Hello, and welcome to this insane little concept.
A little backstory: I was looking at the Chameleon, and I randomly started thinking of it as the meta-class. Then I came up with the following.
Metaclassing is similar, in some ways, to metamagic, but ends up being different. I'll use a converted Echoing Spell metamagic to explain the concept. Let's say that you are creating a 10th level barbarian, and want him to be a little... different; you want him to be able to recover rages. What you do is, let's say, pick levels 3, 6, and 8 are Echoing Feature barbarian levels. Please note that you can only apply one Metaclass to any one class level (think of it like a PrC if you want), and it counts towards levels in that class; i.e. you gain class features as normal. Alright, now you have a Barbarian 7/Barbarian(Echoing) 3; now what? Well, to tap the power of your new "PrC", you treat your character as if all those PrC levels were drained; treat him like a Barbarian 7 (Don't worry, you regain the lost levels after a good night's sleep). So, to give an example of how this would be used, let's say that our Barbarian Bob goes into one of his 3 daily rages; he loses one of them, and he wants it back. So he triggers the Echoing effect, drops to level 7, and regains a rage.
Now for prestige spells. This is when you take a spell (say MM), and want to alter it. Let's say you want to give it the almighty "placeholder" effect in addition to what it already has. To do this, you replace MM with "placeholder" in your spellbook for a number of days equal to spell level*The base amount of days "placeholder" needs, let's say 3. You have to cast it at least once each day, and some PrS will require more times per day. After you cast it the necessary amount of times over the necessary amounts of days, you would permanently replace MM with MM/"Placeholder", which would be, in this case, a 3rd level spell. The equation for this would be (Base Spell Level+PrS-1)=New Spell Level.
Well, what do you think? I want opinions, possible Metaclasses and Prestige Spells, and balance suggestions; I personally think this could lead to thousand of possible variations on otherwise predictable classes. Feel free to suggest flavor.
Thanks in advance
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