doctorbadwolf
Heretic of The Seventh Circle
This is selling that section of the book egregiously short.
D&D (2024) What type of ranger would your prefer for 2024?
- Thread starter Horwath
- Start date
Incenjucar
Legend
A druid is more like a tree and a ranger is more like a falcon.
doctorbadwolf
Heretic of The Seventh Circle
Maybe your rangers do.
Everyone I know uses rangers as embodying the borderlands where the wilds and civilization meet.
The point was the D&D has a history of simply reusing spells rather than recreating new mechanics.
That my point. Rangers are still part of civilization and interact with the wild as civilized people do.
Shardstone
Hero
Spells as natural hazards is such a nifty tool that people seem to really hate, and I think its all because of aesthetics.
The 600+ spells in the game are really 600+ different mechanical effects in the game. If you go through all of thoe mechanical effects, you can find very good expressions for a huge range of ideas, from traps to weather to hazards and more. I wish D&D was more forward about this. When you see spells for the tools they are, you realize that D&D has a lot of ways to do very interesting and fun encounters, like saying this fey mist the Archfey fights with creates natural Hypnotic Patterns, or a character sees a loved one die and the adrenaline and pain gives them the effects of the Haste spell without concentration, or a poison that when afflicted with strikes the target with Eyeblight.
Perhaps the big issue here is less about martial vs caster and more about the inability to access 600+ different mechanics depending on your game class. And perhaps the need to call these spells at all, and not something like "Mysteries" or "Fantastic Phenomena" gets in the way of that more then anything else.
Why shouldn't my Fighter be able to strike the Archmage in the eyes, afflicting them with Eyebite? Why can't my Barbarian trigger the effect of Fear on all enemies when they hit a brutal critical?
In the end, what is a spell anyway? There's no real definition to it in D&D outside of shaping the weave through Force of Will and ritual, and that itself is tenative. If a spell is an expression of Fantasy, then really, those mechanics should be opened up in a way that lets every class draw from them. Fighters who can spend hit die to gain the effects of Haste for a round, or Monks hitting a target with all of their flurry of blows, inflicting Slow upon the target. Etc etc.
The 600+ spells in the game are really 600+ different mechanical effects in the game. If you go through all of thoe mechanical effects, you can find very good expressions for a huge range of ideas, from traps to weather to hazards and more. I wish D&D was more forward about this. When you see spells for the tools they are, you realize that D&D has a lot of ways to do very interesting and fun encounters, like saying this fey mist the Archfey fights with creates natural Hypnotic Patterns, or a character sees a loved one die and the adrenaline and pain gives them the effects of the Haste spell without concentration, or a poison that when afflicted with strikes the target with Eyeblight.
Perhaps the big issue here is less about martial vs caster and more about the inability to access 600+ different mechanics depending on your game class. And perhaps the need to call these spells at all, and not something like "Mysteries" or "Fantastic Phenomena" gets in the way of that more then anything else.
Why shouldn't my Fighter be able to strike the Archmage in the eyes, afflicting them with Eyebite? Why can't my Barbarian trigger the effect of Fear on all enemies when they hit a brutal critical?
In the end, what is a spell anyway? There's no real definition to it in D&D outside of shaping the weave through Force of Will and ritual, and that itself is tenative. If a spell is an expression of Fantasy, then really, those mechanics should be opened up in a way that lets every class draw from them. Fighters who can spend hit die to gain the effects of Haste for a round, or Monks hitting a target with all of their flurry of blows, inflicting Slow upon the target. Etc etc.
Last edited:
doctorbadwolf
Heretic of The Seventh Circle
Okay, but what is presented in TCOE isn’t just recycling spells. Living spells and spells as environment are part of that section, but even those are more than just “anyway, here’s thunderwave” as an environmental effect, and the section also contains supernatural hazards that aren’t spells.
If that was your point…that was a wild way to express it.
Vaalingrade
Legend
The actual point of the druid is shapeshifting and also being a cleric. It really has nothing to do with nature at all.
Yaarel
🇮🇱 🇺🇦 He-Mage
The Druid class is several things that are difficult to synergize.
- Healer
- Shapeshifter
- Wilderness witch (Earth, Plant, Beast)
- Weather witch
- Gish
The point was in a certain context.
That Wilderness stuff in D&D not a priority. It is a couple pages in the second options book with a lot of it referring to or reusing old content
Have you seen how civilized people interact and use nature once they no longer fear it?
Tame is... tame.
Dominate is apt.
Rangers tend to sic controlled nature and tribal civilization on wild nature and savage civilization.
Summon vines and wolves on the orc then snipe them with arrows.
doctorbadwolf
Heretic of The Seventh Circle
Frankly that is an idiosyncratic view of Rangers that I think most folks would disagree with.
