Revised Ranger Base Class and Three Archetypes - Hunter, Beastmaster and Spirit Invoker

[simonb530]

Edited 3/22/16


In my opinion, the ranger base class should represent a person who can thrive in wild by understanding the terrain and the creatures that inhabit it through experience (i.e. no spells). So, this is my attempt at creating that base class. Below are the major changes from the PHB version


Skills – I gave the option to take athletics or acrobatics. I don’t understand why that wasn’t there to begin with when you are kind of pushed into a dex build.


Favored Enemy(F.A.) now has some combat abilities. I didn’t build the class to be solely dependent on F.A, but just add that little extra to show you are familiar with that creature. The improvements to F.A. are scaled to prevent dipping.


6th level - F.A. have disadvantages on detecting and tracking you


13th level – Foe Hunter (moved from lv 20 and merged with F.A.)


15th level – Archetype improvement


Fighting Style – I moved this to 1st level and moved Natural Terrain to 2nd. It is really boring playing a 1st level Ranger with just F.A. and Nat. Explorer. Those abilities don’t do anything at 1st level even with my improvements. That is why I moved the fighting style to 1st level.


Hunter’s Instincts – 2nd level is just Rogue’s Expertise but only for Ranger Class skills.


Natural Explorer– I call it Favored Terrain. I merged the vanish ability into favored terrain and add an additional pick.


Ranger Archetypes – With a spell less ranger, new archetypes are necessary. I have 3 rough archetypes: Hunter, Beastmaster, and Spirit Invoker. You gain features at 3rd, 7th, 11th, 15th, and 18th.

The hunter archetype is supposed to represent the Strider ranger type. The basic mechanic for this class is Focus Points similar to ki, superior dice, or Grit (Matt Mercer’s Gunslinger).

The beastmaster archetype is very similar to the current version but with some major improvements: bonus action to command beast, ability to gain varying CR beast, Training/improving your beast. This may be a bit complicated especially “improving” the beast, but I think this is better than the proficiency bonus to show the effects of different training.

The spirit invoker archetype is the magical archetype which has gained a deeper understanding of nature and formed a link with a spirit. With this archetype, you get a spirit companion. The spirit companion is used to sort a replace the conjuring animals and woodland creatures. I also changed the spellcasting to be prepare instead of knowing and add cantrips. I also modified/add spells so the ranger doesn’t have to use range weapons.


Evasion - add at 9th level


Hide in Plain Sight – modified to work until you took damage, move or attacked. If you took damage, you need to reapply it taking 1 min. If you moved or attacked, you needed to take an action to fix it.


Removed Primeval Awareness


Ability score Improvement, Extra Attack, Land’s Stride, Feral Senses – Stayed the same


Capstone ability – I originally had Free Movement, but I like my adaptability better for Theme anyways. I am still working on the ability, but basically it would allow the Ranger to study a creature or terrain and temporarily add them to its Favored list.


Well that is about the gist of what I have changed. I would appreciate any input on balance, theme, mechanics, wording, etc.

 

[Blue]

Notes during a read-through:

Average HPs for a 1d10 is usually 6.

Favored enemy getting a new power at 6th, and rolling in the old 20th level capstone at 13th. That's a boost to the class.

Moving Fighting Style to 1st: Not a fan. Give the Fighter something to be better at Fighting at 1st. And makes it harder for multiclass cherry-picking. Against this move.

Natural Explorer/Favored Terrain: Give out more and give more bonuses. Okay, I like additional focus on the exploration pillar for the ranger, sounds good. 6th level is the core Ranger's Vanish, normally given at 14th. And 14th gives out a new bonus. That's more giving things earlier life in Favored Enemy.

Hunter's Expertise: I like this, though worry that it will 90% of the time be Perception and Stealth as the skills with the most combat application.

Ah, but we've taken away casting. So more features but no casting, let's see where this goes. I worry that removing Hunter's Mark will hurt their combat.

Side note: There's a lot of copying text, but at first blush all in the SRD. Include the OGL in the PDF and you are legal.

Primeval Awareness gone, which makes sense as it relied on spell slots. But no replacement.

Evasion added at 9th!

Vanish was folded into Favored Terrain, so I guess it's not a new power. But it was moved from 14th to 6th.

Feral Senses moved up a level.

Foe Slayer, the 20th level capstone, was folded into favored enemy at 13th.

