D&D 5E The Ranger: You got spellcasting in my peanut butter!

[Minigiant]

So, really, it's for want of anything non-magical-bad-ass enough as Rage or 12-attacks-a-round or SA with which to compensate the Ranger for loss of his half-casting abilities.

That actually does make some sense. The do seem to have a really hard time coming up with adequately potent non-magical class abilities.

Yeah, a spellless ranger would be a 4e style one
TWIN STRIKE FOR MORE DAMAGE. MOAR ATTACKS.


Also the 3e Epic Handbook hand many nonmagical high level class features. The problem is the fandom is too too stubborn to allow them or hard headed to realize that high level no magic stuff is supposed to be overpower.

Devastating Critical? That is a fine ability for a fighter at the level where wizard drop meteors and cleric bring people from the dead?

Epic dodge? fine for level 16+.

Terrifying Rage? Cool for level 19 barbarian.

Death of enemies for a level 18 ranger? Why not?

Remember when people complained that fighters could easier stand up after taking lethal damage? I had zero issue with it. If I am an epic fighter, I should be able to roll the meteor off me.

 

[Hussar]

It most certainly does not! D&D is not an abstract strategy game. If this logic applied to D&D, there would be no need for "rulings over rules." Chess doesn't need a DM.

At its core, D&D is a game of pretend. It's not all that different from when one kid says "I'm Batman!" and another says "Well, I'm Wonder Woman!" and they start fighting imaginary criminals. The rules exist to help the kids decide what happens when the imaginary Joker throws imaginary razor-edged playing cards at Batman. When the kids start debating whether Batman can dodge the playing cards, the rules offer a common ground and a set of tools with which to reach an answer. Sometimes, strict adherence to the rules produces silly results, in which case the kids can say "That's silly" and ignore them. This is one of the reasons Rule Zero was invented. But in most cases the rules provide decent answers.

Because the rules are tools for answering questions about the fiction, however, they can't be separated from it. When the rules say that Batman can only throw 3 Batarangs per day, that is a statement about the fictional world. It shouldn't be necessary for the kids to dream up ad hoc rationalizations for why Batman is choosing not to throw any more Batarangs. The rules have no authority over what Batman chooses to do, only over the results of his decisions.

Really?

So, your fighter, in any edition of D&D you care to name, can only swing his sword 1/round at 1st level? He is incapable of swinging it more than once per round (whether that round is 1 minute or six seconds)? I've watched a fair bit of boxing and it sure looks like they throw punches, and connect, a heck of a lot more than once or twice every six seconds.

D&D absolutely is abstract in a lot of ways. Trying to claim that the rules for abstractions should be a direct correlation on the fiction has never been true. When you climb a tree, using the climb skill, at what point does your skill check apply? At the beginning of your 15 foot climb (half movement for the round) or the end? Why? Why is it, when I start climbing, I only ever fail to climb at the bottom? Why can I never fail half way through the action or at the end? I only ever fail at the start of the action.

What does that say about the game world?

Trying to pin rules=physics is a rabbit hole that never, ever ends.

 

[evileeyore]

Put me in the "I want a No Magic Ranger" club, my Rangers don't 'gish'...

Remember when people complained that fighters could easier stand up after taking lethal damage? I had zero issue with it. If I am an epic fighter, I should be able to roll the meteor off me.

Roll it off?

No... knock it back like a pro!

 

[1of3]

One of the things the rules need to do is ensure that when Wonder Woman complains, "Is there anything Batman can't do with those stupid Batarangs?" there is an answer. Saying "No, Batman can do anything with his Batarangs, but he only throws them three times a day because, well, he just does" is no kind of answer. The Batman player will quite reasonably say, "Well, what if I do throw a fourth Batarang today? What happens then?"

You have a non useful idea on rules in role-playing games. The rules are in no way about the actions of characters.

All rules are about what the players at the table may say.

Simple example: "Elves have pointy ears", is a rule. It makes sure that no player says anything indicating that elves do not have pointy ears. (That also means that all setting information upheld by the gaming group is a rule for the group.)

As for Batman now, no player may say anything about Batman successfully employing a fourth Batarang. He might even throw them. They just don't work in any remarkable way.

