D&D (2024) Ranger playtest discussion

[Ruin Explorer]

as the ranger class has alot of magic baked into it that is superfluous to the idea of a ranger but essential to DnD

This doesn't have to be the case, though, and prior to WotC, it wasn't. It's not genuinely "essential to D&D".

AD&D Rangers didn't have any magic until the rather-high level of 8.

There's no reason Rangers in D&D couldn't do all the "Ranger stuff" without magic, apart from WotC's weird fixation. The best illustration of this is 4E, where literally you didn't need magic, because of AEDU-style design, yet WotC still designed a magic-heavy Ranger (but also a non-magic-y one).

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I don't mean to rehash the Ranger identity thread from a few months back, but the truth is, characters who "feel" like Rangers aren't actually all that well represented by the class, and could just as easily be Fighters or Rogues.

They couldn't, though, because Fighters in D&D are absolutely goddamn terrible at skills and have basically zero non-combat skills, and clearly Rogue is the wrong class for all the examples we've discussed. Literally all of them. Certainly Drizzt, Aragorn and Katniss are not Rogues. Even the core/baseline abilities of Rogues are wrong for them.

What people want is a class which is:

A) Highly skilled.

B) Has actual ABILITIES which relate to nature.

C) Is good at fighting.

That's not actually asking very much. If Fighter were DRASTICALLY more competent, in skills/exploration, and didn't have heavy armour and martial weapons built into the chassis, then we could be talking about that, but they do, and changing that is probably unreasonable.

Barbarian is a lot closer than Fighter, note. The problem is Rage. And the fact that Barbarians are traditionally barbarians.

 

[James Gasik]

They couldn't, though, because Fighters in D&D are absolutely goddamn terrible at skills and have basically zero non-combat skills, and clearly Rogue is the wrong class for all the examples we've discussed. Literally all of them. Certainly Drizzt, Aragorn and Katniss are not Rogues. Even the core/baseline abilities of Rogues are wrong for them.

What people want is a class which is:

A) Highly skilled.

B) Has actual ABILITIES which relate to nature.

C) Is good at fighting.

That's not actually asking very much. If Fighter were DRASTICALLY more competent, in skills/exploration, and didn't have heavy armour and martial weapons built into the chassis, then we could be talking about that, but they do, and changing that is probably unreasonable.

Barbarian is a lot closer than Fighter, note. The problem is Rage. And the fact that Barbarians are traditionally barbarians.

At which point, you take away the heavy armor, give out more skill proficiencies and maybe Expertise.

Which sounds a lot like the playtest Ranger sans magic, actually.

Actually thinking about it, I now have a serious complaint about the playtest Ranger. Why on Greyhawk would you play a Fighter instead of a Ranger?

 

[UngainlyTitan]

At which point, you take away the heavy armor, give out more skill proficiencies and maybe Expertise.

Which sounds a lot like the playtest Ranger sans magic, actually.

Actually thinking about it, I now have a serious complaint about the playtest Ranger. Why on Greyhawk would you play a Fighter instead of a Ranger?

To answer that we will have to see what they do to the fighter.

 

[fluffybunbunkittens]

Actually thinking about it, I now have a serious complaint about the playtest Ranger. Why on Greyhawk would you play a Fighter instead of a Ranger?

To start with TWO fighting styles at lv1!

For the Ranger, getting a fighting style besides their original 3 would take the place of a real lv4+ feat (and stat gain), which is... uh... no.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

For sure.

On the flipside audiences are extremely good at detecting when a movie sucks, or when it contains stuff that just doesn't work for them.

Yes, exactly! People know when they dislike a movie/how a class is designed, but largely don't have the experience to actually fix it or fully explain how they think they could improve it.

None of these match what WotC's own surveying suggested players want, and they were extremely poorly designed, and showed a real lack of effort and care. Something that players regard as a core element of the class should be a badly-designed optional subclass, should it? WotC's surveying indicated people want an animal friend to help them kill stuff. Not a rando summon, and not a pet that just stood around mashing the DODGE button.

The class has options for having pets. The fact that those mechanics are poorly designed doesn't mean that it isn't an important part of the class. WotC knew that people wanted Rangers to have pets. They just did a bad job at representing that mechanically.

A) WotC are NOT following their own surveys particularly closely.

How do you know that? Give evidence. "Rangers have bad options for pets" isn't evidence of that. WotC misinterpreted what people wanted for the Ranger's pet options. That doesn't support your view of "WotC are bad at following their survey results".

