(Some of the concepts I mention here are taken directly from the article I wrote in Dragon 274, "Create Your Own Prestige Class.")

Two weeks ago, I started discussing prestige class design in the first online design worskhop. I based a lot of what I wrote about on material generated by people on my message boards who submitted their prestige classes for critiquing.

First, let's take a step backward. Let's discuss the concept of prestige classes, and why you would want to create one.There are four basic reasons why you should create prestige classes for your campaign.

1. To Develop an Organization. You've already created the Order of the Blade, a group of fighters, rangers, and even rogues that help defend the capital city in times of great distress. They have a good reputation and a long history. To help further develop this organization, you create a prestige class with abilities unique to the Order. Now, when people speak of their almost unnatural prowess, there are concrete facts pertaining to exactly what they can and cannot actually do.

Prestige classes are a way to define monastic orders, secret cabals, religious zealots, thieves' guilds, special military units, or even just people trained under a specific teacher, sorcerers from a particular area, or bards who studied at the same college. If you're not already creating organizations like this in your campaign, you should be. If you are, use prestige classes to distinguish them from one another. If the wizards of the Inverted Pyramid actually know different spells and have different abilities than the wizards of the Open Hand Guild, it makes both groups, and the campaign as a whole, much more interesting.

Using prestige classes with campaign organizations also encourages Player Characters to join or at least investigate these groups. Prestige classes offer you a way to use the rules to draw players into your campaign world and involve them in whatever sorts of politics, intrigues and adventures you have in store.

2. To Develop a Race or Culture. Like organizations, races and cultures can benefit from having specific rules to showcase their abilities. While the races are detailed in the Player's Handbook with different abilities to make them unique, two prestige classes in the Dungeon Master's Guide, the arcane archer and the dwarven defender, use the rules to further demonstrate how each race fits its own standard archetypes. You could easily create many more such prestige classes. The dwarven smith, the halfling hill-scout, the half-orc demolisher -- these are just some of the racial archetypes to embrace.

While it's fine to say things like "elves operate well in the woods," or "gnomes are tricky," such statements become more powerful when you have rules to back them up. Prestige classes (the elven woodstalker and the gnome trickster, for example) are those rules.

Cultures can benefit from prestige classes perhaps most of all. There are no rules in the game for how the people from the Southern Kingdom in your campaign differ from the folk of the Direwood Forest. You could create an extensive description of how the spear-using warriors of the south have a completely different fighting style than the hardy, no-nonsense approach favored by the warriors of the Direwood. However, the southern speardancer and the Direwood ranger prestige classes could speak volumes on the subject. Culture-based prestige classes can tie into PC backgrounds: Only characters from the Sunlost Desert can take the knife-fighter prestige class. It makes every culture and every populated place that you create for your campaign something truly special.

3. To Satisfy Players. A player with a ranger character wants to be an expert archer. He takes Point Blank Shot and some of the other appropriate feats, but he wants to be able to do even more with his bow. He's willing to sacrifice other aspects of his character to do so, but there don't seem to be options for him. You create something called the Order of the Bow, and the player's character joins. There, he discovers a number of different trick shots and special bow-related abilities he can learn if he takes levels in the Order of the Bow prestige class.

Players often have plans or desires for their characters that extend beyond the bounds of the rules found in the Player's Handbook. That's okay. Prestige classes provide a way for you to develop rules within a balanced format to help meet your players' needs. Some DMs even allow players to develop their own prestige classes -- with the DM having final approval, of course.

4. To Make Otherwise Poor Options Acceptable. While this reason ties in with the first, it's worth mentioning on its own. A prestige class can take a poor choice possible in the rules, such as specializing in the whip, and make it worthwhile. Imagine a prestige class that granted abilities enabling a character to entangle foes with thewhip, gaining a bonus to trip and disarm maneuvers, and granting special damage bonuses with the weapon. Suddenly, the whip becomes an interesting choice. Potentially, you could create prestige classes that granted interesting abilities for people spending a lot of skill points in Innuendo, Intimidate, or a particular knowledge or craft. Characters that chose strange multiclass combinations, put their best score in Charisma, or selected a lesser race like a goblin or a kobold could all have access to prestige classes that made those choices worthwhile.

