D&D (2024) Ranger playtest discussion

[James Gasik]

I've actually had a @Snarf Zagyg style post brewing in my head for some time now about "D&D as oral tradition" vs. the Exploration pillar of play - most new players haven't read (in my experience) much in the way of older fantasy novels. I love Tolkien as much as anyone, but LotR definitely sucks all of the air out of the room for whatever reason. For Sparrowhawk / Fafhrd and the Grey Mauser / the Fellowship, getting to a new place is a big deal and a significant element of the story, while Tony Stark / Homelander / whoever can pop off to the Middle East for a big fight for the afternoon and be home in NYC for dinner. I really think that the received ideas / tropes of fantasy have shifted for the current generation.

Even Tolkien fails to make travel interesting- there's a huge section in the middle of The Two Towers that took me a long time to finally get through without skipping ahead as a youngster. Sure, when he starts expositing about the history of Middle Earth, that gets a little interesting, but consider how more exciting travel is in a visual medium, when during The Fellowship of the Ring, they sail down river and see the great statues of ancient Kings carved into the sides of mountains.

I can't blame authors (or DM's) with wanting to just skip past that and get to more exciting parts of travel. A few years back, I was playing in a Pathfinder game, and the GM went on a rant about how he hated teleportation magic and how it would be banned in his game.

We got sent on a long mission to a far off region of the world, and this is how it went:

*We board a ship in the nearest port city. We travel for weeks. We have an encounter with a floating island (cool!) and a sunken ship created by the Azer for the Efreeti (who trade with the world, but obviously don't care to get wet- also cool by the way). We reach a port city adjacent to the desert.

We stock up and my Wizard bought some scrolls for the journey. We see a gigantic golem in the desert- we avoid it. A few Survival checks are made. We get to our destination, then on the return trip, nothing of substance occurs. When I asked about it, the GM admitted that he basically ran out of interesting things to engage us on the journey.

"So, why is teleportation magic bad again?"

He sighed and conceded the point. Some times, travel, especially to places you've already been, isn't all that engaging, and random encounters with enemies on the road is just so much padding, between a few interesting sights.

 

[James Gasik]

They don't have that D&D brand, and no one's made a movie.

Well there's an anime...that should be good enough for the youngsters, right?

 

[Islayre d'Argolh]

The most vital things are being "one with nature", an "animal friend" (whether that means friends with animals generally, or friends with a specific animal), reasonably stealthy in natural environments, and good with a bow.

All things you can do in 5e with a Rogue. ^^

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

ROFL wth?!?

You don't need to be a game designer to know when something is off, or have an opinion about a class. Or even to understand game design. That's laughable. That's like saying "Most audiences don't know enough about film-making to have an opinion on which movies they like!". Come on.

Absolutely players have opinions on this. Whether you think those are informed opinions is a different matter, but they have them. They expectations of a class called "Ranger", and WotC isn't meeting them. Not in any WotC edition of D&D. WotC THEMSELVES have admitted they have problems getting this right, and have basically apologised about it before!

No, what I'm saying is more akin to "most audiences know when something is wrong [if a movie is good or bad], but a lot of the time they don't have the ability to point out the specific parts that they don't like". The average member of an audience would be absolutely terrible at making a good movie. The average player would be terrible at designing a Ranger that does exactly what they feel it should do while also being balanced.

WotC have admitted to repeatedly screwing this up. WotC themselves have also repeatedly said one of the key things audiences expect from a Ranger is a pet. And yet... Where's the bear?

In the subclasses and spells. The Beast Master gets a pet. As does the Drakewarden. And the Conjure Animals/Woodland Creatures spells. Rangers have had the options of pets since the PHB. They were mostly poorly designed, but they were there.

You're making an appeal-to-authority argument when the authority themselves has admitted messing up, and has shown designs of the class that don't match their own surveys lol. That's not a strong or logical argument.
That's circular reasoning and not very plausible, frankly. Especially given 5E Rangers had better exploration abilities than 1D&D ones.
I think I've demonstrated that it's not. You appeal-to-authority argument demonstrates more flawed reasoning on your part.

That doesn't mean I'm right! I could well be wrong. But my reasoning on this is demonstrably better than what you're arguing.

This isn't an "appeal to authority". This is "Wizards of the Coast are the ones that have data showing what the player base wants". If the player base doesn't like the Ranger being a spellcaster, WotC will change it to fit what the player base wants during this playtest.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

why is 'song of rest' the only character ability that interacts with hit dice?

I mean, I think the answer is because HD were only "locked in" pretty late in the playtest and WotC were trying to position so they could go back to a more trad way of healing for a long time.

Well there's an anime...that should be good enough for the youngsters, right?

It's not an anime likely to appeal to youngsters, and it doesn't tell Ged/Sparrowhawk's story.

It's basically a random generic fantasy tale that happens to be set in, technically, in Earthsea, but also everyone is white, and all the elements that make Earthsea distinctive are ignored.

Plus worse it's goddamn boring! Not something Ged's story is usually seen as.

 

[James Gasik]

Yeah that's the sort of thing I've seen. Ranger is literally the only class I've ever seen people be annoyed by it also having magic. That's across a whole bunch of games and 30+ years. I've see stuff like people disliking how magic is implemented plenty, but just "that the class has it"? That's new. Well, not new, in that I've seen it with Rangers on and off for 30+ years. But it's the only class. Because it's the only one where them having magic runs counter to expectations and desires.

