D&D 5E The Dual Wielding Ranger: How Aragorn, Drizzt, and Dual-Wielding Led to the Ranger's Loss of Identity

[Mind of tempest]

Are you talking King Conan magic axe-wielding Kong?

no, the giant none human primate, nor are we speaking of master kong fu in case that was on the table.

 

[Voadam]

Just for reference

I could not find a picture of him on his throne from the movie.

 

[Charlaquin]

4e could have merge ranger a rogue and nothing bad would have come of it or at least the backlash would be no worse than what was already there.

I can see how it might look that way to someone who doesn’t like 4e, but it’s just not true. The 4e ranger and the 4e rogue had very different designs and gameplay feels, and merging them just wouldn’t make sense in 4e’s design framework.

 

[Ace]

Ranger (and thieves as well but that is another conversation) only needed to exist as a class because D&D has until 3rd edition had inconsistent and janky rules for all kind of common adventuring tasks.

Tracking? No idea. Stealth? No idea we uh got surprise rules lifted from wargames.

Its understandable as D&D started as 'Play a hero only" wargaming and no one expected to be anything but a niche hobby but it took a long long time to evolve and during that time, each fashion of the day (Aragorn today, than Drizzt and so on) get added in and being part of a long lived and well loved stuck around.

What suffered is coherence but than maybe that's part of D&D's charm. Sure a D&D with four classes (Fighter, Skill Monkey, Magic User, Cleric) and a skill system would be more focused but it wouldn't be D&D and that is what counts.

 

[Minigiant]

kong is cr 20+ at the weakest.

25+
It took airplane guns, beauty, and Gygaxian fall damage to kill one.

 

[Voadam]

What suffered is coherence but than maybe that's part of D&D's charm. Sure a D&D with four classes (Fighter, Skill Monkey, Magic User, Cleric) and a skill system would be more focused but it wouldn't be D&D and that is what counts.

That would be most D&D starter sets and I think it counts fine as D&D.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Heck. There are barely any martial threats past level 10 beyond other fighters and outsiders who use swords.

It's not like the ideas don't exist. We have a big natural no-no-word ravage the world for a year. It's that the designers and fanbase have a lapse of imagination in the wild or martial area since few are outdoorsy, warriors, or experts in either area.

I mean King Kong and Godzilla are level 15+ beasts, right?

Someone summon Mike.

Godzilla isn't natural, but something like him that is natural definetly (I'm too invested in his origin). Kong... well, I think that is what they were going for with the Giant Ape. I'm not saying that is Kong, I'm saying that's what it look like.

And, yeah, why not have a living terrain? Fight a literal walking forest, or a lake of mold. Not every dangerous beast needs to be huge, give us the Primal Predator, the thing that stalked the world and defined what it meant to hunt.

Sure, I can homebrew diseases, molds, and all this stuff, but it would be nice if WoTC remembered that adventurers get beyond level 10, and the Primal World needs to be just as terrifying as the Arcane and Divine.

 

[Mind of tempest]

I can see how it might look that way to someone who doesn’t like 4e, but it’s just not true. The 4e ranger and the 4e rogue had very different designs and gameplay feels, and merging them just wouldn’t make sense in 4e’s design framework.

can you elaborate as it seems they could have been merged earlier in the design process?

 

[Charlaquin]

can you elaborate as it seems they could have been merged earlier in the design process?

They just aren’t very similar. Their powers do substantially different things. You could make a class with some of the rogue powers and some of the ranger powers (in fact, that’s exactly how the hybrid class system worked), but it wouldn’t really play like a rogue or a ranger. It would play like a different class that had some similarities to both, but was its own thing.

See, I think a huge part of the disconnect people had with 4e was that 4e classes are just a different thing than classes in other editions of D&D are. People are used to thinking of classes as character archetypes, which the mechanics are designed to express. 4e classes are first and foremost sets of powers, which fill a combat role, by way of one or two power sources. In very basic terms, 4e classes are about what you do rather than who you are. Could you combine the narrative elements of rogue and ranger into a new class? Absolutely. But in the 4e design paradigm, that class would have a set of powers that would set it apart from both the ranger and the rogue.

 

[Mind of tempest]

They just aren’t very similar. Their powers do substantially different things. You could make a class with some of the rogue powers and some of the ranger powers (in fact, that’s exactly how the hybrid class system worked), but it wouldn’t really play like a rogue or a ranger. It would play like a different class that had some similarities to both, but was its own thing.

See, I think a huge part of the disconnect people had with 4e was that 4e classes are just a different thing than classes in other editions of D&D are. People are used to thinking of classes as character archetypes, which the mechanics are designed to express. 4e classes are first and foremost sets of powers, which fill a combat role, by way of one or two power sources. In very basic terms, 4e classes are about what you do rather than who you are. Could you combine the narrative elements of rogue and ranger into a new class? Absolutely. But in the 4e design paradigm, that class would have a set of powers that would set it apart from both the ranger and the rogue.

both are martial strikers so it seems odd to have two when you could have one instead.
also, I am suggesting that this class would replace rogue and ranger thus it would not be seen as a separate class but the only one.