The classes that ban an extra school are both incredibly powerful. What about other classes that are not as overpowering? This is probably a bad example, but take something like Master of Shrouds. What if, instead of giving up a level of casting progression, you instead gave up the ability to cast Conjuration (Healing) spells? Now the class has a meaningful drawback for its features. Sure you can work around it, but it still represents giving up something for what you get. (As an aside, I think that Master of Shrouds is basically the perfect example where sacrificing spell slots works, rather than giving up a school or subschool, but that's besides the point here)

I'm not saying that banning schools is a catch-all solution, just that it could be used far more than it already is.

Darg

2022-06-07, 03:30 PM

That's because it's not a harsh enough tradeoff in some cases.

Incantatrix is just simply overbaked with features. 8 features and 4 bonus feats + full casting progression. Let's compare it with spellsword which has 3 features, 1 bonus feat, full BAB, and 5/10 casting. The discrepency really starts to show. Even a MotUH only gets 8 features and no casting progression.

The problem we have is that the books aren't really consistent on the value spellcasting progression provides. Not to mention that each level of spell caster provides more value than the last. If we gave spellcasting progression a value it would have a value of something like 1+n, where n=level, for every level of the class. Bonus feats are a 3. Statistical modifiers are a 1:1. Other passive features are a 3 and daily limited features are a 2 unless they progress to more than 3 uses which makes them a 4. At will abilities are a 5. If I counted right, that would give Incantatrix a score of 118 over 10 levels, Spellsword a score of 58 over 10 levels, and MotUH a score of 35 over 5 levels. The values are arbitrary and made up on the spot, but they highlight the kind of discrepancy there is between the classes. As a comparison, a 20th level wizard would have a score of 282. A wizard 10/incantatrix 10 would have a score of 310. A fighter 2/wizard 8/ spellsword 10 would have a score of 125. A fighter 20 would have 80.

I didn't bother giving the loss of a spell school value because it would have been a flat score loss of like a 3-5 which doesn't make much of a difference.

RandomPeasant

2022-06-07, 08:12 PM

Incantatrix is also extremely front-loaded. In the first five levels, you get three different game-changing class features (Cooperative Metamagic, Metamagic Effect, and Metamagic Spell Trigger). Other PrCs, even other PrCs that are generally considered very good, generally give you one. Planar Shepherd gives you one, and that's if you picked a plane because it has good planar traits instead of good denizens to wild shape (maybe it gives you two if there's some crazy magical beast for you to turn into, but I can't think of any). Shadowcraft Mage gives you one, or maybe two if you think the point of the class is realer-than-real shadow illusions and not just flexibility. Dweomerkeeper gives you one.

This is problematic for several reasons. It means that the class is overpowered for longer. It makes it easier to combo the PrC with other powerful PrCs (you can do Wizard 5/Incantatrix 5/Shadowcraft Mage 3/Initiate of the Sevenfold Veil 7 if you want). It means that taking away caster levels is less effective at balancing it, as you could make the class zero casting and people could still get Metamagic Effect + 9ths. It's interesting to consider what would happen if you just shuffled class features around a bit. Swap Cooperative Metamagic and Sieze Concentration, Metamagic Effect and Snatch Spell, and Metamagic Spell Trigger with one of the usages of Instant Metamagic. Then, as a Wizard 5/Incantatrix 5, instead of having a big stack buffs up all day and the ability to blow people up with wands, you'd have a couple of derpy abilities that let you beat up on casters who use specific kinds of spells and the ability to Persist one buff or Quicken one attack spell per day. Much more reasonable, even if you do get all the crazy nonsense eventually.

Yeah, I agree. Having a minimum level would be simple and effective way of gating prestige class power. I do think that there should be some other prerequisites, specifically those that tie it to whatever specific niche that the class is supposed to fill, or what role or organization that the class is tied to in the setting.