Even during the 3e/PF1 days, I've seen this, when "not having magic" was a huge disadvantage (unless you could cheat with Use Magical Device). I watched players multiclass from Ranger into Rogue quite often, as they seemed to want to create some kind of special forces commando (the worst was a Ranger/Rogue/Barbarian/Fighter lol) and they had no use for "finger wigglin'".

WotC has always had this problem with magic and non-magic, where being non-magical meant you couldn't do anything cool. Of course, TSR wasn't exactly any better at this- thousands of spells and magic items, only two non-magical classes in the PHB, and barely any options for them compared to what magicians could do.

I mean, even in 4e, the Martial Power Source had nothing cool or unique unto itself, and every other Power Source could do amazing things. Save for the Ranger, because even before Essentials, he had a few moves that were dubious, like the attack power that let him leap into the air, then travel in a line, attacking a few times as he did (some kind of anti-flying move, though as insane as it sounds, it wasn't very effective).

 

[Ruin Explorer]

The average member of an audience would be absolutely terrible at making a good movie. The average player would be terrible at designing a Ranger that does exactly what they feel it should do while also being balanced.

For sure.

On the flipside audiences are extremely good at detecting when a movie sucks, or when it contains stuff that just doesn't work for them.

In the subclasses and spells. The Beast Master gets a pet. As does the Drakewarden. And the Conjure Animals/Woodland Creatures spells. Rangers have had the options of pets since the PHB. They were mostly poorly designed, but they were there.

None of these match what WotC's own surveying suggested players want, and they were extremely poorly designed, and showed a real lack of effort and care. Something that players regard as a core element of the class should be a badly-designed optional subclass, should it? WotC's surveying indicated people want an animal friend to help them kill stuff. Not a rando summon, and not a pet that just stood around mashing the DODGE button.

If the player base doesn't like the Ranger being a spellcaster, WotC will change it to fit what the player base wants during this playtest.

No.

Absolutely not. We have direct evidence that is not how WotC works. This circular reasoning that whatever we get is what the audience wanted is absolutely false on a truly fundamental level. Not just in D&D, but across the board with media. Companies are extremely bad at understanding and implementing survey results, and as you yourself just pointed out, players are bad at explaining what they want.

Real skill in class design comes in creating fantasies people want to embody. WotC have not been great at that. Many other companies aren't too, but it is why WoD was really freakin' huge. White Wolf didn't "survey people" to see what players wanted from a vampire game. They created a bunch of awesome vampire archetypes with the Clans, and then people wanted to be them.

Part of WotC's problem has been being blinded by their own surveys and the admittedly-confusing-and-contradictory results therein. Audience know what they don't like, but they're much more confused about what they do like.

WotC's focus should be on making a super-sexy super-awesome Ranger than says "PLAY ME!". Not checking a bunch of bloody boxes.

As I've said before - that could even work with a half-caster (or even maybe full caster!) Ranger. But they need to "pick a lane", and surveys aren't really helping them do that, very clearly.

To be clear we have a situation where:

A) WotC are NOT following their own surveys particularly closely.

and

B) WotC are NOT creating a sexy-as-hell Ranger class that people want to play.

They're not sitting in either chair, let alone lounging across both smugly, as we'd hope.

 

[CreamCloud0]

My point about Katniss is : by using the Fighter or the Rogue classes the right way, we can now build very good non-magical "rangers".
That's why the official Ranger class have to be this difficult-to-balance Fighter/Rogue/Druid multiclass (magical ranger) : because the game already allow us to build Aragorn/Katniss with two of the non-magical classes.

I think this indicates on why there’s such dissonance between the DnD class of Ranger and examples of ‘rangers’ in other media, DnD is such a high magic universe but what seems to be the stereotypical pop culture concept of a ranger doesn’t inherently focus on the magic angle, the conceptual focus is more on their archery, stealth and tracking, expertise in nature/their environment or of a specific target, survival and exploration, none of these concepts require magic and so in other media rangers are often primarily martial rather than the half casters of DnD meaning that trying to translate those ranger characters into the ranger class will always cause dissonance as the pure martial classes of fighter and rogue will always fit them better on a 1-to-1 comparison as the ranger class has alot of magic baked into it that is superfluous to the idea of a ranger but essential highly ingrained into DnD.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

some kind of special forces commando

Yeah I think we're kind of getting closer to one of the two major fantasies Ranger tends to embody, and it's got large crossover with the other.

People want to be "badass of the woods". Sneaky nature-living guy who is deadly in ambush and in a fight (and isn't an ambush specialist like a Rogue). That's very common.

They also often want to be "friends with the animals", and often have a loyal animal.

And guess what? In fiction, tons of "special forces commando"-types are ALSO friends with the animals. They calm animals down rather than killing them (unless they're rabid or the like). They often befriend animals. Animals often help them.

 

[James Gasik]

Once more I repeat "What do you think the ranger class is for if it's not covering Katniss, Aragorn, or Drizzt - or even any pre-5e rangers"?

What does Drizzt do that's particularly Ranger-y? He's a warrior with skills in stealth and survival and can track prey. Once he admitted to having a favored enemy (goblins) and summarily got over his hatred in the same story, lol.

He rarely uses any magic that isn't inborn to him being a Drow. The guy is basically a Dex Fighter with a few extra skill proficiencies.

I don't mean to rehash the Ranger identity thread from a few months back, but the truth is, characters who "feel" like Rangers aren't actually all that well represented by the class, and could just as easily be Fighters or Rogues.