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Message: <blockquote data-quote="doctorhook" data-source="post: 6322919" data-attributes="member: 58401">I creeped the archives pretty thoroughly earlier but I still couldn't find it. I'm glad to know I didn't imagine it!I suppose my conception of "ranger-as-nature-knight" came from how closely it was presented alongside the fighter and paladin. In 1E and 2E, the ranger was a top-tier warrior with druid spells, and IIRC it had d10 hit dice in 2E, as well as no restrictions on weapons or armor (except that it could hinder his stealth skills). This plus the fact that the ranger had alignment restrictions and something like a code of conduct made my teenage brain see the ranger as a nature-themed paladin-analogue. (FWIW, I just peeked into my 1E PH to see if I was totally out to lunch imagining 1E rangers as mystic warriors. Nope! The really did have access to the first two levels of magic-user spells alongside three levels of druid spells.)Certainly things did get weirder in 3E/3.5E: 3E's ranger was like 2E's ranger...which was pretty unremarkable. 3.5E beefed the rangers' skills and reduced him to d8 hit dice (like in 1E). 3.5E also brought us the scout class, which was a full-skirmisher, fully-martial nature-rogue that covered a lot of the same "hunter/tracker/spy" territory the ranger was supposed to. 4E's ranger killed the scout and took its stuff.Good points, all. I don't mind the idea of a "defender of nature"-type warrior, I just think the warden is fighting for an ever-smaller piece of conceptual ground in the middle of rangers, barbarians, and paladins of nature deities. I dislike redundant concepts. Warden needs to build some traction for me.(Obviously my point above is totally moot if the warden is now a subclass of paladin or ranger or something.)</blockquote>

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