How Best To Introduce New Classes / PrCs Into An Already Running Campaign?

[Austin Morgan]

Greetings, all!

I'm going to be running a long campaign soon. I have just classes in the Core/APG/UM/UC allowed right now. I'd like to set up possibilities to open up new classes as the campaign progresses. Example:

The party helps out a high-standing Assassain group? They can now take the Assassain Prestige Class.

Now, the Assassain is already allowed, but you get the idea. I'd also like to open up certain 3.5 base classes this way. The issue I'm having is how a player would go about taking these. The base classes would have to be pretty damn appetizing for a character to sacrifice his single-class progression. The PrCs are similar though not as bad.

I don't want to provide incentive for players to kill their characters off to bring in new ones, but I also want players to reap these rewards.

Any ideas on how I could do this? I realize it's kind of odd, and there may be no good way to do it. My campaign's not hinging on the inclusion of these, but if there's anyone out there who has a solution, they'll be on the Homebrew boards :)

[TriOmegaZero]

Me personally, unless the secrets of the class are a guarded secret of an in game organization, I don't make a big deal out of it. Characters pick up new classes and abilities and they are just part of their fighting style or what have you.

When my monk player wanted to go Tattooed Monk, she had to find a master to teach her the methods before she could use any of them.

[Austin Morgan]

I'll pop out a better example and better question.

Say the party discovered the secrets to Binding, thus opening the 3.5 class "Binder". What incentive do the character's have to trash their current build and start at Binder 1? What 6th level Rogue is going to say "Oh hey, that's cool! It does almost nothing for me, but I'm going to start taking levels in that class anyway!"

The players already have their builds pretty much thought out. Throwing them new classes isn't going to change their builds after the first few levels.

Should I allow them to switch previous levels of "old" classes to their "new" class? That seems clunky and unrealistic. Is there just no way to do this?

[TriOmegaZero]

Thanks to the multiclass rules, it is pretty difficult to do effectively. This is why I ask players to try and let me know if they want a prestige class later on when the game starts. It's hard to do, and doesn't help when new classes are published, but what can you do?

[Bwang]

When I did this a few years back, I let the players reset their characters (a stock campaign mechanism to keep less mechanically minded players better realize their characters). Those who did minor changes were okay, though one decided he wanted to switch from a human Paladin to a gnome Illusionist, keeping the same background, storylines, etc. The other players put an end to that.

[Austin Morgan]

TriOmegaZero wrote:

Thanks to the multiclass rules, it is pretty difficult to do effectively.

This is what I feared.

Hmm... I suppose I could have them open up Abilities instead of Classes, and have XP costs for each ability....