Prestige classes were additional classes that you could multiclass into back in D&D 3.0 and 3.5, but they had requirements to get into that required you to be at least 5th level (if not higher), and usually you needed to very carefully plan your character to take the right classes and feats in order to meet those requirements.While the goal was specialists and branches off the primary classes, they generally were a lot more powerful and any character not going into one or more would be left behind. Yet the requirements usually made it so that you would need to plan out your character ahead of time. In 3.x, not only did the prestige classes have requirements, but all of those requirements had requirements. For example, you might need feat X, but feat X has a requirement of "Base Attack Bonus +5" which means that depending on your class(es) previous you couldn't take it at levle 3 (when you got yoru first feat) and you might not be able to take ti at level 6 - but the prestige class might also have a skill rank requirement (proficiency in a skill was in +1 chunks called ranks, there was no proficiency bonus), adn the classes that could get you a high enough BAB wouldn't give you the max skill ranks (which was halved if it wasn't a class skill ever), but if you took a dip in another PrC for one level it would give you teh BAB and the right skill ...
It really ended up being something that people willing to invest a lot of time could make characters well above the curve, and others would not, and also took out all spontaneously and blocked in a lot of what you needed to take at every level, planned out in advance.
If you can't tell from my negativity, I'm glad they don't exist anymore.
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