The problem. The Ranger needs mechanics to be closer with their comanions and empathy than anyone else. Everything else I, and at least my group, would find unacceptable.
It seems that every iteration of the Ranger class has failed you on this count!
If your animal companion is an NPC, though, there's nothing stopping you from being closer with your companion than anyone else (including opting to buff your NPC companion).
Paladins in 5e have their mount through magic spells. Same with familiar. Its an intrictate part of those classes.
It's an
ignorable part of those classes, which suggests that it's not all that definitional, much as an animal companion is not necessarily definitional to the ranger.
As for the druid? The druid didn't have an animal companion until 3e, and never again after that. Druids don't have animal companions in a number of novels or video games - they shape into beasts themselves as a major mechanic.
I wouldn't be so sure about that -
animal friendship gave the 1st-level druid an explicit, permanent animal ally from 1st level, starting with 1e. 3e just moved it from a spell to a class feature. OD&D's
speak with animals allowed an animal to perform a service for the caster, meaning that some druids were probably recruiting animal buddies long before 1e codified it.
The upthrust in play is that if you had a party with both a ranger and a druid in it, from 1e on, the druid was the one with the animal friend. The ranger might've had a loyal bear hanging out in her fortress, maybe. The druid just had to cast
animal friendship, and that bear would follow them around, learn tricks, and listen to their commands.
You can't easily exclude druids from your conversation about animal companions min D&D - they've had them at a higher power for much longer than rangers ever have.
And the warlock is terrible with summons, which is a terrible loss for the class.
They can have an NPC party member demon, too!
I specifically said 2e was the start. So glad we're on the same page.
I dunno if I'd consider the 2e beastmaster kit as equivalent to the 5e beastmaster archetype. For one, the 2e beastmaster kit
treated the companion as an NPC party member who got XP, which is what I'm proposing here, and what seems to be unsatisfying to you.
They did have Animal Empathy as a core feature of the class. I never said Beastmaster with a pet exclusively. You're either not understanding me, or twisting my words around.
Animal Empathy doesn't have anything to do with their companion, which is the topic of conversation. 5e handles the "animal empathy" feature mostly through the Handle Animal skill - if you have that, you can pretty much do what a 2e ranger could do with Animal Empathy. I'm specifically talking about ways to handle animal companions, and the closest thing that the 2ePHB ranger has to this is that they might have an animal as a follower. That 2e ranger might also have a wearbear as a follower, but I don't see anyone saying that having a lycanthropic companion is a definitional element of the class (despite it being present in most D&D editions - OD&D, 1e, 2e, and even possible in 3e with the Leadership feat and monster-PC rules!).
Which just goes to show that the demand for beast companion was there. And the giving up action to let a pet work was standard in ALL summons and companions in 4e. Conjure up an elemental in 4e, takes your action. Conjure up an elemental in 5e, acts alone. The two editions are completely separate standards.
But the design problem they're solving is the same - adding a party member is
powerful. Treating them as a full-fledged party member acknowledges and accounts for that power. Trying to shoehorn that power into a subclass is practically doomed to be unsatisfying (action use) or unbalanced (no action use) and can be both.
The spell using Scout and Hunter were Rangers, and had options of using the Ranger stuff from previous books, including getting a pet.
They had spells, but they did not have the option of having the beast mastery fighting style, so they could not do both (aside from multiclassing, hybriding, or the like).
So, you came here to ask opinions, and now, when I disagree with yours with my own, its suddenly a wrong opinion?
Let me be clear: your opinion isn't wrong. I'm just looking to see if it's something I should be taking into account as I consider this option as a solution for my games (and perhaps providing for others looking at this thread who might have similar questions/concerns). I want to make sure my players who love rangers will still feel like they're playing a ranger, and it's valuable to see where this strategy might fall down.
In other words, I might not be willing to accept "the ranger MUST have the BEST companion as part of their CORE CLASS FEATURES" as a criteria I'll hold myself to, but I want to make sure that if I don't, that it's a considered drop, not something I just drop because it runs counter to the idea I had. It certainly is looking like something I won't worry too much about taking into account myself. But I wouldn't know that without discussing your criticisms in detail!
And, given the current testing of the Ranger, I think its clear that the people at WotC think its an important part of the class identity as well. We'll see with the next survey how much that's true with a wider audience.
I wonder if some more robust NPC-party-member rules might not be able to fix the Companion Problem for a lot of tables, leaving those who want a "companion as a class feature" with more intensive ways (like 4e's method of providing you with a unique creature as your companion, not a specific creature). WotC seems like it is trying to fix companions, and that effort might offer a lower return for its investment than coming up with a "Monster-to-PC-level-equivalent" chart or somesuch.