New capstone, permenant Freedom of Movement. It fits their roll ask skirmishers but doesn't fit the theme of Ranger at all. Powerwise it's reasonable.

HUNTER
Focus regained on critical hit favors more attacks, on kill favored bigger attacks, and only 1 if both happens. That's a reasonable range. But since they also regain every short rest, I'm not sure this doesn't just add more tracking.

Deeds system is way too powerful. Lots of things last as long as you have a single focus point, with the limitation that they can't apply more than one to a single attack. But that's not a big reduction. You could make all opportunity attacks against you have disadvantage, always get favored terrain (while lets you use Vanish allt he time at 6th level), get an extra horde breaker attack AND an extra collosus slayer damage to a different attack, proficiency in wisdonm saves all the time, etc. And that's without spending any focus. I'm only halfway through the list and this whole subsystem is broken broken broken.

I was going through this hoping it was a serious rebuild, and while the general Ranger abilities moved abilities to earlier levels and gave more, it still seemed a bit lwo for giving up spells. But reading Hunter is completely broken even before getting to the second feature. Maybe I'll go back and read Beastmaster and Spirit Master later, but right now it has started with a reasonable rebuild and then showed no real sense of balance and I'm just annoyed how much time I've put into the read through.

 

[simonb530]

Blue,

Thank you for taking the time and looking over it. I have made a few changes based on your suggestion.

I have fixed the average hit points to be 6.

I moved the fighting style to the 1st level because gaining both Favored Enemy and Terrain on the 1st really did nothing for the ranger. People might try to dip (1-2 lv) into the ranger to get the fighting style but would end up with a semi-useless ability (favored enemy - which is why I scaled its improvements with ranger level), while if they dip into fighter. They get second wind as well. For this reason, I don't think the ranger gaining fighting style at 1st level is really overshadowing the fighter class.


Let me explain my reasoning for the changes to favored terrains and enemies.

Favored Enemies - in the original was weak and really only added fluff to the class, but then the capstone ability was built around that fluff. I didn't want to make favored enemies be required for the ranger to perform well, but just to give him a little bit of an edge when fighting them. That is why I merged Foe Hunter into to favored enemies. I scaled these improvements to prevent people from level dipping and being as good as a ranger with their favored enemies.

Natural Terrain/Favored Terrain is very similar to favored enemies in the original class. I wanted to improve favored terrain but again not require it to be present for the ranger to do well. Therefore, I merged vanish with favored terrain. I did break up the effects of vanish - hide as a bonus action and a GROUP can't be track by nonmagical.

If you are comparing the original to my version, I did give more "bonuses" to the favored enemies over favored terrain. But if you are looking at my version and comparing favored terrain and enemies they are equal in power.

Hunter's Expertise - it's possible but it depends on how the person wants to play. I think the hunter should be able to be stealthy but it shouldn't be a requirement for the ranger to perform well. Kinda another reason I put vanish into favored terrains.

With removing the spells and not increasing attacks on the ranger (I didn't want to overshadow the fighter), I increased the power of each archetype. I hope the character is balanced, but the archetypes themselves probably seem strong compared to other archetypes.


For the ranger capstone feature, I wasn't too sure what a good feature is without being overpowered. I personally kinda like the idea that the ranger could spend sometime studying an enemy (kinda like Know Your Enemy) or a terrain and temporarily gain it as favored enemy or terrain. I think this would fit the ranger theme better. What do you think?


I had just made some changes to the deeds system, which is now called Exploits.

- If you kill a favored enemy with a critical hit, you gain 2 focus points, not 4.

- Changed Giant Killer, Horde Breaker, Multiattack defense to require spending a focus point to activate them.

- Changed Colossus Slayer, Escape the Horde, Keen Sight, Iron Mind - require allocating a focus point to remain active.

For example if I have 3 focus points, and the following Exploits Precision Attack, Colossus Slayer, and Keen Sight. I chose to allocate 2 focus points as a bonus action to have Colossus Slayer and Keen Sight active. This leaves me with 1 focus point to activate Precision Attack. The next, turn I could remove a focus point from Keen Sight as a bonus action. Leaving Colossus Slayer active and do another Precision Attack.

I think this setup would prevent abuse of the Exploit system, but would add a little bit of tracking.

I hope this is better and appreciate the time you spent going through and critiquing it.