the battles? Are we making assumptions? Legolas and Gimli counting against each other, for example, did demonstrate a lot of arrows being readily available.
In the books, Legolas is constantly having to scavenge off Orcs and Uruks after he looses all of his own.
And during Helms Deep its presumable like any well run fortress that the defenders will have stockpiles of arrows all along the walls, so at least up until the defenders are pushed back into the keep there's unlikely to be any issue with ammunition. And even then.
But, funnily enough, in the Jackson movies Legolas is depicted as scavenging arrows in these scenes. He plucks arrows out of the Uruks and fires them again.
Because that's the fighters (exclusive) thing.
Which happens every time the fighter has something. Everyone is just like "why can't the ranger/paladin/ect... have it too?".
Ive seen it go in the other direction as well.
We could make the rogue, druid, paladin, and bard all generic enough that they can support any version of those archetypes found in media, but at a certain point they become generic customizable classlike lumps with no defining features.
I don't believe its quite as zero sum (?) as you're depicting it.
The base classes need to represent commonality between the more specific tropes that can be provided via subclass.
Barbarians as a trope aren't really unified by Rage. Thats strictly a Beserker inspired trope that could be applied as a more specific niche of a Barbarian, but isn't common to every depiction.
But then you have things like the Ranger, where they do exist in other properties, but never actually had a trope that was well defined before the DND Aragorn Homebrew was propped up and became traditional. So you need to actually define what a Ranger ought to be, and then again apply the same Commonality rule.
This is the underlying logic Ive been using for my game. The Ranger for me is firmly descended from Aragorn, Faramir, and the Ranges of the North, was best captured in literature by Will Treaty and friends, and had its best gaming identity provided in the core of the 2014 Ranger design.
So what does that give you?
That gives you an uncannily skilled martial warrior who specializes in the wilderness and serves best as a guide, healer, and tracker, with a penchant for fighting many foes simultaneously and being stealthy as required.
This in turn is what gives me my Rangers core abilities, which cement their role in the game as a Passive Party Buffer whom not only is uncannily skilled at tracking and stealth, but also fights uniquely with AOE as a Stealth-orientied Martial, and provides consistent healing for themselves and their allies.
This in turn gets developed more through subclasses, which explore different angles of these tropes.
The Herbalist further develops Poultices as an ability, and will generally feel right at home for anyone who just wants to play an Aragorn analogue.
The Warden goes down the Faramir route, but also incorporates elements from traditional DND Rangers, with its focus taking it down into dungeons to slay terrorizing monsters.
The Raider goes with a nautical theme, invoking the Rangers abilities as being fairly in-line with that of a Pirate or Viking, and fully explores the Ranger as a more dedicated brawler.
And finally, the Agent takes it in a more urban direction, taking cues from Will Treaty. This emphasizes stealth as the prime focus, and integrates it with the social and investigation mechanics.
And these meanwhile are the core four Im going with to start. With the Ranger base I've concieved you could do most anything you like, particularly if you introduce the ability to swap out the tertiary and quaternary abilities (Poultices and Wilderness Training) with others that can take the Ranger in other directions, which is also something I want to support.
One, indeed, could cement spellcasting as one of those options, and that opens the doors to most of the conventional Ranger takes that 5E went with, all without having to make anyones preferences play second fiddle to anyone elses.
The only thing my Ranger doesn't support is Beastmastering, which will be deliberate as that will be its own class developed along the same lines, given the primary abilities are variants of one-another, but explores the Beastmaster directly as its own commonality.
So yeah, all this to say that it can be done better, and it should be.