Choose the Specific Over the General

You have an advantage that no one else has -- that no game designer can ever have. You know the specific details of your campaign. When creating a prestige class, use your knowledge of these details to their fullest. The first rule is to forget the general and embrace the specific. You're not creating a prestige class for everyone's campaign -- just for yours. Below you'll see some examples of general prestige classes and how you can transform them into something more specific -- and therefore more interesting.

Prestige Class Balance

The first thing to look at are requirements. While I went over this a bit last time, I'm going to discuss it again in terms of balance. You need to be able to determine the lowest level at which a character can meet the requirements. In general, this should not be lower than 5th level -- these are prestige classes, and you should have to work for a while to achieve this special status.

When determining lowest level, don't forget to consider multiclassing. Often, a good prestige class won't make all requirements easy for a single class to achieve without taking ranks in cross-class skills or specializing in varied areas, so multiclass characters frequently qualify for prestige classes the quickest.

So let's take a look at these requirements (from Isida KepTukari's bondblade prestige class):

Requirements:
Craft (Weaponsmithing) - 6 ranks
Feats - Weapon Focus*, Alertness, Quick Draw
BAB - +5
Special - Must have used a single martial or exotic melee masterwork weapon (or a mace, spear or morning star) consistently and primarily** during the last three levels leading up to taking this prestige class.

(There are other requirements, but I didn't include them here because they are flavor related. They make the class interesting, and I highly recommend including things like that, but they have no place in a discussion of balance.)

A fighter is going to reach these requirements the quickest. He has to be 3rd level to get six ranks in craft, but 5th to get a base attack of +5. By 5th, he can easily get the three feats, even including the exotic melee proficiency feat if need be. So these are requirements that a 5th-level fighter can get easily -- and without even really straining. The fighter would take Weapon Focus anyway, and Alertness and Quick Draw, while not great feats, aren't terrible. The fighter doesn't get much in the way of skills to spend points on, so why not put them into weaponsmithing?

Armed with this knowledge, we can go into the next phase of balancing. When balancing prestige classes, look at the following aspects of the class as separate pieces:

1. Attack bonus, saving throw progressions, Hit Die type
2. Skill points and class skills
3. Spellcasting abilities
4. Special abilities

Compare these closely with the requirements. In this case, the bondblade has the same base attack bonus and saving throw bonus progressions as a fighter. Hit Dice aren't listed, but presumably they are the same as a fighter's (d10s). Skills are basically the same as a fighter's as well. So far, the fighter has gained nothing and lost next to nothing by taking the class.

The bondblade class has no spellcasting abilities, so let's turn to special abilities, the core of the class. In this case, they need to stack up against the feats that a fighter would normally get. Basically, the abilities give the bondblade a kick-butt magic weapon:

Class Features:

Weapons and Armor Specialization: The Bondblade gains no extra weapons or armor specialization.

Awaken the Blade I: During their time together, the weapon and the Bondblade have gone through a lot together. Now the weapon becomes intelligent, communicating by semiempathy (tingling and throbbing). (The weapon gains Int, Wis, and Cha, two at 2d6+7, one at 3d6). It shares the Bondblade's Sense Motive, Listen, and Intuit Direction skills and also her Alertness feat (For checks of these abilities, the Bondblade essentially gets to make them twice, once for her, and once for her sword.) Also the blade is now considered to be +3 for the purposes of bypassing damage reduction. (Note that the alignment of the blade will always be identical to the Bondblade. Also note that the weapon will only communicate and share its abilities with the Bondblade and no other.)

If the weapon is already magical or intelligent, abilities gained do not stack except for the following:

* If a weapon is already magical, it doesn't gain any magical pluses to this class until the given bonus is greater than what the weapon already had. Ex. if a Bondblade has a +2 shortsword, it wouldn only gain part of the abilities from the It's a Kind of Magic I: being able to bypass damage reduction at +3 and becoming a defender at its +2 bonus.