The problem with that is that it quickly results in PrCs that are pointlessly over-specialized. Why are all Divine/Incarnum theurges members of this specific sect of lawful dudes who worship a big rock? Why are all Divine/Maneuvers theurges devotees of Wee Jas of all the possible gods? Having specific fluff for PrCs can be cool, but it can also mean that a mechanically interesting PrC looks you into a concept you don't like, or that the PrC that is called out as fitting your character's religion does stuff you're not interested in mechanically.

That being said, I think that it's kinda missing the point. The classes that ban an extra school are both incredibly powerful. What about other classes that are not as overpowering? This is probably a bad example, but take something like Master of Shrouds. What if, instead of giving up a level of casting progression, you instead gave up the ability to cast Conjuration (Healing) spells?

The problem is that, fundamentally, there's no guarantee that you'll cast any particular spell to begin with. You can build a Favored Soul that never learns any healing spells if you want, and that character will be fine. Beguiler gives up the overwhelming majority of magic available to the Wizard. It's still pretty close power-wise, and that's with a delay in its casting. The "versatility" that people talk about is just not that big a part of characters' power, especially at typical levels of optimization.

Losing caster levels is fine if you know what, and more importantly why, you are doing it. After about 3+ lost caster levels, you should consider your character to be fundamentally distinct from whatever class you deviated from. For example, if you play a wizard who takes 4 levels of Master of the Unseen Hand (CW), you should consider yourself as a MotUH first, and a wizard second. Doing so lets you build something new and interesting. If you do the opposite, you will just be playing a bad wizard.

This is just the same old "partial casting PrCs are fine if you judge them by a standard that says they're fine" thing. If the class makes you a bad Wizard when judged by the standards of Wizards, it is bad, because the thing that you are taking it instead of is Wizard levels. If you think that is an acceptable power level, make Wizards worse. Don't randomly make the PrCs that WotC happened to not like worse but leave Wizards alone.

Jack_Simth

2022-06-07, 08:43 PM

In my experience, prestige classes which advance casting 5/10 levels (or even 6/10) are almost never taken except as dips. I'm considering increasing them all to 7/10 casting in the hope it'll make them at least playable, if not optimal. Is there a good reason not to do this? Are there any with class features so strong they justify a slower progression?

Edit: for clarity, I mean "are there any prestige classes which currently have 5/10 progression which justify staying that way?".
Depends on your perspective.

If you are looking at things strictly through the lens of player use in a 1-20 build and measuring mechanical power:
Then no, basically no partial casting PrC is going to be worthwhile (unless you can shortcut the lost caster levels by some means, such as with taking only a single level of Mindbender and not soaking the lost casting that comes at Mindbender-2, or by getting your higher-level casting via a different PrC, such as Sublime Chord, and only losing levels from your base casting plan).

However, that's not the only possible perspective (it is, however, a very common perspective).

For instance, past 20th level (where you stop getting new spell levels from leveling up), a few lost caster levels can be mitigated entirely with Practiced spellcaster. As long as you're losing 4 or less caster levels, the question becomes "is it worth the class bonus feats you'd otherwise be getting, and the feat for practiced spellcaster?" From that perspective, the answer will relatively often be "yes".

Another perspective is that of the DM building an opponent for the PC's. As the DM, I have largely unlimited resources for my builds. I can absolutely wipe the party with a relatively generic build. I don't actually want to do that. I want the Big Bad of this encounter to be a memorable fight, not a generic one, and while I do want it to be a hard fight, I want it to be one they will still win. From this perspective, the funky abilities from a PrC nobody takes due to lost caster levels are great! Oh, that means his fireball won't pack quite as much punch? Not a big deal, I actually don't want to murder the PC's anyway. Oh, he doesn't get native access to this spell I want him buffed with? Scroll solves that, or just bump him up a level more with the base casting class. From this perspective, lost casting levels are no big deal, so yes, it's worthwhile.

There's more possible perspectives.

AsuraKyoko

2022-06-08, 04:53 PM

Incantatrix is just simply overbaked with features. 8 features and 4 bonus feats + full casting progression. Let's compare it with spellsword which has 3 features, 1 bonus feat, full BAB, and 5/10 casting. The discrepency really starts to show. Even a MotUH only gets 8 features and no casting progression.

