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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Flying Toaster" data-source="post: 9697929" data-attributes="member: 7052563">The Ranger was always fairly popular in my junior high school (late 1980’s) AD&D 1E groups, but more because of Aragorn from LOTR and general “rule of cool” than because of the actual class abilities.  One of our house rules allowed Elves and Half-Elves to be Druid / Rangers or Druid / Ranger / Mages, which we felt made a lot of thematic sense for those classes and also matched the Fighter / Mage and Cleric / Fighter / Mage multi-class options.  I suppose by that logic we could have also had Ranger / Mage, Ranger / Thief, Druid / Mage, and Druid / Thief characters, although I don’t recall anyone ever trying any of these.  The 1E rules required Druids to be “True” Neutral and Rangers to be any Good alignment, but we split the difference by requiring Neutral Good alignment for all such characters and it worked well enough. On paper the Ranger always seemed like a fun class, but in actual play it was often hard to use the abilities effectively.  Rangers might have really come alive in a wilderness-focused campaign like the West Marches hex crawls popular with the OSR crowd today, but in my experience at least few DMs back then ran wilderness campaigns and the TSR modules we used did not seem to offer great opportunities for stealthy characters.  I can’t recall if any of our Rangers ever actually got the chance to use the iconic tracking ability at the table.  Many of the 1E rules for stealth and perception used d6 mechanics that meshed poorly with the percentile dice used by Thieves, and I realize now that most of those d6 rules were probably holdovers from the ”white box” OD&D era. None of us could ever figure out why the “giant class” enemy list had that name, since many of those monsters were Small or Medium size and that term was never used anywhere else in the rules.  IIRC correctly Rangers were supposed to belong to some kind of circles or fellowships that organized their activities.  That could have been the basis for quests or story hooks, but our games were not that sophisticated.  When 2E came out we switched to the new edition and did not really look back, but in retrospect we could have used both the 1E and 2E Ranger rules together.  The two rule sets could have represented two different groups with their own goals and training methods, like martial arts schools, e.g. “Wyrmwood Wardens” (1E rules) and “Trollbane Rangers” (2E rules with Trolls as favored enemies).For some reason it never seems to come up much in discussion these days, but one class feature that impressed us back in the day was the hit dice.  The 1E Ranger was a Fighter subclass that only got d8 hit dice instead of d10, but they got a unique perk: two HD at first level instead of the usual one.  I don’t think this idea was ever used for any other classes, and the 2E PHB switched Rangers to more conventional d10 Hit Dice (among many other changes).  High level Fighters and Paladins would usually pull ahead of the 1E Ranger on hit point totals, but in deadlier campaigns run by tougher DMs that early low-level survival advantage might have proven decisive.  Our tables were not particularly deadly, but we still really liked this feature, particularly since we used the popular “max hit points at first level” house rule.  I remember at least one attempt by someone whose Ranger had a high CON score trying to “rules lawyer” their way into getting their CON bonus applied twice at level 1, but the DM was not having it (and rightly so IMO).  Thus a 1E Ranger could theoretically start with 20 hit points: d8 + d8 + 4 (18 CON).Regarding the animal in the cover painting, it seems to be some kind of lorisoid primate like a loris or potto.  Clyde Caldwell probably used a photo of one of those as a reference.  In the real world they are nocturnal, arboreal, wooly-furred primates native to tropical Asia and Africa.  This being is kitted out with a dagger, some pouches, and a fair amount of jewelry, so I think it is at least a magical familiar or more likely a sapient sidekick.</blockquote>

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