Steverooo said:
Great! I appreciate these. Let me go through each one and give my thoughts. Again, not trying to be argumentative. Just working through some ideas.
1) Make Rage/Track a choice, so that both Barbarians and Rangers can be built.
My thought on this is that it's a campaign world thing. Raging barbarians don't fit particularly well in my homebrew. Sure, there are some, but they strike me as more appropriate for a PrC.
2) Add flavor. Wilderness abilities include things like the ability to predict the weather, set snares, nets, deadfalls, dig pits, and create "bushwhacker" limb traps that hit you like a morningstar, or snares which pick you up and slam you into sharpened branches, etc. Others might include Energy Resistance 5 to natural Heat and Cold, etc., etc. There are a million things you can do.
All of what you're talking about are already part of my design.
Weather sense, and other survival bits are already part of the Wilderness Lore skill.
All the trapsetting for a Ranger is already handled the same way it is for a Rogue, the Craft (trapmaking) ability. I could see the arguement for allowing Rangers to do it with the WL/Survival skill, but that seems like a bad idea when there is already a mechanic for it in the game.
With both of the above, I just don't like the idea of adding a "special ability" to the class when I could just add an in-class skill (as these already are). It just doesn't seem like sound design.
As far as the DR vs heat and cold, the DR I've added at higher levels already works against heat and cold. It applies to all damage.
3) Make each level of DR tradeable for minor spell use (there currently is no way to allow the Ranger to be recreated).
D&D isn't really built to be modular in this way. If it was, we'd just have one character class and pick our abilities on a point buy.
I'm not really trying to duplicate the current Ranger class (otherwise, I'd just use that class). I'm trying to craft a class that better fits the core archetype(s). I don't see spells as being even remotely appropriate to the basic Ranger concept, but that's the nice thing about the multiclassing rules -- a player could easily pick up a few levels of Druid or Wizard to grab some spells. One of my design principles was actually to remove spells from the Ranger.
4) Look at each Ranger spell. Find a non-magical function that allows him to do much the same thing, and consider adding it as a class ability at one of the levels that currently has no special ability. EXAMPLE: The Alarm spell could be replaced with the ability to set tripwires (just as a fer instance).
Again, I don't see the spells as part of the core Ranger archetype. I really don't have any desire to give them supernatural abilities. Pretty much anything else that the Ranger needs, I think can come from his skills. Setting tripwires certainly can -- Craft (Trapmaking).
5) Add an option allowing something to be traded away for the D12 HD, to allow recreation of the Barbarian (alignment restriction and illiteracy?).
Again, not trying to recreate the Barbarian. If the class came out power-light, I think a d12 HD would be appropriate for the class. I don't know that it is necessary, though. I definitely _don't_ think that HD should be a swappable class feature, though. Whatever the hit die is, it is.
Thoughts? Am I coming from left field with some of my ideas here?