The problem we have is that the books aren't really consistent on the value spellcasting progression provides. Not to mention that each level of spell caster provides more value than the last. If we gave spellcasting progression a value it would have a value of something like 1+n, where n=level, for every level of the class. Bonus feats are a 3. Statistical modifiers are a 1:1. Other passive features are a 3 and daily limited features are a 2 unless they progress to more than 3 uses which makes them a 4. At will abilities are a 5. If I counted right, that would give Incantatrix a score of 118 over 10 levels, Spellsword a score of 58 over 10 levels, and MotUH a score of 35 over 5 levels. The values are arbitrary and made up on the spot, but they highlight the kind of discrepancy there is between the classes. As a comparison, a 20th level wizard would have a score of 282. A wizard 10/incantatrix 10 would have a score of 310. A fighter 2/wizard 8/ spellsword 10 would have a score of 125. A fighter 20 would have 80.

I didn't bother giving the loss of a spell school value because it would have been a flat score loss of like a 3-5 which doesn't make much of a difference.

Losing spell schools gets more costly the more you lose. Losing access to every single school of magic is basically just making you a commoner with more steps. Losing access to all but 1? Sure you are still pretty powerful in your area of expertise, but there's a reason why a class like Warmage is tier 3. Losing all but 3 schools, and having 2 of them be specific ones allows for flexibility, but you are still going to feel the loss of the others. For example, I'm playing a Specialist Wizard/Incantatrix, and when I entered incantatrix, I had to give up some spell that I cast relatively often. It was absolutely worth it (even without grabbing Persistent Spell, which I'm not going to be using), but it's still a tradeoff; I'm giving up something for what I am getting.

Just to be clear, I am definitely not arguing that the lost school makes Incantatrix "fair" or anything. If I were to use banning schools as a basis for balancing out the class, my proposed banning would leave 3 total available schools: Divination, Abjuration, and one of your choice, and I'm really not convinced that that would be a good idea at all.

I don't think that comparing the boost given by a prestige class to the power of another class entirely is a particularly useful metric when the difference in the base classes is so high. Of course Incantatrix is going to blow Fighter out of the water, it would do that anyways even if it didn't progress casting at all.

Incantatrix is also extremely front-loaded. In the first five levels, you get three different game-changing class features (Cooperative Metamagic, Metamagic Effect, and Metamagic Spell Trigger). Other PrCs, even other PrCs that are generally considered very good, generally give you one. Planar Shepherd gives you one, and that's if you picked a plane because it has good planar traits instead of good denizens to wild shape (maybe it gives you two if there's some crazy magical beast for you to turn into, but I can't think of any). Shadowcraft Mage gives you one, or maybe two if you think the point of the class is realer-than-real shadow illusions and not just flexibility. Dweomerkeeper gives you one.

This is problematic for several reasons. It means that the class is overpowered for longer. It makes it easier to combo the PrC with other powerful PrCs (you can do Wizard 5/Incantatrix 5/Shadowcraft Mage 3/Initiate of the Sevenfold Veil 7 if you want). It means that taking away caster levels is less effective at balancing it, as you could make the class zero casting and people could still get Metamagic Effect + 9ths. It's interesting to consider what would happen if you just shuffled class features around a bit. Swap Cooperative Metamagic and Sieze Concentration, Metamagic Effect and Snatch Spell, and Metamagic Spell Trigger with one of the usages of Instant Metamagic. Then, as a Wizard 5/Incantatrix 5, instead of having a big stack buffs up all day and the ability to blow people up with wands, you'd have a couple of derpy abilities that let you beat up on casters who use specific kinds of spells and the ability to Persist one buff or Quicken one attack spell per day. Much more reasonable, even if you do get all the crazy nonsense eventually.

I totally agree. That's probably one of the best fixes for Incantatrix that I've seen that don't also make the taking the class feel bad the way losing caster levels does. Hell, the class would still be incredibly strong, but its strength would come online late enough that it's honestly probably okay, in my opinion. Strong as hell late game, but still pretty reasonable in the low to mid levels.