Of course, your view is not wrong. There is nothing like a wrong view in world. Your view is just less useful, as it seriously limits what you can do with rules.

 

[Dausuul]

Really?

So, your fighter, in any edition of D&D you care to name, can only swing his sword 1/round at 1st level? He is incapable of swinging it more than once per round (whether that round is 1 minute or six seconds)? I've watched a fair bit of boxing and it sure looks like they throw punches, and connect, a heck of a lot more than once or twice every six seconds.

...

Trying to pin rules=physics is a rabbit hole that never, ever ends.

Rules = Newtonian physics: An abstraction which accurately models (the fictional) reality under most circumstances. I'm not saying that the rules need to be perfectly true to the fiction--that's an obvious impossibility. What they need to be is close enough to the fiction that, under most circumstances, the rules produce sensible outcomes. Just because Newtonian physics goes wonky in the vicinity of a black hole doesn't mean it's useless here on Earth.

It's funny that you bring up the length of a combat round as an issue here. As you note, the length of a combat round was 60 seconds in AD&D and 6 seconds in later editions. Between 2E and 3E, the length of a round was reduced by an order of magnitude. Why the change? Because 60 seconds pushed the abstract model too far from the fiction! It created too many situations where the model's outcomes didn't make sense. People could accept a system where making a "real attack" requires about 6 seconds' worth of feinting, parrying, and positioning to set up. 60 seconds was a lot harder to swallow.

The Batarang question is much the same: If you're only allowed to throw a "magic Batarang" three times a day, it's roughly equivalent to having rounds that are 8 hours long. If you're playing a game where you follow the hero's life story over months and years, and don't get into the details of daily events, that could be a perfectly fine abstraction. But if you're getting into the details of individual combats, it's a problem. It's using Newtonian physics in a situation that calls for special relativity.

My original objection was to the claim that D&D is like chess, so we shouldn't complain when the rules diverge widely from the fiction. In chess, when this happens, the rules win. In fact, the idea of "fiction" in chess is slightly absurd. Chess doesn't have "fiction," it has a few bits of flavor--the names and shapes of the pieces--on top of an abstract strategy game.

In D&D, if the rules are producing results that diverge widely from the fiction, the fiction wins. That's the whole point of "rulings, not rules."

 

[Tony Vargas]

In D&D, if the rules are producing results that diverge widely from the fiction, the fiction wins. That's the whole point of "rulings, not rules."

I don't think it's the /whole/ point. It's one of many ways to avail yourself of the philosophy, as DM, to do whatever you want. If that's enforce realism selectively, you can do that. If that's stick to genre conventions, you can do that. If that's facilitate the fun, you can do that. If that's keeping the players on the rails, you can do that.

 

[ZombieRoboNinja]

So, really, it's for want of anything non-magical-bad-ass enough as Rage or 12-attacks-a-round or SA with which to compensate the Ranger for loss of his half-casting abilities.

That actually does make some sense. They do seem to have a really hard time coming up with adequately potent non-magical class abilities.

It's not necessarily that they can't come up with anything. It's that for the sake of "simplicity" (read: uniformity), they decided after the third or so playtest that 90% of the cool alternate resource and ability systems they'd tested out - spell points, skill tricks, expertise dice, etc. - basically needed to either die in a fire or get relegated to "expert" subclasses (like the fighter's eventual Battlemaster subclass). Anyone with a set of varied and complex abilities became a neo-Vancian spellcaster, with the vague promise that maybe in the DMG there would be some alternate systems for the huge percentage of their player base who don't like spell slots. Ugh.

Well, lemons to lemonade time. Even if I'm not a fan of this broad design decision, I do think they've done a pretty good job making it work. If you don't want to use magic there are some pretty effective fighter and rogue builds that can do a decent job of accomplishing most of what a ranger does, especially with a bit of multiclassing and feat use. If you're complaining that it's not enough, and you need a full class build to really delve into all the cool things a non-magical ranger should do, then I say get in line with knights, swashbucklers, warlords, brawlers, and all the other martial character types that no longer get their own explicit base class. The only real argument for why the martial ranger needs its own writeup more than these other archetypes is "tradition," and you don't get much more "traditional" in D&D terms than a ranger with Vancian magic.