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I am running a D&D 3.5 campaign, and a player wants to go for the Cancer Mage prestige class in the Book of Vile Darkness. Is this prestige class overpowered, as defined in this question?

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Hi, welcome to the site! We’re a little bit different from other sites you might be familiar with: we don’t really do opinion polls. I have tried to modify your question to allow it to be a little more objective, since questions here need to be definitively answerable. I suggest taking a look at the Tour for more about how the site works. Ultimately, I’m not sure that my edits have done enough to make this question work, but hopefully they help. Either way, you could always come into Role-playing Games Chat to talk about it! –  KRyan yesterday

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Cancer Mage is one of the most notoriously-overpowered classes in the game

Only the illithid savant and beholder mage immediately come to mind as more powerful. The ability to ignore the negative aspects of diseases, but only the negative aspects, is extremely powerful, because many diseases do have some kind of “upside” (to make diseased creatures more dangerous, I suppose). Worse, several of these have cumulative upsides: something it keeps improving (until it kills you).

In particular, Festering Anger is supposed to keep improving your Strength until it kills you – except it will never kill a cancer mage. So the cancer mage just gets arbitrarily-high Strength. Vile Rigidity is another one, that keeps improving your natural armor. Note that both of these diseases are in Book of Vile Darkness right alongside the cancer mage, so... I suppose someone wasn’t paying attention.

That said, without these and other abusive diseases, the cancer mage is probably OK. Drawing the line between what is an abusive disease and what isn’t is tricky though.

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Answers fully my question, thank you –  Saryk yesterday
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Upon rereading disease host, it seems extremely likely that it's supposed to be just disease immunity except the CM's still a carrier. But assuming a traditional reading, besides the GM fiat-heavy festering anger and the admittedly problematic vile rigidity, are there other problematic diseases? Seems sad to consign an otherwise interesting and flavorful class to the scrapheap when the DM can instead just say No to a pair campaign elements under his control anyway. –  Hey I Can Chan yesterday
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@HeyICanChan I do not, off-hand, know of any other problematic diseases, but at least for the sake of this answer I’m not comfortable assuming there aren’t any. Diseases are deep into that “the designers always assumed players wouldn’t be messing with this and gave no thought to what would happen if they did” category. –  KRyan yesterday
    
A DM just saying no to this is boring. Wacky unbalancing combos, especially in expansion rules, have been around a long time. When I DM I never say no to creative ideas like this. I give you a level handy cap. Sure, you can pump your str to twice what it should be but you get half the levels as the rest of the party. It doesn't matter if the rules aren't balanced so long as the game is. –  CandiedOrange 20 hours ago
    
@CandiedOrange That's a nice theory, but your implementation doesn't make any sense. You can build Pun-Pun in a single level, so restricting characters to half the level of the rest of the party won't stop anyone trying for real optimization. Equally, for anyone not trying to abuse the system this is an incredibly unfair restriction. –  Miniman 18 hours ago

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