* If the weapon is already intelligent, nothing changes, except for its alignment, if different from the Bondblade, begins to shift toward hers. (SP)

It's a Kind of Magic I: The weapon now becomes a +1 defender (as the class progesses, the defending abilities scales, thus becoming a +3 defender at 3rd level), and is considered +3 for the purposes of bypassing damage reduction. (Also +5 hit points to the weapon, see Soul of Steel). (SP)

Weapon Specialization: A Bondblade now gains a +2 to damage with her chosen weapon as per the weapon specialization feat. If the Bondblade already has Weapon Specialization, she gains an additional +1 competence bonus to hit. (EX)

Brothers in Arms: A Bondblade can repair her chosen weapon with confidence, even restoring its magical abilities if they have been drained away. The DCs are normal if the weapon just sustained moderate damage (see Craft skill for DCs), and higher if more damage was sustained. The weapon can always be repaired, as long as the Bondblade has at least a shard of her chosen weapon. If the magical abilities have been drained away, the Bondblade may restore them (as they are extensions of her own spirit). A Craft check must be made at a DC five higher than normal, to prepare the weapon. Then two points of Con and Cha are temporarily drained to restore the weapon's magical abilities.

If, for some reason the blade is destroyed past all ability to recover, like being thrown into a Sphere of Annihilation, the Bondblade immediately loses 200 XP per Bondblade level (Fort DC 20 for half), all class abilities, but still retains all class hit points, saves, and BAB. She essentially becomes a Bondblade without a chosen weapon. If, by some fluke (divine intervention or other) the chosen weapon is returned, all class abilties are returned, but the lost XP still remains lost. (SU)

Awaken the Blade II: The weapon now awakes to empathy, communicating through emotions and urges to the fighter to encourage or discourage certain courses of action. (SP)

Soul of Steel: The weapon draws its own physical strength from being bonded to the Bondblade. Multiply the base hit points for the weapon by four (use Table 8-13, in the PHB). Also, for each It's a Kind of Magic ability gained, add five extra hit points to the total. (But even though the weapon has gained five extra hit points by this time, do not multiply them for this ability).

Because the Bondblade and the weapon begin to share characteristics, not only does the chosen weapon gain more ability to take punishment, like their wielder, but the wielder becomes more like the weapon. A Bondblade gets an extra save against mind-affecting spells, reflecting her bond to an "inanimate object." EX

It's a Kind of Magic II: The weapon now gains a true +3 bonus, and is considered +4 for bypassing damage reduction. (SP)

Awaken the Blade III: Now the weapon awakes to full blown speech. It speaks Common (or whatever the base tongue is for the character) plus one language per point of Intelligence bonus. There is also a 20% chance that the weapon will gain telepathy in addition to speech. If the character has psionic powers, the chance raises to 50%. By now the weapon has a name and a distinct personality. (SP)

My One and Only: Because the weapon and the fighter have been through so much together at this point, the weapon would be extremely insulted if the Bondblade choose to use any weapon but them in melee. If the Bondblade uses any weapon but their chosen, the weapon will sulk (essentially denying the Bondblade access to all class abilities until she apologizes or gives a very good excuse why she couldn't use her chosen weapon). Sulking typically lasts one day per fight where the weapon was denied use, unless the Bondblade makes amends.

By Your Side I: If the weapon and the Bondblade are separated, she can call the weapon back to her hand as a move-equivalent action. The weapon flies in a straight line back to her hand (Max range 30 ft.). If there are any intervening items or beings, the weapon makes an attack at the Bondblade's highest BAB. If this enough to dispatch the obstacle, the weapon continues on, if not, it falls, and the Bondblade may try again next round. Useable 5/day. (SU)

It's a Kind of Magic III: The weapon gains one primary ability from table 8-33 in the DMG. (SP)

True Purpose: The weapon has now found its purpose in defending the Bondblade, and will consider communicating to someone who is not the Bondblade if it will help the Bondblade in some way. (I.e. if the Bondblade has been captured and the weapon left behind, it might consider working with a rescue party.)

Also whenever the Bondblade falls to 0 hit points or less, or is the target of a sleep, hold person/monster, or paralyze-type spell, the weapon becomes a dancing weapon. It only dances under those conditions, and cannot be commanded to dance by the Bondblade otherwise.

Got Your Back: The weapon now looks out for the Bondblade. She can no longer be flanked. (SP)

By Your Side II: As By Your Side I, except with a range of 60 ft. superceding By Your Side One. Still 5/day. (SU)

It's a Kind of Magic IV: The weapon is now considered to be +5 for purposes of bypassing damage reduction. (SU)

I Didn't Know You Could Do That!!: The weapon now gains one ability from the medium column of table 8-15 Melee Weapon Special abilities in the DMG. If defending or dancing abilities are rolled, ignore them and re-roll. (SU)

Always Yours: Because the weapon and the Bondblade hate to be separated, she learns to hold onto her weapon. She gains a +10 to any attempts to be disarmed. (EX)

Till Death Do Us Part: By now the weapon and the Bondblade are the best of friends, and the way they work together is nearly supernatural. Now the Bondblade can always unerringly tell where her weapon lies, exact direction and approximate distance. In addition both the weapon and the Bondblade can transfer hit points to each other as a move-equivalent action. The weapon may sacrifice no more than half its hit points to heal the Bondblade (and visa-versa for the Bondblade).