The problem with that is that it quickly results in PrCs that are pointlessly over-specialized. Why are all Divine/Incarnum theurges members of this specific sect of lawful dudes who worship a big rock? Why are all Divine/Maneuvers theurges devotees of Wee Jas of all the possible gods? Having specific fluff for PrCs can be cool, but it can also mean that a mechanically interesting PrC looks you into a concept you don't like, or that the PrC that is called out as fitting your character's religion does stuff you're not interested in mechanically.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting that every prestige class needs flavor prerequisites, just that they should be used when they make sense. I would say that, in general, theurge classes should be rather flavor-independent, but something like Radiant Servant of Pelor should totally have the flavor requirements, because it is a class that is custom-built for specialist followers of a specific deity. If you effectively lock a specific type of thing behind a flavor requirement, that's not necessarily a bad thing, provided that it makes sense in the campaign world that only that group can do that sort of thing (Like Red Wizards/Hathrans/Haalruuan Elders and Circle magic).

This is just the same old "partial casting PrCs are fine if you judge them by a standard that says they're fine" thing. If the class makes you a bad Wizard when judged by the standards of Wizards, it is bad, because the thing that you are taking it instead of is Wizard levels. If you think that is an acceptable power level, make Wizards worse. Don't randomly make the PrCs that WotC happened to not like worse but leave Wizards alone.

I think that a good way to look at it is that, if the point of a prestige class is to be a spellcaster, then it should progress casting fully. If a prestige class is about being a Gish, then it's okay for it to slow your progression somewhat, since casting world-changing spells isn't what the the class is about. Of course, it should give you something really cool in exchange for what you lose, because you don't want a prestige class to feel bad to take. If a prestige class is basically just giving you something you could get out of alternating levels between Wizard and another class, it's not really doing anything worthwhile.

Note, I specifically said that a prestige class that loses caster levels should give something really cool, not really good. This is intentional. It's okay to give up power if you are getting something that feels exciting out of it. Take, for example, a class for Gishes. Say it's 5 levels long, and has 3/5 casting progression. You are slowing your casting progression by a full spell level by taking this class, so it should feel like it's worth it.

What feels like it's worth it, that also follows the Gish theme? Perhaps it lets you spend a spell slot to make an attack that hits multiple enemies in a 30 ft. radius at once. That's a pretty cool ability, so let's make it one of the "major" abilities that you get on one of the non-casting progression levels. We want it to be big and impactful, so let's have the number of extra targets you can hit be capped at your BAB, and give a bonus to the attack & damage rolls equal to the level of the slot expended.

Is this ability better than a level of casting progression? Well, no. It does, however, do something pretty cool, and it will remain useful throughout the rest of your career, allowing you to hit a large number of enemies at once. It also scales up with you, so it's not going to be obsoleted, and you can get lots of uses of it at higher levels when the lower levels slots matter less.

What about the other non-casting level? Perhaps that offers an improvement of some sort on the first ability, or perhaps it does something else that will remain useful throughout the rest of your levels, like some sort of defensive reaction ability or something. The levels that do progress casting should give something in addition to the casting progress, but it should definitely be less impactful than the other two levels. This is a good place to include the more flavor-oriented stuff.

Depends on your perspective.

If you are looking at things strictly through the lens of player use in a 1-20 build and measuring mechanical power:
Then no, basically no partial casting PrC is going to be worthwhile (unless you can shortcut the lost caster levels by some means, such as with taking only a single level of Mindbender and not soaking the lost casting that comes at Mindbender-2, or by getting your higher-level casting via a different PrC, such as Sublime Chord, and only losing levels from your base casting plan).

However, that's not the only possible perspective (it is, however, a very common perspective).

For instance, past 20th level (where you stop getting new spell levels from leveling up), a few lost caster levels can be mitigated entirely with Practiced spellcaster. As long as you're losing 4 or less caster levels, the question becomes "is it worth the class bonus feats you'd otherwise be getting, and the feat for practiced spellcaster?" From that perspective, the answer will relatively often be "yes".

