Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="stonehead" data-source="post: 9761085" data-attributes="member: 7047885">I think the point was that no one used these rules, so being able to ignore them is meaningless. I've never played in a game in which overland travel speeds or foraging for food played a significant role. To my knowledge, published adventures also don't emphasize them, which makes sense because they need to be playable even if the party doesn't have a ranger. [HR][/HR]More generally, the Ranger's core concept, "The wilderness survivalist and tracker," doesn't seem like enough to justify its mechanical existence. Maybe if it leaned more into the "guy with an animal companion" there would be enough, but the past hundred pages of posts have showed that's not what most people think is the Ranger's thing. In point-buy terms, the wilderness abilities of the ranger would be worth probably less than 10% of its power budget.It's like, imagine if there was a class called the Fire Resistor whose core concept should be self explainatory: "The guy who doesn't get burned by fire." The class gives fire resistance which scales to immunity and maybe they eventually heal when they would take fire damage. Fans complain that they don't get to do anything against monsters that don't deal fire damage, so in the next edition they can change incoming physical damage to fire damage a few times per day. Maybe they get some gimmicky abilities like summoning a fire elemental, or lighting themselves on fire to deal bonus fire damage. It's clear that this shouldn't be a full class. Something that comes up so rarely should be a sub-class, or maybe even a feat or two. "Wilderness Survival" is better than "Fire resistance" but it is still a class designed around something that doesn't come up very often.But, the thing is, classes don't exist for only mechanical reasons. Classes raise the minimum amount of flavor a character can have. When we play a lot, like the kinds of people who post on forums do, I think it's easy to forget the benefit of that. The least interesting character you can build in a point-buy system is literally a stat block. The least interesting character you can build in a class-based system is the trope that inspired the class. (Obviously you can build a less interesting character if you try to, I'm assuming no bad actors, just inexperienced/uncreative players). I saw an example first hand recently when I got a group of friends who hadn't played before into a new campaign. One of my players was struggling to come up with a character concept until we saw the list of backgrounds. All of a sudden, it was like "Acadamy Dropout? That'd be cool. Oh, Runaway Noble, I want to do that. Wait, maybe I could play a Librarian who..." I think that is the value of the Ranger, it's to instill ideas of the kinds of characters who would fit in a DnD world. Is that worth the dozen pages it takes up? Hard to say, it's left as an excercise to the reader.</blockquote>

Verification