2008-04-12 Prestige Classes and Feats

Lately I’ve been thinking about prestige classes and new feats. I’d really like to get a lot of bang for my buck, and I’m not sure I like what I hear about the Complete series by Wizards of the Coast. Blackdirge Publishing has a few PDF products out there for around USD 2 each containing prestige classes (the Master at Arms series). The Order of the Stick forums have a review of some of the prestige classes.

=> Blackdirge Publishing | Order of the Stick forums | a review of some of the prestige classes

Hm... In Peter’s Dragon Coast game I’m playing a swashbuckler and apparently I’m going to be the “tank” – this is not going well from a powergaming perspective, I can tell. 😄 :D

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Comments

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The prestige classes in the Complete series are of widely varying quality, but I think this is true of every supplement from every publisher. I think the problem with prestige classes is that what each player wants out of them is very different. Do you want the most powerful combo for the least skill/feat/multiclassing investment? Do you want to represent a specific organization in your game world? Do you want to realize a character concept that cannot be effectively achieved with feats and multiclassing alone? Even if a prestige class is well-designed, if it has nothing to do with a character you are playing (or will play in the future), then it is worthless to you.

In terms of feats, I really like Complete Warrior and Player’s Handbook 2 because they vastly increase the options for fighters. Complete Adventurer has some good feats, too. Complete Divine and Complete Arcane are just mediocre, but they do open up a lot more options in terms of metamagic feats and alternate uses for turn undead (in fact, Complete Divine includes some pretty abusive stuff – Divine Metamagic and Divine Spell Power can be used to outrageous ends), and the warlock core class in the arcane book is really well done, I think. Complete Mage introduces reserve feats, which are an attempt to address the resource management issues experienced by spellcasters, and I think they are a pretty good patch, though not a true fix.

– Adrian 2008-04-12 22:14 UTC