D&D General What is a Ranger? A miserable pile of secrets! (+)

[Paul Farquhar]

Anyway, what about my prior suggestion of beast companions being a sidekick class instead of requiring so much design space onto the Ranger?

A team pet doesn't scratch the itch of it being "my pet". I think a lot of the flavour @Ruin Explorer is talking about is coming from anime. A big influence on many players new to D&D, and for which cute pets are a major trope. Most obviously, Pokémon.

I would fold the tracker, nature guy, and archer archetypes into fighters and rogues, and use the bare bones of the 5e ranger to make a JRPG magic warrior (probably with cute pet) class.

 

[Mecheon]

Anyway, what about my prior suggestion of beast companions being a sidekick class instead of requiring so much design space onto the Ranger?

Its your pet, not the team pet. People want them as a feature of class, so its going to fail to fulfil those people wanting that.

See also the class space of the Summoner idea, which D&D doesn't fulfil at the moment but is a popular one outside of it

 

[James Gasik]

"Minion-mancy" is pretty rough in D&D, overall. I remember many threads being devoted to the summon spells in 5e, like whether or not you can call up a gaggle of sprites. I was in a game where I got to use Animate Objects for one adventure before the DM told me he couldn't handle it (I was playing a Warforged Sorcerer- the DM had told us to roll our stats, so not having a Charisma bonus wasn't an issue really. I had commissioned a local toymaker to make me a bunch of fairy dolls, using the sturdiest and toughest possible materials, and then I'd animate the pack of them in combat).

I didn't see it myself, but one of my friends had been allowed to play a Death Cleric in a campaign, and had apparently wreaked havoc with his undead minions.

Adding a bunch of NPC's to the field really changes up the dynamic of encounter design in ways the system doesn't account for- after all, if you use a spell to summon sprites, that doesn't change the math of an encounter any more than if you cast fireball, and the only real counter is to have enemy casters summon their own minions!

And thanks to bounded accuracy, while summons would quickly fall off in usefulness in 3.5, for example, they remain effective for a lot longer.

Personally, I think that having "companions" be represented by a stat block different from the MM critters is fine. After all, MM NPC's don't resemble the player characters much, so it follows that player controlled minions shouldn't have to resemble their monstrous cohorts.

If we can accept that a 112 hit point Gladiator is a CR 5, then I'm sure we can accept that a bear companion can be weaker than a real bear.

 

[Laurefindel]

I think it came from a desire for simulationism, that is really out of place in 5e. A heroic pet should be to a MM beast what an adventurer is to a commoner.

I think it came as a desire for simplicity. “You want a animal companion/wild shape into an animal? Then pick one, we have a whole bunch made for you.”

For shapechanging, it simplified things tremendously from 3e/3.5 where you essentially had to recalculate another character each time you use a shapechanging spell or ability. Now in 5e, it’s basically « you disappear, then this creature appears in your place ». With that in mind, allowing summons and pets and whatnot to use the same design philosophy was a logical choice. Except that in the case of the PHB animal companion, you still had to modify your base animal…

In the end, I prefer what seems to be the current orientation of giving a specific stat block for “animal companion” or “summoned creature”. I’d prefer a bit more variety than « the one that walks » and « the one that flies », but the idea is to keep it a rather narrow and finite list. (Actually, it could be two stat blocks, then specific animals represented by one or two plug-in special ability/action/reaction).

I’d even go a step further and say that the (moon?) druid should use those for wild shapes too.

 

[Minigiant]

I feel that people only see pets as core because of MMORPGs.

Rangers are usually the Bow class, the Magic Bow class, the Pet Class, the Magic Pet class, the Magic Trap or some combination of the 5.


So most gamers under 45 see rangers in one of those gazes.

A team pet doesn't scratch the itch of it being "my pet". I think a lot of the flavour @Ruin Explorer is talking about is coming from anime. A big influence on many players new to D&D, and for which cute pets are a major trope. Most obviously, Pokémon.

I would fold the tracker, nature guy, and archer archetypes into fighters and rogues, and use the bare bones of the 5e ranger to make a JRPG magic warrior (probably with cute pet) class.

I don't think it's Pokemon but WOW.

The Ash Ketchum archetype plays different from the Rexxar archetype. Rexxar fights with his bear Misha. The big complaint with the beastmster is that you give up you attacks to your pet.


If there is any anime influence it's Naruto. The Swarmkeeper is a blatant recreation of Shino Aburame. Then the beastmster would be Kiba Inuzuka.

 

[James Gasik]

I mean, Rangers with animal buddies goes pretty far back into D&D history. Granted, in AD&D, it was their "name level" benefit, barring Kits (The Complete Ranger's Handbook was kind of wacky).

And as I pointed out, the archetype goes back a ways, with individuals like Lord Greystoke (and his clones, like Ka-zar) or Grizzly Adams.

But it might be best to split this into it's own class, and give them a "Ranger-ish" Subclass for people who want that flavor. With other Subclasses for "Monster Tamer", "Summoner", or even "Magical Girl".

 

[Mind of tempest]

I mean, Rangers with animal buddies goes pretty far back into D&D history. Granted, in AD&D, it was their "name level" benefit, barring Kits (The Complete Ranger's Handbook was kind of wacky).

And as I pointed out, the archetype goes back a ways, with individuals like Lord Greystoke (and his clones, like Ka-zar) or Grizzly Adams.

But it might be best to split this into it's own class, and give them a "Ranger-ish" Subclass for people who want that flavor. With other Subclasses for "Monster Tamer", "Summoner", or even "Magical Girl".

pure mechanic subclasses rarely work, besides what would ranger even be then?
on the other hand, we could go full beast master and dye a tiger black?

 

[James Gasik]

pure mechanic subclasses rarely work, besides what would ranger even be then?
on the other hand, we could go full beast master and dye a tiger black?

What do you mean? The Ranger functions without an animal companion now, doesn't it?

 

[CreamCloud0]

pure mechanic subclasses rarely work, besides what would ranger even be then?
on the other hand, we could go full beast master and dye a tiger black?

I think much more than a beast tamer the ranger is a survivalist and an explorer, there’s a dash of monster hunting there too.

But their core concept can function perfectly well without an animal companion IMO, maybe just give ranger find familiar on their spell list.

A tracking based ‘ranger’ subclass for a hypothetical beastmaster class would be a good idea from the other side of the equation though.

 

[Shardstone]

When people bring up concepts about pets being impossible to balance in DnD, have they ever just considered that we just haven't put enough effort into making them work? There is no such thing as an unsolvable design problem in TTRPG.