D&D (2024) What type of ranger would your prefer for 2024?

[le Redoutable]

Within the pilot lies handle

 

[Reef]

They mean stuff like the Warlock invocations, but with ranger fluff instead

An example might be:

Mountain terrain mastery: gain a climb speed equal to your move speed and resistance to falling damage.

Cavern terrain mastery: you gain dark vision if you don't have it, or tremorsense if you have dark vision.

Urban terrain mastery: you can move through difficult terrain and enemies squares at no penalty.

Desert terrain maastery: gain resistance to fire damage


Things that are useful no matter where you go, but represent your mastery of surviving in a terrain.

Those are abilities I could actually get behind.

 

[Minigiant]

They mean stuff like the Warlock invocations, but with ranger fluff instead

An example might be:

Mountain terrain mastery: gain a climb speed equal to your move speed and resistance to falling damage.

Cavern terrain mastery: you gain dark vision if you don't have it, or tremorsense if you have dark vision.

Urban terrain mastery: you can move through difficult terrain and enemies squares at no penalty.

Desert terrain maastery: gain resistance to fire damage


Things that are useful no matter where you go, but represent your mastery of surviving in a terrain.

Like the 3.5 horizonwalker.

Cool but many of those features are only appropriate for low levels. The warlock is a halfish full caster and has the best cantrip in the game.

Could a ranger grow gills Waterworld style or create a network of critters, fey, and elementals to form a search party. Or at least evolve to immunity.

 

[Emberashh]

Open world sandbox? Yes.

Tons of logistics and penalties for not doing the logistics? No.

Its not an either/or, and your prejudicial attitude towards the concept of actually having to engage with more than the shallowest surface of the gameworld isn't a given either.

 

[Charlaquin]

It is part of the fantasy of the Ranger too. But people still want to get rid of it.

They want to get rid of it because it’s not part of their fantasy of the ranger.

Great! Here's the trick. Currently, both druids and Rangers can speak to animals using a spell slot. If they both can do so at-will... why wouldn't this just be a spell at-will, like the Warlock Invocation?

Because thematically it shouldn’t be a spell. Just like how forest gnomes can talk to tiny beasts without a spell, Druids and rangers should be able to do the same regardless of size (and so should forest gnomes, frankly). It should be treated like a language.

It doesn't make a lot of sense to make a spellcaster have one of their spells as a non-spell ability, just so a half-caster can be stripped of spells. But it also doesn't make sense to have them do the same thing, but one of them avoid mentioning the spell.

It makes perfect sense to have it not be a spell. It should just be a thing they know how to do.

Rangers are spellcasters too, and they have healing magic. They don't need to use herbal poultices either.

That is the case currently. We are arguing about whether it ought to be the case. My position is no, it ought not to be.

And, herbalism kits can, in theory, do this, but the crafting rules are terrible and I can't remember if Healing Potions are RAW allowed to be made with an herbalism kit. (The non-difference between Alchemy and Herbalism is a thorn in my side)

They are RAW, and Xanathar’s guide has more detailed rules on how to do so. Though I do think rangers should be able to do so more quickly and efficiently than with those rules. They should get a class feature that lets them do so.

Yes it does. How do you find the evil things despoiling your forest if you don't track them? And any "use animals" answer... is the exact same thing we just agreed rangers can do.

No, it doesn’t. The druid ain’t a tracker, sorry.

Druids tracking makes sense. Rangers being better at it makes sense too, but Druids should be able to track.

I mean, any character should be able to try anything. But Druids shouldn’t have a special ability to track better than other characters. The druid is a priest, not an expert. They use spells to accomplish these things, not know-how.

Rangers also have spells.

And I am arguing they should not.

So, here we are. The druid and the Ranger should share a lot of thematic elements, but the Druid doesn't need some of them because they have spells... the same spells rangers get.... that ranger's should lose for some reason?

Yes, because spellcasting is thematically inappropriate for the ranger. Do try and keep up.

No. Sure, some rangers can do that, but so can some druids. There is no class requirement that my friendly hunter must dominate and conquer nature and bend it to his will. That is something people keep adding for no reason. The ranger is not the enemy of nature, bending it to serve his whims.

