The only reference to woodcraft in the text of the 1E Ranger can be found in this sentence, "Rangers are a sub-class of fighter who are adept at woodcraft, tracking, scouting, and infiltration and spying." Mostly this is nothing but flavor.
I think it relevant to note that this is the
very first sentence of the class description. And also noteworthy: nowhere is there any mention of enemy specialization. This tells me a lot about how Gygax himself defined the class conceptually. If his mechanical implementation fell short of the mark -- well, it'd hardly be the only time that happened in 1E.
As for actual, mechanical capabilities, only tracking and the ability to surprise and not be surprised more often could possibly be considered related to woodcraft, and neither depends on being in the woods or any other natural environment.
Well, first of all, that's not quite accurate: the tracking improves when you're outdoors, and druidic magic certainly also qualifies as "related to woodcraft". Secondly, you say that "only" these abilities could be considered related to woodcraft, but the 1E ranger only has seven unique abilities: (1) a damage bonus against giants; (2) surprise; (3) tracking; (4) druid spells; (5) magic-user spells; (6) scrying; and (7) attracting followers. That's three out of seven already, and you and I both seem to agree implicitly that (5), (6), and (7) were silly and ought to be discarded. And thirdly, for gameplay reasons already covered in this thread, the ranger's abilities really
shouldn't depend on being in the woods.
My opinion, however, is that at that point the D&D Ranger became its own thing, an amalgamation of all its parts. The question I've been trying to answer is what makes the D&D Ranger unique as a class. Its resemblance, or lack thereof, to literary characters and archetypes is pretty much irrelevant to that discussion. Sorry I've been so round about in making that point.
Okay, now we're getting somewhere.
Is there any other core class that's "unique" in the way you describe? Does the fighter or rogue or barbarian have any distinctive ability that does not resemble the literary characters and archetypes upon which the class is based? Ought they to? Is the barbarian a lesser class because all its abilities are pretty recognizably the common denominator of Thor, Hercules, Cú Chulainn, and Conan? Would it be a good idea to give the barbarian, I dunno, let's say a breath weapon, to make the class more unique? Could we then say, "Conan may not breathe fire, but in D&D, barbarians breathe fire, and Conan is irrelevant to that"?
The closest another class comes to having an ability unique to D&D, I'd say, is Vancian magic. But at bottom that's just a mechanical implementation of the concept of "magic", which of course is ubiquitous among literary mages. Anyone writing a mage class would have to find some rules for magic, and since magic doesn't actually exist and it works very differently in different stories, there's not really any guide for a "right" way to do it. So the arbitrariness here is a necessity. It's not analogous to the uniqueness of the favored enemy ability, or our hypothetical barbarian breath weapon.
In short, I don't think D&D is trying to be unique in its class system. On the contrary, I think it's trying to be as universal as possible. And I think, given the game's open-ended nature and its position in the market as
the go-to fantasy role-playing game, this is the correct approach. It makes sense for Final Fantasy to say, "In our universe there are these special warriors called 'dragoons' who are defined by their distinctive leaping spear attack", because Final Fantasy is only trying to tell
one story and trying to make that story unique to their brand. But D&D is trying to provide a platform for players to tell
their own stories, in their own worlds. The core rules should provide for just that: the common core of fantasy tropes. The uniqueness of the stories should come from DMs' imaginations and campaign setting guides.
These influences were distilled through Aragorn into the D&D Ranger and combined with rules that were created for Fighting-men, Magic-users, Clerics, and Thieves, from whence derives the ranger character-class archetype, a concept with limited applicability outside of FRPG discussions. It seems strange to me then to speak of a "ranger archetype" that embraces the literary and historic influences on the class, or at least some of them, but actually rejects the game-mechanics that made the class what it is.
If we're going to restrict the discussion to the FRPG context, ranger-archetype classes still very seldom have a favored enemy ability. Outside of D&D, I can only think of one game that does:
Heroes of Might and Magic 5. Final Fantasy's ranger doesn't have one in any of its incarnations that I've played. The Warcraft franchise's rangers and hunters don't have one. Torchlight's vanquisher and outlander don't have one.
Heck, even within D&D itself... what's Drizzt's favored enemy? Drow, I guess, though his archnemesis is human so maybe not? Minsc's? Canonically, it changes from gnolls to vampires between games! Belkar's? Not a clue... humans, perhaps? For all these guys, it just doesn't come up that often in the story. That tells me something about how important favored enemy is to the ranger class. Can you imagine a wizard character whose ability to cast spells never came up?
If I remember correctly, Grendel was universally despised. Beowulf wasn't just going out and killing random people to get famous. He needed to kill a hate-object.
If Grendel is universally despised, Beowulf's opinion is hardly distinctive, is it?
And yet he didn't use the same tactics with the dragon. If grappling was his go-to tactic for defeating monsters you'd think he'd use it in all cases, in lieu of any "special knowledge", that is.
Are you implying that fighters and barbarians must always use the same tactic because they don't have favored enemy?
This is what I don't understand. You're giving primacy to the wood-craftiness of the "ranger class", but rejecting its favored enemy ability. It seems arbitrary when they are both part of the class.
One shows up in the first sentence of the First Edition flavor text, and is shared by all the class' archetypal relatives. The other doesn't and isn't. That's not an arbitrary distinction. That's precisely the distinction we should be making in determining what identifies the class.
To answer the question you've raised, however, FE is only associated with the Ranger's other skills because the class brings them together. It's part of what gives the D&D Ranger its particular flavor, which I think was my point to begin with.
This is what's arbitrary. And circular. "The ranger has the abilities it has because it has them."
Not sure about the "archetypal hunter", but you hear an actual hunter frequently referred to as a "deer hunter", a "duck hunter", or a "big-game hunter". Are there really people out there who are equally skilled at hunting everything, and if so do they excel at hunting a particular animal above the abilities of those who specialize?
What is this? Realism in D&D? By realistic logic, every class should have favored enemy. No fighter or rogue is really going to be equally talented against every foe, either. There is nothing
distinctive about the fact that the hunter has expertise with one animal over another. That's just a boring universal of professions. What
is distinctive is the fact that the hunter has expertise with animals.
That's what the class should emphasis.
