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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 8967735" data-attributes="member: 6877472">The Ranger gets their magic not because of anything Aragorn does in the Lord of the Rings, but simply for a desire to make them another "Fighter+" analogous to the Paladin.  While the 1e Ranger is an odd hodge podge of abilities, this design intent becomes more clear in 2e, where Paladins get some spells Clerics use, and Rangers get some spells Druids use.  Neither case was super fantastic, but it was retained as a legacy trait in 3e so people wouldn't get up in arms about Rangers not being the same class.By the end of 3.x, Rangers had a lot of very cool spells unique to their list allowing them to do a wide variety of rangerish things, as well as make up for weak points in the class, like improving their combat abilities (the spell that lets you shoot an arrow at every enemy in range was a personal favorite).Because this is generally how WotC likes to fix problems; just throw more spells at it, lol.The 4e Ranger does almost nothing magical, save for a few Primal abilities.  However, surprise, surprise, there were people who (outside of just generally not liking 4e) pointed to the Ranger no longer being magic as a point of contention.Thus we got 5e, which rolled back many design decisions to previous eras, where again, we have magical Rangers because some people were very vocal about not liking 4e Rangers, and apparently wanted previous Rangers back.But it turns out that opinions about what Rangers are, and what abilities they should have are sharply divided by the community (they are one of the most complained about classes, after all), and WotC hasn't figured out how to "thread the needle" (using Crawford's words) without making two separate Ranger classes.  Some people see their "Primal Paladin" status as too ingrained to the Ranger to accept a spellcasting subclass, and every time WotC has presented a "no spells" option for the Ranger or Paladin, the result has always been worse, so I doubt a "no-magic" Subclass would be any good.</blockquote>

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