D&D (2024) Ranger playtest discussion

[GMforPowergamers]

I get it. I too would like all the benefits of spellcasting without having to worry about verbal and somatic components, costly material components, anti-magic, magic resistance, dispel magic, counterspell, spell slots, loss of concentration, etc.

or we could have non spell abilities that scale and AREN'T magic...

 

[Micah Sweet]

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.

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.

What's your issue with them, if I may ask?

 

[GMforPowergamers]

It's the height of irony when people dismiss Heracles and Cu Chulainn because demigod when the main inspiration for wizards are Merlin and Gandalf...

every hero has an origin... most don't matter once the story is going, it is just an excuse.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

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.

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.

one of the 3.5 DMs we lost going to 4e went to PF, and for years those playing with him would joke (as we did in 3.5) don't travel in his games...

I know 3 times the lightning rail derailed in his ebberon games (twice in 1 campagain) I know that every boat he has ever had players on has been hit by at least 3 encounters... and at least 1 pirate attack.

He ran a 5e game before his passing and in it we spent 4 real life months of weekly games to play out a 2 1/2 week trip in game.

 

[Micah Sweet]

one of the 3.5 DMs we lost going to 4e went to PF, and for years those playing with him would joke (as we did in 3.5) don't travel in his games...

I know 3 times the lightning rail derailed in his ebberon games (twice in 1 campagain) I know that every boat he has ever had players on has been hit by at least 3 encounters... and at least 1 pirate attack.

He ran a 5e game before his passing and in it we spent 4 real life months of weekly games to play out a 2 1/2 week trip in game.

In the old days, we used to always say, "half of all boats sink". It was more or less true in our 1e games.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

In the old days, we used to always say, "half of all boats sink". It was more or less true in our 1e games.

yup. in star wars we once through an out of game "lets go to the IRL bar to celebrate" when we went from 1 planet to another without incident.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

What's your issue with them, if I may ask?

Well, it starts with being too much an expansion to the existing D&D exploration rules, it just expands the terrain types and adds in pages of stuff to lookup. It works best is a more traditional hex crawl type use. It looks to me like an abstracted hex crawl.
It is very prescriptive and would be pretty good for someone designing a sandbox as they could consult the rules in constructing the terrain and keying the map by the terrain types and tier levels. If that was already in place you could put stuff together on the fly.

I do like the supply idea though.

I looked at the AiME journey rules and I really like the idea of terrain knowledge, and the underlying hostility of the terrain as being the major influences on the encounters and success of a journey.
I was toying with the idea of modding that for D&D but then Cublicle 7 announced their kickstarter to do exactly that. So, I backed that.

I want something that I can put together on the fly.

 

[The Glen]

My issue with the ranger as an expert is it doesn't seem to be an expert at anything. The biggest problem with exploration in 5e is the rules kinda blow chunks. Either the party is going to starve to death or there's no threat at all. I learned this the hard way trying to run Master of the Desert Nomads with the cleric spamming goodberry. Hard to do a survival adventure when one of the core elements of survival is completely removed by a 1st level spell. If they don't rewrite the survival rules and get rid of the get out of starvation free cards all the arguing over how to build a ranger to be an outdoorsman is moot. The big problem was the favored terrain meaning automatic successes for keeping the party alive, which was a common complaint for modules like Into the Abyss. If the party ranger had Underdark as a favored terrain then the whole survival aspect was neutered.

But rather than just complain about what the ranger lacks, here's some ideas of how to make it better without just resorted to 'more spells'.
Favored Terrain: You get one terrain choice equal to your PB. So starting with 2. The ability gives you a static and a triggered ability. Static ability is good no matter where you go. Triggered abilities are the standard ignore difficult terrain, find more food, etc. So static examples:

Swamp: Immunity to non-magical diseases
Mountain: Resistant to cold
Aquatic: Swim Speed
Desert: Ignore fatigue from heat
Forest: Climb Speed
Fort Worth: Speak with cows

Alter Hunter's Mark so it's not just an automatic ability every single combat. Go favored enemy, at the end of a long rest choice a creature type and subrace (orc, bear, dinosaur, thoul). Then the hunter's mark applies to all those creatures until the next long rest. This represents you studying up on the anatomy, applying certain toxins to weapons, or just adapting to your prey.

Make the ranger self-sufficient on his own, and a bonus to the party by keeping them alive. One good way to represent this is giving them tool proficiencies, but in their terrain they don't actually need the tools. They can create items that they could with the tool kits, but it's more of a then and there. The ranger uses his herbalism tool training to just gather the right plants to make the antidote kit. The items created have to be used immediately, you can't stock up on healing potions this way.

 

[Neonchameleon]

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?

We haven't seen the fighter yet. But off the top of my head they start with:

• The ranger's fighting styles are defensive, archer, and TWF.
  • I don't know why you'd play an archer fighter or a two weapon fighter yet
  • Sword & board fighters get the duelist fighting style, which gives them a higher baseline
  • Great weapon and polearm fighters need to use strength not dex so like heavy armour (which the ranger doesn't get)
• The fighter's extra feat at level 6 is worth more with the better feats; you can using the standard array e.g. now reach Str (or Dex) 20 at level 8 and still have Sentinel, Shield Master, and Charger for an absolute bully of a build or if you want something more vanilla it's likely to be (greatweapon/polearm/shield master, and two from charger, grappler, heavy armour master, mage slayer, and sentinel). Until L12 the ranger will, under the Standard Array, either only have at most one 4th level feat plus the full ASI or they will have a Dex modifier of +4.
• They don't want to play a caster - and this ranger casts too much for a ranger never mind a fighter

But we need to wait and see the playtest fighter; they've talked about extra effects for the weapon types for martial characters.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Even Jackie Chan played competent characters very often, and a lot of his "incompetent" characters were actually specially trained and were kind of making a mockery of their opponents (thinking back to his HK movie career which thanks to Channel 4 I ended up seeing most of in the '90s).

I'm not saying he didn't. I'm saying that he managed to make looking incompetent at combat look really good. No one's doing that at all today that I can think of and if you've got no one at the top you'll not have the actors or the writers at lower tiers.

Ryan Reynolds normally plays highly competent characters in action stuff, just not invulnerable ones. Deadpool is extremely competent, but isn't sweating getting shot too much for obvious reasons

That's not Ryan Reynolds' only film. I'm thinking more of Free Guy and Red Notice.

WotC have admitted to repeatedly screwing this up. WotC themselves have also repeatedly said one of the key things audiences expect from a Ranger is a pet. And yet... Where's the bear?

Agreed that the Beastmaster should absolutely have been the subclass in the packet. The hunter's easy and bland (and they still managed to mess it up in a whole lot of ways by picking "you know an awful spell that you could otherwise learn but is so bad no ranger bothers" as the level ten feature)