When designing a roleplaying game, it's quite important to consider the calibration of the game. Otherwise, you get results like characters routinely solving problems well beyond the bounds of known science, or great heroes being slain by a lucky strike from some random punk, or (worse) both at the same time.
Of course, neither of these is actually inherently bad. If your heroes are the Avengers, and your character is Tony Stark, it is entirely sensible that he's constantly pushing back the frontiers of science. Conversely, if you're playing a gritty war drama (or Warhammer), it's entirely consistent that life should be cheap - being that "great hero" is simply a matter of having the luck not to have died so far. But the key thing is to calibrate the game so that when these things happen, it is because they are meant to happen.
In D&D 3e, the original designers did a decent job of calibrating the game... but not actually in the way that they envisaged. See, they seem to have taken the view that the early levels were some sort of apprenticeship, that the mid levels represent the point where the character is a known hero (the equivalent of a skilled tradesman, perhaps), and that even at the high levels characters were fundamentally human in scope - they didn't become truly superhuman until epic levels.
The reality is quite different. In 3e, even 1st level characters are strictly superhuman in some regards, and they pretty quickly accelerate out of sight. By the time they're mid-level, they're quite clearly superhuman, to the point where pretending otherwise really gets quite silly. High levels are yet another step above, and epic... well, by the time you get to epic levels the maths of the game has broken down to a point where it's barely worth considering.
Basically, low-level (1-5) play has the heroes as "The Three Musketeers" - the characters are clearly a cut above the man on the street, but not spectacularly so. They can still be challenged by mundane threats, they can't (quite) laugh at a crossbow pointed at them.
Mid-level (6-12ish) play casts the characters as the Knights of the Round Table, Han Solo, Batman, Aragorn, or many similar characters. These characters are legends, and are clearly superhuman... but still recognisable. These are the guys who see a band of orcs rushing towards them and proceed to draw their swords and get stuck in. But to really challenge them, they really need larger-than-life foes. Batman can take on any number of thugs, but he is challenged by the Joker. Aragorn, as mentioned, takes on a legion or Uruk-hai singlehandedly, but struggles with an armoured troll. Han Solo, of course, meets his match in Boba Fett ("Return of the Jedi" notwithstanding!). And so on.
High level play, then, is "Clash of the Titans", "300", or the Iliad. The characters are the most epic of the epic - they're Leonidas, Achillies, and the like. Chances are, they're directly descended from the gods themselves, and indeed they may well fight against the gods and at least hold their own.
Which brings us to NPC classes.
See, in addition to the regular PC classes, 3e also introduced 5 classes for NPCs: the Commoner, the Adept, the Aristocrat, the Expert, and the Warrior (later joined by the Magewright in Eberron). The notion here was that if the DM ever needed stats for one of the great unwashed, he could quickly roll those up. And, I think, the notion was that the King would be a high-level aristocrat, perhaps even as high as 20th level. After all, in 3e, NPC wealth was tied to their level, and kings are of course fabulously wealthy.
The problem with that is that 20th level characters, of any class, are clearly superhuman. If the king is 20th level, even a 20th level NPC, then suddenly there's little reason for the PCs to be called on to adventure - if a threat to the kingdom is truly that bad then the 20th level monarch would need to just go and deal with it.
(And, incidentally, 3e did indeed assume that such high-level NPCs did exist, and were even quite common. There are demographic tables in the DMG for designing cities, and very large settlements could indeed throw up multiple 20th level NPCs.)
Fortunately, there's a fairly simple (two-part) fix for this oddity:
Firstly, of course, the DM shouldn't feel the need to stat up every single NPC. The effort involved in absurd anyway, so not really worth bothering with. This should only be done if it's necessary or beneficial to the game. (Which is just good sense anyway. Those NPC classes can, at times, be very useful, but they're like flavourings used in cooking - best used sparingly.)
Secondly, the DM should simple recalibrate. With a very small number of exceptions, no NPC should be assigned anything above 5th level in even an NPC class (and PC classes should be even rarer). The overwhelming majority of people should be 1st level. (Those low, but above 1st, levels aren't terribly hard to justify. It's not hard to envisage Cleig Lars as being a 3rd or 5th level farmer, what with his living in proximity to Sand People. It's not hard to see a master smith, having spent decades at the forge, as having several levels in Expert.)
And there can be exceptions, of course. It's not unreasonable to have a high-level Expert hidden away somewhere in your campaign - just make him appropriately rare, well-known, and potentially legendary in his own right. Basically, he's Hatori Hanzo.
(Incidentally, if the king and all his retinue are 5th level or lower and the PCs are 10th level or higher, one might well ask "what stops the PCs from just killing the king and taking over the kingdom?" And the answer is: nothing. There is absolutely no reason that the PCs shouldn't do that, if that is truly what they want. Of course, they might then find the demands of running a kingdom get in the way of their ongoing adventures, or they might find that doing so throws up a whole load of new challenges/adventures for them. But that's not really a terribly bad thing, is it?)
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There is an unfortunate corollary to this fix, and it highlights the second part of my title: Prestige Classes don't make sense.
See, as written, Prestige Classes were intended as a world-building tool - they're organisations for elite characters to join after they have completed their apprenticeships.
However, if mid-level characters are already clearly superhuman, they must necessarily be very rare or your setting is quickly cease to be recognisable. But if such characters are rare, then organisations that you can't join until you've reached that point become even rarer.
Now, that doesn't mean they shouldn't exist - as I indicated above, the Knights of the Round Table make for a decent model for mid-level characters, while Leonidas' 300 represent a possible high-level group. But it does mean that the setting can't really accomodate more than maybe half a dozen such organisations (in total), and that such organisations would have to be necessarily broad - with so few mid-level characters who could join, the few organisations would need to be willing to accept almost any character of the requisite level.
3.5e has several hundred Prestige Classes, and it is generally expected that a PC should be able to adopt pretty much any PrC that he wants, provided he meets the entry requirements. Indeed, a single PC could adopt multiple prestige classes over the course of the campaign, if that is what he desires.
As I said, that doesn't make sense. Either the DM needs to build his world with hundreds of mid-level organisations all in place (and vying for a ridiculously small talent pool), or he needs to leave large swathes of his campaign undefined so that he can drop in whatever organisations he requires. Which defeats the purpose of these classes as world-building tools.
Oops.
My preferred way of dealing with this is dead simple: I just don't use Prestige Classes. Problem solved. However, if you do want to use them, my suggestion is simply to divorce them from the "in-setting organisation" part of the equation, and make a Prestige Class just another class that a PC who qualifies can take. Meanwhile, simply add whatever organisations you want to your game, but don't tie membership of these to being even mid-level (in most cases). So even a 1st (ish) level character gets to join "The King's Musketeers", without the need of a Prestige Class to model that affiliation.
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