There are fewer prestige classes because there are simply a lot fewer people playing (any version of) D&D3.5, and a lot fewer people vanity publishing for it.

Quote from: Joethelawyer;335736But did that interruption force us to be a bit introspective, take a look around, and realize "Shit, prestige classes are a pain in the ass.  Who needs them and the kind of game they lead to."

Nope.

To clarify: I didn't use 'em much (if at all in my last game) 'cause I had us leveling slow. By the very end my players might have started picking up PrCs, and I'd have let them. I'd use them if I started a 6+ level game without any remorse or introspection.

I'm not writing them into the game I've been working on for ages, but that's just cause the game isn't class based.

They're gonna be as much a feature of third-party Pathfinder publishers as they were of third-party 3.X publishers. It's a very convenient form of shovel-ware.

Paizo itself may well cut back. I'm not qualified to express an opinion there.

I still think PrCs are great AS A GM TOOL TO SHAPE THE GAME.

As powerup toys (the way most splatbooks presented them), not so much.

As a replacement for having a flexible class system, not so much.

Overall, I like the concept of prestige classes as specializations MUCH better than the idea of stuffing new core classes in every splatbook (as in 3.5 and 4e).


In Spycraft (and by inheritance, Fantasy Craft), the origin system gives you a mechanical tool to shape your class more so you don't need a gladiator PrC (or core class) to make a gladiator. The games still have "expert classes", but they aren't power-ups. They get some cool abilities which might be just what you are looking for, but the core classes themselves get cool abilities at the same level you would get it if you took an expert class.

The age of prestige classes is over. The age of splatbooks will continue for a long time.

I never liked 99% of the prestige classes released. The concept was good but the execution was poor. Most of them were things I would never play. The splatbooks were only part prestige class and there were other things like new races, base classes, new feats and new spells that made the splatbooks somewhat usefull to me.

It was never about the prestige classes.

I don't think prestige classes were ever that powerful. Some of them were just plain weird (Greenmetal Adept being one of my favorites), and often required a much less than optimal set of requirements to get into (for example, if you want to get into Shadowdancer, you need to spend a certain amount of your skill points on Perform:Dance).

But it was cool to have a green-metal dude who slowly becomes a construct over time, or a character that can slip in and out of shadows.

I wasn't one of those Charops guys, but it seemed to me that for most people, just sticking with a single class was the way to make the toughest character. Otherwise, you had to go find some standardized "build" and follow it pretty meticulously from the start of your career. Rogues got hosed on sneak attack dice and spell casters *usually* got hosed on spell levels at the moment they multiclassed.

I'm not sure if I believe that Pathfinder isn't going to have as many prestige classes, (I don't really know) but it seems like - if that were true-- that wouldn't be a point in it's favor. Community members would actually benefit the most from as varied a spectrum of choices as possible.

Quote from: Abyssal Maw;335917I don't think prestige classes were ever that powerful. Some of them were just plain weird (Greenmetal Adept being one of my favorites), and often required a much less than optimal set of requirements to get into (for example, if you want to get into Shadowdancer, you need to spend a certain amount of your skill points on Perform:Dance).

But it was cool to have a green-metal dude who slowly becomes a construct over time, or a character that can slip in and out of shadows.

I wasn't one of those Charops guys, but it seemed to me that for most people, just sticking with a single class was the way to make the toughest character. Otherwise, you had to go find some standardized "build" and follow it pretty meticulously from the start of your career. Rogues got hosed on sneak attack dice and spell casters *usually* got hosed on spell levels at the moment they multiclassed.

I'm not sure if I believe that Pathfinder isn't going to have as many prestige classes, (I don't really know) but it seems like - if that were true-- that wouldn't be a point in it's favor. Community members would actually benefit the most from as varied a spectrum of choices as possible.

Agreed. I liked prestige classes, in that they gave your character more distinctive mechanics and made it more unique. It's the "Charop guys" that ruined it by making broken character builds with them.

Quote from: The Worid;335920Agreed. I liked prestige classes, in that they gave your character more distinctive mechanics and made it more unique. It's the "Charop guys" that ruined it by making broken character builds with them.

Yeah, and most of those builds you can just look at and go, "come on, four prestige classes?" And also you are pretty high level by then.

Quote from: Imp;335928Yeah, and most of those builds you can just look at and go, "come on, four prestige classes?" And also you are pretty high level by then.

Yup. Indeed. Which is a futile exercise in most instances. For me, real optimization is to get the most efficient character possible given a precise game context. It's kind of a game in and of itself, a puzzle based on game mechanics. It's not to pile on all you possibly can assuming the DM would accept everything and the character would be level 20. That almost never happens in practice.

But in any case. Since people were optimizing with PrCs regardless of coherence or ties to the game world thereof, there was a market for bland and/or weird PrCs of "Ze Awesome" out there, and WotC provided.

Quote from: Benoist;335931For me, real optimization is to get the most efficient character possible given a precise game context.

This, totally.

Figure out the character concept first. Then figure out how to put together mechanics that keep the feel of the character while still being mechanically viable/optimized.

Quote from: Caesar Slaad;335898I still think PrCs are great AS A GM TOOL TO SHAPE THE GAME.

As powerup toys (the way most splatbooks presented them), not so much.

