Quote Originally Posted by Rubik View Post
This. This and spells with alignment tags that don't actively use aligned energy. Why is Mindrape [Evil]? It can [very very easily] be used for Neutral and even Good things! It doesn't involve channeling Evil energy or summoning or calling inherently Evil creatures. It's not even inherently unusable for Good things, like Eternity of Torture. Why is it Evil? Is it the name? Because I can change the name with a single Ctrl+H in MS Word and suddenly BAMF. It's no longer Evil.
Mindrape being [Evil]? Probably because it involves forcibly altering a fundamental part of a person's personality. And they don't even know that it happened.

Quote Originally Posted by Rubik View Post
I also have a beef with other types of prereqs, especially racial ones. Unless a feat, PrC, or other option explicitly improves upon a specific racial feature (such as weretouched master, as an example), there is never a time when racial prereqs are good ideas. Arcane archer? Why? Shadowcraft mage? Why? Dwarven defender? Why? Able Learner and chameleon? Why? Not a single one of those deals with anything racial beyond stereotypes.
Stereotypes yes, but that's part of the flavor of a race. Elves? I got nothing on that really. ScM? Gnomes are the only core race, which is the only thing that can be absolutely assumed in use, that has access to SLAs and their SLAs involve [Illusion] so naturally they'd create a PrC devoted to a magic that they are innately gifted with. Dunno why its related to [Shadow] but it makes sense for them to have a PrC devoted to improving their innate abilities. Dwarven Defender? Even from a mechanical standpoint, Dwarves are the race that's all about being an immovable object against unrelenting force. Well, Core race at least and DD is a Core PrC. Its not going to consider other races that weren't printed at the time.

Do some of these reasonings rely on Flavor? Yes. But that was the only sure thing about a race that the writers had to work with. They couldn't anticipate all variations and permutations of flavor individual DMs would come up with, so they made PrCs/feats/options that fit the default flavor of a race.