NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mephista" data-source="post: 6687898" data-attributes="member: 6786252">It may very well be a hold-over, but so is the wizard and sorcerer by that logic.  The demand for a psion is a holdover.  Anyways, let me start at the top.1.  Strider-Aragorn.  For the most part, Aragorn actually comes off as a paladin to me.  "The hands of a king are a healer." Lay on Hands anyone?  His holy sword?  Leading armies and calling up the spirits of the ancestors to follow him?  I've never really felt he actually works the Ranger vibe very well, except for the whole tracking-through-wilderness stick when he was still Strider.Still, before we hit Rivendell, there's stuff we can mine: the LotR Rangers, before the war, were the monster hunters that protected the North.  When they left, all the monsters came out to play and hunted people so that they had to huddle inside.  They were all well known for having elvish qualities - speaking with animals, keen senses (more D&D fey gnome, tbh, but still!).  Strider served as a guide through the wilderness, knew how to avoid leaving trails, knew how to use things like fire to hold off monsters instead of holy magic.  Actually, I think that's something that'd be cool to include in a Ranger - a torch as a weapon against monsters, maybe with something like the current bow magics.  Torch and warhorn in addition to bow.  Anyways, moving on.  Strider didn't do much after Rivendell, led to the mountains, took over after Gandalf fell, Fellowship fell apart, tracked the hobbits.  And then, we went on to the battles against Sauron, and he stopped being Ranger-y and more paladin-like.As another example, lets look at the Rangers from Babylon 5 - "We are Rangers. We walk in the dark places no others will enter. We stand on the bridge, and no one may pass. We live for the One, we die for the One." Clearly inspired by Tolkein's.  Walking in darkness and not letting the monsters pass, guardians.  It keeps coming back to fey-like associations and protecting against mosnters in the darkness/wilderness.2. The Ranger really isn't a fighter with some spells, though.  The original Fighter class was a generic weapons master, alongside the gishy Cleric, Magic-User, and then, the Thief addition.  If you primarily relied on weapons, you were a Fighting (Wo)man.  The Fighter is now someone who's primarily a front line warrior now, or perhaps a master (but mostly stationary) archer.  Rangers are skirmishers in a way that Fighters are not.  Let me use a quote from the US Army Ranger web page - "The 75th Ranger Regiment encompasses the 'Big five philosophy': marksmanship, physical training, medical training, small-unit tactics, and mobility for the success of the individual Ranger and the Ranger mission."  Marksmanship and physical training are about the only thing a Fighter has in common with an Army Ranger.  Note the healing, mobility, and small-unit tactics - all very important to the D&D Ranger. And that's not touching on the skills of a forest ranger, which I assume should be part of the class.  Rangers are much more like the Rogue, but without the criminal overtones.  You're primarily a hunter, above all else.  Stalking, worrying prey down, slaying (not fighting, but killing). 3.  Same as above.  Paladin, Barbarian, and Ranger were all once part of the Fighting Man class.  They've all branched off into their own segments.  Fighter does not have the skirmishing mobility, the healing, the small unit tactics.  Its not enough to have forest ranger skills - that's easy enough to acomplish.  In addition to the military might, we have a focus on stealth, wilderness survival, beast-mastery, herbalism, and tracking.  Tracking and wilderness is easy.  Even stealth is easy - just add the skills.  But the Fighter lacks all of them together.  We need a stealthy skirmisher with herbalism healing, tracking, enhanced senses, and animal empathy.    There's just -more- to it than Fighter + spells and outdoors-ness.  Hells, take away the wilderness survival aspects, and the Ranger should be urban-ready.  The point of the Ranger is to fight against the monsters - that can easily be in the wilderness or ones hiding among the civilized people.4.  Rangers are mobile and stealthy skirmishers. Fighters, Paladins (knights as far as I'm concerned) and Barbarians really aren't that.  The thread connecting them is the theme of Monster Hunter.  They're not outdoorsy Fighters with magic. They're survivors.  They skirmish to avoid being directly hit.  They live off the land when civilization's food industry is unavailable.  They know how to treat wounds with wild plants and herbs.  They need to be hardy and skilled in order to hunt the monsters to their lairs and slay them. This makes them more than a little wild themselves, with animal-like senses and pack tactics.  They are skilled at archery to bring down their own meat, they use weapons in close combat when they need to sneak up.  They're not front line warriors, they need to -move-. They're not glory hounds like the barbarians, being all obvious. Again, they don't want a fight, they want to kill their enemy and go home.  The're not knights who need steeds, duels, and leadership in battle - they'll work together to bring down an enemy anyway they can, be it traps or ambushes working together.</blockquote>

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