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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jalkain" data-source="post: 258767" data-attributes="member: 2473">Very well said.  Some people think of Strider, some think of Robin Hood, some just want a generic character with some decent woodland skills.  I think there are two parts to this discussion, and I shall divide my post accordingly...PART 1I get the impression that whenever people want to create any character with woodland skills, they assume they have to do it using a ranger.  I reckon that you can do it by making the class skill system more flexible.  A forester is basically just a commoner or expert with wilderness lore as a class skill.  Give a fighter/rogue some woodland skills and you have Robin Hood.  I think that any character who spends a lot of time in woodlands or other wilderness areas should be able to have wilderness skills as class skills, regardless of their actual class.  The mechanics would need working out - you might have to swap out other standard class skills to keep things balanced.  But such a system would allow everyone to easily create woodcutters and bandits in the forest, without resorting to special wilderness classes.  That in turn allows us to concentrate on tweaking the ranger to more fully embrace the concept outlined in the PHB.Which brings us to...PART 2The best stereotype for the wilderness protector/hunter concept used in the PHB Ranger class is probably Strider and his men.  They watched over the Shire and surrounding lands, roamed the wilderness, lived off the land, and hunted maruading orcs.  You can argue about specific class features, but I think the concept matches the PHB flavour text quite well.So what class features don't match that concept?A lot of people are unhappy about dual wielding and divine spell casting as class features.  While we might expect some rangers to have such skills, they aren't so generic that we would expect all rangers to have them  Personally, I think that dual wielding and magic seem most appropriate for elven rangers, although if you extend dual wielding to include the quartertaff then it might be more widely practised.  Other ranger groups might have archery feats or Alertness/Endurance instead of dual wielding.  I'm not sure the spells make much of a difference to the class.I don't think we should be giving rangers bonus feats like fighters, nor druid abilities.  All that does is water down the distinctions between classes.  I assume that if we are playing DnD then we are happy playing a class based system.  Feats and skills, together with the  multi-classing system, afford plenty of flexibility to develop particular character concepts.Finally, the argument about favoured enemy not coming into play is something I personally find unconvincing.  The DM should take class abilities into account when designing adventures, but in any case, favoured enemy is no more situation specific then turn undead.  If you want to run into your favoured enemy on a regular basis then you may just have to go out and hunt them!  That's what rangers do, remember?</blockquote>

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