B) WotC are NOT creating a sexy-as-hell Ranger class that people want to play.

How do you know that? They are the ones with the survey results. If we had them, then we'd know what people want. But we don't. Neither you nor I know what the player base considers a "sexy-as-hell Ranger class that people want to play". As far as we know, WotC implemented the feedback from the recent Class Surveys into this OneD&D playtest version of the class and is what they interpret to be the "sexy-as-hell Ranger class that people want to play".

We don't know what players want the Ranger to be. We don't know what the survey results are. We don't know if the majority of people that responded to the Class Survey said that they were "strongly satisfied" or "strongly dissatisfied" with the Spellcasting feature in the Ranger class. If anyone knows what the majority of players want the ranger to be, it's Wizards of the Coast. Not you. Not me. Not anyone else in the community.

What we know is:

A) The community considers the Ranger Class fundamentally flawed in its design (more than the other classes, all of which are flawed to a lesser degree) and that it has been since the 2014 Player's Handbook. This is proven through the multiple tested revisions to the class throughout the past 8 years in 5e and the substantial changes to the class in the OneD&D Playtest.

B) Wizards of the Coast has tested out a non-spellcasting variant of the Ranger and multiple variants that have spellcasting. The Ranger has maintained its half-casting nature, expanded to give them prepared spells and cantrips.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Hey remember how people complained (and still do) that 4e classes are lIteRallY aLl thE SamE because they had a unified progression?

Well now every ability that isn't swinging a pointy stick is "a wizard did it."

Some of us want the 4e system (fixed and updated) back

 

[UngainlyTitan]

Even Tolkien fails to make travel interesting- there's a huge section in the middle of The Two Towers that took me a long time to finally get through without skipping ahead as a youngster. Sure, when he starts expositing about the history of Middle Earth, that gets a little interesting, but consider how more exciting travel is in a visual medium, when during The Fellowship of the Ring, they sail down river and see the great statues of ancient Kings carved into the sides of mountains.

Funny I never had an issue with the Two Towers but the first third of the Fellowship was a struggle. I was older when introduced to Tolkien though.

I can't blame authors (or DM's) with wanting to just skip past that and get to more exciting parts of travel. A few years back, I was playing in a Pathfinder game, and the GM went on a rant about how he hated teleportation magic and how it would be banned in his game.

We got sent on a long mission to a far off region of the world, and this is how it went:

*We board a ship in the nearest port city. We travel for weeks. We have an encounter with a floating island (cool!) and a sunken ship created by the Azer for the Efreeti (who trade with the world, but obviously don't care to get wet- also cool by the way). We reach a port city adjacent to the desert.

We stock up and my Wizard bought some scrolls for the journey. We see a gigantic golem in the desert- we avoid it. A few Survival checks are made. We get to our destination, then on the return trip, nothing of substance occurs. When I asked about it, the GM admitted that he basically ran out of interesting things to engage us on the journey.

"So, why is teleportation magic bad again?"

He sighed and conceded the point. Some times, travel, especially to places you've already been, isn't all that engaging, and random encounters with enemies on the road is just so much padding, between a few interesting sights.

This is the central issue with exploration. If you have a game focused on exploration and resource management D&D manages fine, arguably the original game was built for it. No good abstract system that does not trivialise the matter. And @Micah Sweet I have read the Level Up rules and am not happy with them. I am looking forward to Cubicle 7's latest attempt.

 

[ersatzphil]

We don't know what players want the Ranger to be. We don't know what the survey results are. We don't know if the majority of people that responded to the Class Survey said that they were "strongly satisfied" or "strongly dissatisfied" with the Spellcasting feature in the Ranger class. If anyone knows what the majority of players want the ranger to be, it's Wizards of the Coast. Not you. Not me. Not anyone else in the community.

I mean - knowing how to craft a survey and 'correctly' interpret the results is a very specific (and genuinely difficult!) skill. I have an old friend who wrote a freaking Masters thesis on the topic. It's incredibly easy to craft a survey that produces incorrect data, and incredibly easy to take accurate data and draw the wrong conclusions from it. The very fact that they've iterated over the Ranger and Psionics so many times does seem to indicate that they're struggling with it.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

I think there are a lot of people forgetting what the classes looked like in 2008 vs what they looked like after 3 years of expansion, including monthly Dragon options.

this is why I think they missed the boat with 5e... years of updates expansions and more options (like skill powers) could be used to make a 6e that is based on 4e but much better