Another perspective is that of the DM building an opponent for the PC's. As the DM, I have largely unlimited resources for my builds. I can absolutely wipe the party with a relatively generic build. I don't actually want to do that. I want the Big Bad of this encounter to be a memorable fight, not a generic one, and while I do want it to be a hard fight, I want it to be one they will still win. From this perspective, the funky abilities from a PrC nobody takes due to lost caster levels are great! Oh, that means his fireball won't pack quite as much punch? Not a big deal, I actually don't want to murder the PC's anyway. Oh, he doesn't get native access to this spell I want him buffed with? Scroll solves that, or just bump him up a level more with the base casting class. From this perspective, lost casting levels are no big deal, so yes, it's worthwhile.

There's more possible perspectives.

This is a good point as well. For me, my priorities lie in two things:

Is this something that is cool now or in the near future?
Will I regret this later?

If I'm playing a dedicated caster, then it's really hard to satisfy point 2 when losing a caster level. Every single time I hit a level where I would otherwise have gained a new spell level, I will feel bad about having to wait, and the feeling will get worse each time it happens. This is the same reason why Sorcerer is vexing to me. I start out a level behind in progression, and it feels like crap. (Notably, my table has started houseruling spontaneous casters to get their spells at the same levels as their prepared variants, and it's pretty nice)

Endarire

2022-06-08, 05:14 PM

To add to balancing frustration is the notion - at least in my experience - that games have normally lasted from levels 1 to about 8, rarely hitting double digits. In this context, Incantatrix is oddly balanced because one of its most significant abilities, Metamagic Effect, acts as a low level capstone and something that barely fits inside an E8 game.

Considering how spiffy the Incantatrix class features are, one could spread out most or all of these class features, maybe tweak some, and just rebrand "Incantatrix" as "(Specialty) Wizard" or "Sorcerer" as a 20 level base class and people would still take it.

Darg

2022-06-08, 07:19 PM

I don't think that comparing the boost given by a prestige class to the power of another class entirely is a particularly useful metric when the difference in the base classes is so high. Of course Incantatrix is going to blow Fighter out of the water, it would do that anyways even if it didn't progress casting at all.

I made the comparison to show how spellcasting progression massively outpaces features in and of itself and the kind of gap half-casting gives. It wasn't meant to compare the classes themselves.

RandomPeasant

2022-06-08, 08:19 PM

For instance, past 20th level (where you stop getting new spell levels from leveling up), a few lost caster levels can be mitigated entirely with Practiced spellcaster. As long as you're losing 4 or less caster levels, the question becomes "is it worth the class bonus feats you'd otherwise be getting, and the feat for practiced spellcaster?" From that perspective, the answer will relatively often be "yes".

This is just "PrCs that cost you casting are worth it if they don't actually cost you any casting". Which, sure, but very much not a disagreement with the "not worth it" position.

Another perspective is that of the DM building an opponent for the PC's. As the DM, I have largely unlimited resources for my builds. I can absolutely wipe the party with a relatively generic build. I don't actually want to do that. I want the Big Bad of this encounter to be a memorable fight, not a generic one, and while I do want it to be a hard fight, I want it to be one they will still win. From this perspective, the funky abilities from a PrC nobody takes due to lost caster levels are great! Oh, that means his fireball won't pack quite as much punch? Not a big deal, I actually don't want to murder the PC's anyway. Oh, he doesn't get native access to this spell I want him buffed with? Scroll solves that, or just bump him up a level more with the base casting class. From this perspective, lost casting levels are no big deal, so yes, it's worthwhile.

Similarly, I don't find "as a DM I can just kinda do whatever so it doesn't really matter if stuff sucks" to be all that valuable of a perspective, though I will grant you that it is a possible one.

Sure you are still pretty powerful in your area of expertise, but there's a reason why a class like Warmage is tier 3.

