Well, yeah. Look, Open Multiclassing and Prestige Classing were popular concepts in 3e and were generally better than what came before. But they fail in important and unsolvable ways. You can't actually get rid of them without making a whole new edition, but moving forward you're going to want people to be able to scratch the itch those features scratch without actually having to use those broken mechanics.TiaC wrote:It's like they're trying to achieve the granularity of open multiclassing with single-class builds.
If you were making a new edition, you'd want to provide a lot of classes that covered all the hybrid options and you'd want to provide a number of customizability options as characters grow including a prereq-free paragon class jump that allows players to undergo radical transformative advancement at some level or another. But within the context of maintaining the fiction of 3.5 compatibility, all you can do is provide a classplosion with enough archetypes and traits and feats and shit that people can play generally what they want without having to poke at the multiclassing or PrestigeClassing "rules."
Pathfinder is doing pretty much exactly what they have to do given their constraints. Including making all this shit pretty much stand alone - a constraint brought in by the fact that a lot of their writers are fuckups and they don't do any playtesting or editing. So if there was a lot of cross pollination of spells, archetypes, feats, traits, and whatever the fuck between different classes you'd have things collapse into 4e style charop shit right away.
-Username17