Agreed. Lots of stuff in 3.5 Complete Divine, for instance, was craptastic to char-op your character, and fell flat in terms of flavour at a level where it's worth probing a character concept at the game table for some time to come. But as a toolbox for a DM fine tuning some of his NPCs, lots of the Complete Divine PrC held some degree.
By the by, I noticed that Pathfinder remains silent on the role of prestige classes, given the chapter position in the book: it's after the spell descriptions (in 3.5. that demarcates the end of the PHB section) but before the chapter on "gamemastering". Could of course mean that it's meant to be part of both worlds.

This is not to say that 3.5 couldn't sometimes (often?) suffer from an arms race syndrome- I've left campaigns that were kinda ruined by too much optimization.

(IF I had the patience and actually trusted people here I'd open my Livejournal entries that show two campaigns I dropped out of where a single player was able to drive up the optimization requirements of a game singlehandledly- in one case basicly by cheating-- so that a character that didn't take advantage of rules-holes was essentially rendered useless. I know of a third example offhand that a friend of mine played in.

The issue wasn't usually prestige classes, though. Often it was Level Adjusts (this is for non standard races) and magic items. Given two levels of LA to mess with, an abusive player could come up with a character that breaks the CR system. Another player could take those two levels and create something totally interesting and unique.

The problem is- if you have just *one* guy breaking the CR system, some DMs will start trying to creep the power level up to "challenge" him, and he'll just keep obsessively finding holes in the rules to exploit. Meanwhile the rest of the group gets screwed over as the monsters suddenly become immune to their spells and weaponry (via SR and DR) and only the abusive player really thrives.

Also, not to forget: the majority- the overwhelming majority-- of Prestige Classes (and I suspect the majority of the problem PrCs) were actually meant for NPCs.

...Which is another reason that Pathfinder should consider keeping them, perhaps with something unheard of like an "NPC Only" caveat.

Quote from: Abyssal Maw;335942The issue wasn't usually prestige classes, though. Often it was Level Adjusts (this is for non standard races) and magic items. Given two levels of LA to mess with, an abusive player could come up with a character that breaks the CR system. Another player could take those two levels and create something totally interesting and unique.

The problem is- if you have just *one* guy breaking the CR system, some DMs will start trying to creep the power level up to "challenge" him, and he'll just keep obsessively finding holes in the rules to exploit. Meanwhile the rest of the group gets screwed over as the monsters suddenly become immune to their spells and weaponry (via SR and DR) and only the abusive player really thrives.

I completely agree. If you want to play char-op and just wreck the game for everyone else involved, you can with 3.5 (and I'd guess, with Pathfinder RPG as well). It's important for everyone to be on the same page when it comes to the aims and style of the game about to begin.

As for the role LAs and Magic items played in char-op, I agree there as well. LAs were an excellent idea, but the implementation was more than wonky in some instances. I understand when a character race is fundamentally gimped to fit the flavor of a setting (ex: Cherubim Elves in Ptolus, which basically have the ability to fly for LA+2, and that was it), but I've seen tons of LA races gimped for no apparent reasons, and others that were just open doors for char op. That's where IMO the mechanics of the game really are supposed to be campaign-specific, with a DM paying attention to the players' game play style and the feel of the game world he wants to achieve. Like in the case of PrCs. There's no one-size-fits-all, silver bullet in these instances.

Quote from: Abyssal Maw;335942This is not to say that 3.5 couldn't sometimes (often?) suffer from an arms race syndrome- I've left campaigns that were kinda ruined by too much optimization.

(IF I had the patience and actually trusted people here I'd open my Livejournal entries that show two campaigns I dropped out of where a single player was able to drive up the optimization requirements of a game singlehandledly- in one case basicly by cheating-- so that a character that didn't take advantage of rules-holes was essentially rendered useless. I know of a third example offhand that a friend of mine played in.

The issue wasn't usually prestige classes, though. Often it was Level Adjusts (this is for non standard races) and magic items. Given two levels of LA to mess with, an abusive player could come up with a character that breaks the CR system. Another player could take those two levels and create something totally interesting and unique.

The problem is- if you have just *one* guy breaking the CR system, some DMs will start trying to creep the power level up to "challenge" him, and he'll just keep obsessively finding holes in the rules to exploit. Meanwhile the rest of the group gets screwed over as the monsters suddenly become immune to their spells and weaponry (via SR and DR) and only the abusive player really thrives.

hehehe... when my primary group played 3.x D&D I was constantly clowned for my "sub-optimal" characters.  Whenever we would create a new character, they would plan out the build to the 20th level before we even played.  My character development approach was the complete opposite- I would have an initial concept and then I would develop the character organically out of the developments in the campaign story line.  Consequently, I would often have characters that were multi-classed with non-uber-optimized builds.  

Level Adjustment is such a can of worms because I've encountered very few people who understand how it works, let alone implement it in their game effectively.  It is a difficult to get a grasp on- I had to read Savage Species, the WotC FAQs, read play and character examples, and read forum posts about it before it finally 'clicked' in my mind for me.  However, once it did 'click' it was easy to deal with and employ effectively.  

I've seen the player/GM arms race more often than I care to remember, and I've been a part of it from both sides I'm ashamed to admit, although it was a learning experience.  I now know how to recognize the signs both as a player and GM, and work to diffuse it before it gets completely out of control.