The Warmage is T3, but the Beguiler and Dread Necromancer are T2. A Summoner or Transmuter could easily be T2 (honestly, the Transmuter is probably T1 if it gets class features that make it better at abusing polymorph-type spells). And even at T3, the Warmage is better than many classes! It is true that if you ban enough spells you can balance some things. But it's a lot more spells that people appreciate, and it's easier to balance things by giving casters class features or taking away spell slots if you feel the need.

but something like Radiant Servant of Pelor should totally have the flavor requirements, because it is a class that is custom-built for specialist followers of a specific deity.

Radiant Servant has relatively little Pelor-specific stuff. It mostly exists to focus a Cleric on "healing" and "blowing up undead", which are pretty much the default foci for a Cleric to have in 3.5. Of course, the absence of Pelor-specific stuff makes it easy to refluff in any case, but I think there are very few PrCs that truly need specific fluff.

It's okay to give up power if you are getting something that feels exciting out of it.

I strongly disagree with this. "Feels cool" is impossible to truly, effectively predict in advance, and it's not the kind of tradeoff you should ask people to make in any case. You might think Mindbender is a boring class that just makes you generically better at casting, I might think it's a super cool class that gives me the tools to emulate a character I really like. Aim for balance and let people take things they think are cool.

Jack_Simth

2022-06-09, 11:27 AM

This is just "PrCs that cost you casting are worth it if they don't actually cost you any casting". Which, sure, but very much not a disagreement with the "not worth it" position.

Similarly, I don't find "as a DM I can just kinda do whatever so it doesn't really matter if stuff sucks" to be all that valuable of a perspective, though I will grant you that it is a possible one.

You don't like those perspectives. That's fine. I am not saying you need to.
You don't find them compelling. This is also fine, I'm not saying that you need to.

However: Can you truly say they're perspectives that nobody holds? Because if somebody holds them, then - for the folks who do - the partial casting PrCs can in fact be worth it at times. Which is an answer to the thread title.

vasilidor

2022-06-09, 02:40 PM

As I said earlier, it depends on the campaign.
I have had DMs where they expected characters to be cranked to the max of whatever was allowed because everyone at the table was a power gamer. This included the DM. At that table you had to have the ability to hit big numbers with your weapon attacks if you gave up spell casting to not be a load. We used our own variation on point buy (80 points, minimum score of 8 before race, 1 for 1 cost) and would generally try to get our spell casting score maxed out as quickly as possible with items and level up. These games also had a habit of ending at around level 13-14 by design. Giving up caster levels was rarely ever worth it.
Now other campaigns I have been in it was more lax. The DM graded on a curve and tailored the encounters to the average power of the party. Generally using magic items given freely to shore up any weaknesses in the party as well. I accidently blew out the power curve on that one around level 10 with an archer character, hitting damage numbers that would have been more appropriate to a level 20 character. I was thinking of just multiclassing into a spell caster just so everyone else could catch up to me in terms of power and ability, If I had gone with that route by level 20 things might have averaged out so as to make everyone around equal.

AsuraKyoko

2022-06-09, 02:56 PM

The Warmage is T3, but the Beguiler and Dread Necromancer are T2. A Summoner or Transmuter could easily be T2 (honestly, the Transmuter is probably T1 if it gets class features that make it better at abusing polymorph-type spells). And even at T3, the Warmage is better than many classes! It is true that if you ban enough spells you can balance some things. But it's a lot more spells that people appreciate, and it's easier to balance things by giving casters class features or taking away spell slots if you feel the need.

It is certainly true that you can do a lot with a limited spell list, but there are tradeoffs inherent in limiting your spell list. I'm not saying that a prestige class should limit you enough to drop you a tier or anything like that either. Mostly I'm just commenting that it's somewhat surprising that they didn't use that drawback more frequently than they did, given that it's the sort of thing that can mean that a character is giving up something for going into a prestige class, even if it's only an opportunity cost.

It's also worth noting that I'm very strongly in the "sacrifice spell slots" camp. I think it's by far the easiest to balance, and that the cost associated with gaining your features is static, rather than scaling. It's roughly like casting a spell that gives you your feature each day.

