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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6078502" data-attributes="member: 82106">So, is the paladin thing beaten to death? How about a slight diversion? What about rangers? How did AD&D style design work there? Seemed to me like there were some things that were OK, but a lot of puzzlement. Looking at the restrictions:1) Must be good - What? There are no woodland scout type guys that aren't good? I have no idea why this restriction exists, except as purely a counterweight to the class's better features vs a fighter. It lacks even the logic of reinforcing a specific trope the class is designed for. I mean Paladin by its nature refers to a good guy, 'woodland warrior' has no such connotations.2) May not hire servants/men-at-arms before 8th level. Again, what is this reinforcing? It certainly seems to be aimed again at balancing the class. It may also force you to be a loner, but I don't understand the whole reason for that, since it doesn't fit the general archetype in any consistent way.3) No more than 3 rangers may ever associate together. Again, I can't see what this is doing. It is a virtually meaningless restriction anyway, but why if the ranger is supposed to be a lone operator does this only apply to other rangers?4) The 'travel light' restriction. Why does this need to be a rule? So, we have one restriction that seems to have no basis in anything, 2 that are aimed at making you a loner, but again this isn't consistently an aspect of the archetype, and a restriction that has little meaningful effect. The BENEFITS are also a bit of an odd lot. Some of them like the ESP benefit seem to be nothing but nods to Aragorn. Others make sense, but I never understood the magic user spells or the giant class creature bonus. They aren't BAD, and at the level of development of rules systems that AD&D was at (all options hard-coded, sub-classes very rigid on top of broad archetype base classes) its unremarkable.BUT if we compare this with the 4e ranger there are surely interesting contrasts. The 1e ranger is more flexible in terms of fighting styles. The lack of restrictions is nice though. Where the 1e ranger is only doing one very specific thing the 4e one can handle a lot more of the underlying archetype. As usual a lot of the 1e version's limitations feel to me like they should be choices for the player to make and the advantages plus disadvantages of 1e class design was overly limiting. The 4e ranger is no better than the other classes and thus doesn't have to have some "you're a loner or else!" wedged in, it can be an RP option for the player to explore (or not as the case may be). The other thing with the 1e ranger was IMHO beyond the "you must RP this way" stuff it didn't capture a lot of useful conceptual space. For instance why can only rangers track? The whole design of 4e lends well to a slew of different character concepts. Comparisons to 3.5 might be more useful here, but basically with 3.5 why take ranger over fighter unless you want the specific class features? You have plenty of feats and PrCs and etc to use to provide your fighter with mechanical color. I was never sure what the point of most of the more specific subclasses was in 3.x. You can graft stuff onto the fighter, like a few druid levels and tracking. This makes the restrictions of the ranger especially odd in 3.x as there seem few reasons to put up with them and they can easily be pretty out of place in many of the characters the system lets you construct. The 1e ranger is thematically cohesive, the 3e one's features seem like they'd be better as selectable options for fighters.</blockquote>

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