@Minigiant has already quoted the PHB on the matter. It’s quite clear that the ranger as-written is a native of civilization who learns to protect themselves and others within the wild, and ventures out into it to hunt down threats to civilization. They are not necessarily an enemy of nature (though they certainly can be,) but they are certainly not at home there. It is a hostile place, that they apply their expertise to be able to survive and thrive within. As opposed to the druid who reveres nature and literally transforms themselves into a part of it.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Its not an either/or, and your prejudicial attitude towards the concept of actually having to engage with more than the shallowest surface of the gameworld isn't a given either.

Is counting rations really all that deep?

 

[Emberashh]

Is counting rations really all that deep?

No, but you're already off the rails if you're assuming thats what Im suggesting.

If we step into Video game land, the MMORPG Runescape actually serves as a big inspiration for my thoughts on how to approach it. In RS, food is what restores your health. There are no health potions or resting.

And aside from obvious MMO scaling, thats about as deep as Food goes in RS. Game design wise, it provides a pretty big justification for the simultaneous existence of Fishing and Cooking as skills, and together through how Jagex designs questing, each skill is worthwhile to train up. (If you can deal with the soul crushing grind of MMO gameplay anyway, I should know, it took me 20 years to Max my account in that game)

But that said, Food doesn't have to be that shallow. Food can be elaborated on to provide a great deal of passive and active benefits, and how food is made and consumed can in turn provide a lot of meaningful decision points.

Sitting down to eat a high level soup for instance could take time, and in turn provide boosts, resistances, and even perhaps special one-off abilities they retain as long as they don't go hungry (!!!). The skys the limit.

But say the party doesn't have that time? Scarfing down a fairy muffin might provide a lesser benefit as a trade off for only taking a moment to consume. (But would upkeep your, lets call it, Food Baby)

But you can even go the other way. Sitting for a super high level 7 course meal would take even more time, but come with an even greater benefit.

And with that, now you've got knobs and levers to dink with, and all the while, we're no longer sitting and dreading the horrid spectre of "tracking rations", because we're already engaging with the thing that resolves that issue, because said thing is an indepth system that provides tangible gameplay benefits and meaningful choices to make.

And thats before we consider quality of life for the player. The benefits of food, for instance, might be designed in such a way that tracking their diminishing benefits is dead-easy, with their final elimination being made the mechanical point at which the characters "hungry". And then, you start tracking hunger levels, which in turn can also be made easy by not slaving ourselves to a whole separate chart to memorize. In my system, I have 4 Energy pools already ready to go, simply drain one or more of them at a fixed rate until you eat.

Meanwhile, with a universal signal thats being run always to begin with (ie, a tension pool automatically tracking time), you no longer have a cognitive load. When the signal comes, you simply remove a mark, a die, whatever it is, and you're done.

And that is assuming we just automatically say whenever time advances, your needs go down...they don't have to, not everytime. Thats the value of breaking down time into separate time scales, with the bulk of the game taking place in lower scales.

Having to update your Needs would come relatively speaking infrequently in actual gameplay, and as alluded to, you'd ultimately have to be in some real deep doo doo to not be keeping up with it automatically, or you'd have to be ignoring entire reams of content, at which point I can't help you because you're not really playing the game.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Its fascinating how averse to the concept of an open world sandbox some appear to be given that TTRPGs originated the concept and their high popularity in the video game world.

In my experience Open World Sandboxes normally fit into either of two categories:

• Engine building/construction games like Minecraft or Factorio (and no RPG really replicates that)
• Extruded cRPG Product with a light levelling and skills system, a bit of fantasy gloss and whose goal is to provide a bit of something for everyone.

The best ones have the open world part providing a backdrop for the story (as in Witcher 3) or manage to mix building in there (as in Tears of the Kingdom). But there's a reason "Ubisoft Games" are considered irritatingly overdone.

 

[Weiley31]

The Revised Ranger.

 

[Minigiant]

Although neat stuff like climb speed and fire resistance at low level features. Level 1 features.
Which comes to the issue with the spell-less ranger. Leveling it.
The stuff people want are low level stuff. The 3e Horizon Walker was cool and one of my favorite characters in 3e. It was also weak.

Many of the spell-less rangers you see in D&D editions like 4e or D&D adjacent games like PF or A5e are just variant fighters with low level exploration tricks and level 1stuff spread across 20 levels.

And since some of the spell-ranger fans who don't just want reskinned spells, it becomes trading half casting for always-on 1st level features.