Actually, I'm a little bit surprised that they don't really have any PRC-unique spells. I could easily see a class that, as one of its features, gives you a totally unique spell that you know. Perhaps it could be a more powerful version of an existing spell, or a spell that does something special.

Radiant Servant has relatively little Pelor-specific stuff. It mostly exists to focus a Cleric on "healing" and "blowing up undead", which are pretty much the default foci for a Cleric to have in 3.5. Of course, the absence of Pelor-specific stuff makes it easy to refluff in any case, but I think there are very few PrCs that truly need specific fluff.

Perhaps that was a bad example, but there are totally classes that are specifically built on the lore of something specific. Exorcist of the Silver Flame's prerequisites are really simple: ranks in 2 relevant skills, BAB +3, divine spellcasting, Good alignment, and being a worshipper of the Silver Flame. The class lets you exorcise fiends, use silver fire to ward them off and enhance their weapons, and a smite ability. This is a pretty specific concept that is built on top of a setting element, so it makes complete sense for it to have related requirements. (it has 6/10 casting progression, but it's honestly more of a class for Paladins than Clerics, so that's not a huge deal)

On that note, I really like the special prerequisites for classes; things like "must spend all your 3rd level slots on haste for an entire level" or "must have peaceful contact with an evil outsider". Those prerequisites are very flavorful, and can and interesting parts to the campaign. Better yet, they can demonstrate dedication to something without consuming build resources on random feats that probably suck.

I strongly disagree with this. "Feels cool" is impossible to truly, effectively predict in advance, and it's not the kind of tradeoff you should ask people to make in any case. You might think Mindbender is a boring class that just makes you generically better at casting, I might think it's a super cool class that gives me the tools to emulate a character I really like. Aim for balance and let people take things they think are cool.

Hmm, that's fair. I guess it's better to say that any lost caster level is going to have to really justify itself, and if you are a dedicated caster, that's almost impossible, since you are giving up your main thing. It's why I'm much more willing to give up caster levels on a Gish, because the casting for that is in some ways secondary to the main focus of the character, which is hitting stuff (or at least shares focus with it).

--------

This discussion has sparked an idea in me about game design. Specifically, there are a lot of 10 level prestige classes out there that have, like, half of their levels give basically nothing. Additionally most base classes give their core features in the first 5 levels or so, at which point you pretty much want to ditch them and go into something else that advances your gameplan. My idea is simply this: Make every class 5 levels long. You can take a base class for 5 levels, getting everything your mini-class has to offer, or you can multiclass between them. Once you reach level 6, another large selection of classes opens up, allowing you to further refine what you are doing, or you can keep going with other base classes.

Spellcasting progression could be handled in a few different way. Perhaps your progression is defined by whatever base class you select, or perhaps each class provides its own, with the higher level classes starting at higher level spells. There's lots of ways it could be done.

The advantages of this are that there is no real reason for there to be a "cost" associated with prestige class features, because there is not base progression to have to compare against. It also allows for builds to be customizable while still being simple. You can go the standard 5/5/5/5, or maybe you do something more complicated involving multiclassing. This also allows you to put the most powerful class abilities in the higher level classes and still keep the clas defining abilities towards the beginning of each class's progression.

I guess, basically, what I'm saying is that base classes could just be 5 levels long and it would work just fine. I'm somewhat tempted to sketch out what this would look like; I'll have to talk to my homebrew buddy about it and see what he thinks.

Postmodernist

2022-06-09, 04:02 PM

I'm not even really convinced they "tried to go for balance". I don't see any rhyme or reason as to which classes lose caster levels and which don't, especially not between different books. Why, for instance, are the Incarnum/Divine and Binding/Arcane theurges full progression on both sides, but the Maneuvers/Divine and Arcane/Arcane theurges not? Did WotC really have a coherent, precisely calibrated theory that those particular combinations were too good, or where they just (as I think is more likely) making things up?

