I disagree wholeheartedly. A prestige class should be taken to complement a character's play.
Crypt Raider is worse than rogue but it does exactly what it says on the tin. You don't take it because there's a mechanical incentive, you take it because it fits your character's concept. I wont rehash MH here and Palemaster is /really/ good these days.
I have the same response to both of these -- What does People's Champion or Crypt Raider offer you, beyond an OOC label - which is all these classes realistically are without tangible, mechanical differences, that a Cleric or a Rogue does not, that is
pertinent to the role-play of the class? People's Champion has approx.
one tangible benefit for either a Paladin or a Cleric, and it is
righteous anger. It's a one trick pony, that is short lived, and doesn't really justify everything you lose as a max level cleric or a max level paladin. For a Paladin, their power curve gets ridiculous after like, level 15 or so, because of the inclusion of spells like Holy Sword and Sacred Haven. From that point forward, you only become stronger, and stupidly stronger. For a Cleric, you get additional spell slots and spells like implosion, which I've personally witnessed used to great effect in the past. Unless you're only dipping a couple levels of People's Champion, you're missing out of more or less all of your good spells as a Cleric, from 10-20, or even 13-14 out to 20. You just don't get that same flexibility. So far it's, sacrificing a bunch of skill-points, to get access to spot and lose a bunch of spells. Nobody thinks Righteous Anger is particularly useful in PvE, where it's OK for a boss-fight, but not much else, and in PvP it's good for a gank, if they're caught unawares.
Or you could use a bow and shoot them? I suppose they could flee but at that point combat is over, no?
This assumes your cleric uses a bow, which requires Zen Archery unless you want to completely mitigate the benefits of using Righteous Anger. It costs one action, or one round, to switch weapons in combat. It's very easy to just run up and KD someone when they switch to a bow, they won't have the rapid fire feats, and they probably won't have point blank shot, which gives them a -4 on top of the fact they probably didn't buff their bow with GMW or any other AB goodies. So even if you have Zen Archery, and you're in PvP - For a Cleric specifically - You're still losing your GMW enhancement bonus, whatever damage buffs you put on your weapon,, and as soon as you do it, they'll just run up and attack you in melee which is a -4 to hit. Then when you click to switch, they bugger off like a cheeky man micro-managing you during your 90 seconds of glory.
For a Paladin, using a bow is going to entirely tank your AB. You have 14 WIS and probably aren't buffing it with Owl's Wisdom because you want to use your significantly better buffs, and your number of spell slots is drastically reduced because of your prestige class. You won't have buffed the bow either, probably aren't wasting feats on Rapid Fire or Point Blank Shot, and the idea that you've taken Zen Archery on the off-chance someone decides to kite your Righteous Anger is a sign of the times regardless. So again, whatever 'Righteous Anger' benefit you had, is almost nothing in comparison to what you're getting out of a high-level Paladin with spells like Holy Sword and Sacred Haven being available. Your only benefit is Spot, at the cost of a lot of cross-class skills. Spot is OK. Spot isn't life, and Spot isn't even the best detect skill.
I think I'd be a lot happier, if there were feats, or there was incentive in the class-level progression, to acquire multiple uses of Righteous Anger, akin to Defender Stance. If you could use it three times a rest period, I think I'd be happier. Because then it feels a little more reliable. Even if it costs more feats.
P.S./Edit: I know you people are all like, 'Nah, mang. For the RP's.' -- But this is a Persistent World server, with Persistent World issues. We balance many of our dungeons to account for the guy who goes through and maximizes his build for excellence, and plays to power and win, so we make things more difficult to prevent solo'ing these dungeons for these people. We adjust the loot tables to account for these people. We adjust the entire server, to account for the individuals who are going to stick to their guns and pull the absolute worst out of a base class, but we aren't even considering trying to give incentive for PRC's to remain more relevant in the meta that is created, by these individuals and their builds.
Some of you just roleplay, and you people sit around and don't care about what your mechanics are, and you avoid confrontational roleplay that could result in your character being corpsehidden, or maybe you just don't care, because it's the roleplay. That's fine and dandy, and you're entitled to enjoy the game however you well please. That's the wonder of the server. In a PnP session, this isn't even really a discussion, because everything is tailored to your party at hand by the careful and loving hands of your cheeto-consuming friendly neighborhood Dungeon Master. However, that isn't how NWN is set up. It's very clear, for roleplay reasons Aprogressivist has taken this class. However, it probably would've been more mechanically advantageous if their character hadn't, and for that they are weaker against their potential opponents on the Antag side of the aisle, and have to rely on banding together with other more capable characters, or even in higher-end dungeons late in the game.