When a Bondblade dies, the weapon will explode into shards of metal (or other) that deal 3d6 slashing damage to all within a 20 ft. radius, unless the Bondblade chooses a rather unusual option.

She can choose to enter the weapon, bonding with the spirit of her blade. If this option is chosen, the weapon's Int, Cha, and Wis become the average of the two entities. Thus the weapon becomes an mixture of the two spirits, with all the attendant magical abilites. Weapons passed down this way in a family often have names stretching back through the ages.

"Ah yes, my name, youngling, is Kernith- Kay-Weldor -Jarsen -Illyan -Hardeth -Belbrite -Garvon -Sevzek -Verquy the Bold, but most call me the Icespider."

A family member (or random adventurer) picking up a old Bonded Blade in this fashion (or from a monster's hoard) can become Bondblades, but instead of rolling for the appropriate abilities, the weapon simply reveals them at the appropriate levels, as their trust in the weilder grows.

Interesting. And when you consider that a fighter is probably going to get a good weapon anyway, through treasure gained in adventures (and now he has a weapon that discourages him from getting that weapon), and he is giving up five bonus fighter feats, it's probably balanced. Perhaps it's just this side of underpowered -- it really depends on whether the character gets other equipment of the same value that he would normally have "invested" in his primary weapon or whether he just misses out.

For non-spellcasting classes, match up the abilities gained with the abilities lost. Does a fighter-style prestige class give abilities at least as good as a fighter would get (but not way better) if he or she just stayed with the basic class and got normal bonus feats? What about a paladin's special abilities -- do the prestige class abilities stack up against the additional laying on hands, smiting evil, and other benefits the paladin gives up?

Basically, when looking at class balance, figure that the core classes have at least these areas of power that you need to compensate for if your PCs take a prestige class and no longer get them:

Fighters: Bonus feats, high hit points, high base attack bonus
Barbarians: Rage, high hit points, high base attack bonus
Ranger: Favored enemy, high hit points, high base attack bonus (and minor spellcasting)
Paladin: Lots of special abilities, high hit points, high base attack bonus (and minor spellcasting)
Rogue: Lots of skill points, sneak attack
Sorcerer/Wizard/Cleric: Spells
Druid: Spells, wildshape
Bard: The bard, being a sort of jack of all trades, is moderately good at everything
Monk: Lots of special abilities, unarmed combat damage progression, great saves

So you can see how one goes about balancing. Determine the character that gets there the quickest and then compare the four aspects of the prestige class (delineated above) to what the character would have gotten by staying in his or her original class(es). That's why it's so important to determine starting level. If the a class's requirements can't be reached until say, 8th level, its special abilities ought to be better than one a character can reach at 5th. Characters don't always take a prestige class at its lowest possible level, but you have to assume that they will to get a good balance.

Spells Versus +1 Spellcasting Level

One last note. Some spellcasting classes get their own spell progression and spell lists, and some get to simply add one level's worth of spells and spellcasting ability from a previous spellcasting class. The latter is much more potent than the former. A spellcasting progression and a short spell list is just a way to configure special abilities. The assassin, for example, isn't really a "spellcaster" in the way that a wizard or cleric is. An assassin is more a spellcaster the way a ranger or a paladin is. Don't treat these two things the same.

Look at most prestige class spell progression tables closely. Many get a single 1st-level spell at 1st or 2nd level. But that's the character's 6th or 7th level (at least). A 1st-level spell is nice, but it's nothing compared to the extra spells a 6th-level wizard would get with +1 spellcasting level (that would be a 1st-level spell and a 4th, plus increased caster level and more spells for the spellbook).

In Conclusion

Obviously, many factors go into game balance, and nothing has more such facets that creating a whole new class -- and that is basically what a prestige class is). Tread carefully. Overall, my advice is this: Be harsh with requirements, then be generous with abilities. That ends up making players happiest and creates the most interesting characters.