Like I said, it's unevenly applied. It's clear that some supplements (eg: FR splatbooks) are particularly egregious offenders on the powercreep side. Early books (early Complete series) tended to have more "cautious" gish PrCs with limited casting. They seem to have mostly corrected in the latter 3.5 splatbooks, but by then it was too late.

Part of the issue is that optimization and "fun" or "cool customization" are mutually exclusive. It comes down to do doing what's right for your campaign and making sure your players have fun and are appropriately challenged. (It'd be nice if WotC/DnD took some of the guesswork out for us, but...)

Endarire

2022-06-09, 06:09 PM

@Asura: A notable drawback to a PrC I found is Hathran in that taking even one level of this PrC forbids taking any item creation feat except Scribe Scroll. For me, that was a serious tradeoff. (Nevermind its female Human only requirement and its Leadership and Ethran feat requirements.)

Some divine casting 3.0 PrCs had prestige domains for exclusive spells, but those were made into normal domains in 3.5 probably so WotC could sell more books.

RandomPeasant

2022-06-09, 08:24 PM

Actually, I'm a little bit surprised that they don't really have any PRC-unique spells. I could easily see a class that, as one of its features, gives you a totally unique spell that you know. Perhaps it could be a more powerful version of an existing spell, or a spell that does something special.

I think they sort of do in a few places (though I can't remember any by name). It's just phrased as letting you spend a spell slot to do X rather than giving you a spell that does X. The thinking is probably to keep things in the same place, which I will say makes a certain degree of sense.

Exorcist of the Silver Flame's prerequisites are really simple: ranks in 2 relevant skills, BAB +3, divine spellcasting, Good alignment, and being a worshipper of the Silver Flame. The class lets you exorcise fiends, use silver fire to ward them off and enhance their weapons, and a smite ability. This is a pretty specific concept that is built on top of a setting element, so it makes complete sense for it to have related requirements.

With the exception of the fire stuff, that sounds quite similar to being a Sacred Exorcist, to be honest. I just don't really think printing hyper-specialized PrCs is a particularly viable approach, as it seems to me you'll run out of pages long before you run out of concepts. PrCs either need to be one-off things you work with your DM to design (as is sort of implied by the initial presentation), or generic enough to work into any character whether the fluff or mechanics grab your fancy.

My idea is simply this: Make every class 5 levels long. You can take a base class for 5 levels, getting everything your mini-class has to offer, or you can multiclass between them. Once you reach level 6, another large selection of classes opens up, allowing you to further refine what you are doing, or you can keep going with other base classes.

This is basically just Paragon Paths from 4e, and I think it is a reasonably good idea, if implemented effectively. The big thing is that it totally solves the "what does the Fighter do at high levels" question by simply declaring that there aren't Fighters at high levels. We don't have to figure out what the mundane warrior does when time stop exists if we dispense with the idea that anyone is a mundane warrior at that point.

However: Can you truly say they're perspectives that nobody holds? Because if somebody holds them, then - for the folks who do - the partial casting PrCs can in fact be worth it at times. Which is an answer to the thread title.

"What if there was a guy who's only joy in life was losing five levels of casting to be a green statue? What then?"

Like I said, it's unevenly applied. It's clear that some supplements (eg: FR splatbooks) are particularly egregious offenders on the powercreep side. Early books (early Complete series) tended to have more "cautious" gish PrCs with limited casting. They seem to have mostly corrected in the latter 3.5 splatbooks, but by then it was too late.

I'm not even sure that's true. Eldritch Knight is in the DMG and it only loses one level of casting. Arcane Trickster doesn't lose any casting at all. Warpriest loses five levels of casting, while Sacred Fist loses only two. Enlightened Fist also loses two, but at different points in the progression. The Daggerspell PrCs lose one level each. Shadowbane Stalker loses two, but Shadowmind loses three. Bladesinger, Rage Mage, and Spellsword lose five each, though not all the same ones. I just don't think there's a through line you can draw that's remotely consistent. There's not even a consistent rule for "how much magic should you give up to also advance Rogue abilities" in Complete Adventurer.