Steely_Dan
First Post
It was fun being able to blap someone with a magic missile.
The Ranger: What is his shtick?
- Thread starter Minigiant
- Start date
It was fun being able to blap someone with a magic missile.
Steely_Dan
First Post
I don't mind Drizzt, in my campaign he's currently working as rough trade on the streets of Calimport.
tracking
Tracking is the ONE thing rangers should excel at. No matter where you are. You're in the wilderness on a rocky path. You're tailing an assassin in the streets of city X. Tracking should just work : period. Nobody would think Sherlock Holmes' powers of perception or deduction would only work in the streets of london, but not in the backyard of the Baskervilles' estates.
A ranger's perception skills should be almost inhumanly acute. This should allow the ranger to also notice that, say, there is a slight limp in the right leg of that ogre, and targetting that might make his tendon snap. The class is all about DIY, taking care of business, survival, self-reliance, hunting, sneaking, preying, climbing, and killing game, both large and small. I LOVE the idea of picking up extra bonuses AFTER you encounter your first X monster, up to the point of : rangers may get bonus XP for fighting new creatures all the time, or learning to dominate them in battle. A bear hunter would learn to set the food with an herbal poison then stab it with a long spear and run away repeatedly due to it having blurry vision. Kiting should be an option. Go for the legs, keep it at bay, finish it off in melee. Avoid enemy hits. When poisoned, investigate what its natural prey would be in that environment and find an antidote in the blood that their may possibly have evolved.
Notice that there are no large enemies, but sink holes. Maybe magic is barren in this area, how did dragons adapt to living here? By becoming more melee combat focused. Who knows. I'm just throwing ideas out there.
I also like, for two-weapon fighting buffs (I am one, sometimes, but personally prefer the Aragorn switch-hitter archetype), the way that everquest did it. Warriors get dual wielding at slightly higher level than rangers. Say a ranger starts off with the ability to fight with a longsword and a handaxe in his offhand. By the time he's got 6 levels (no more), we can dual wield longswords if he wishes. Or if he prefers a bastard sword, can attack twice with it but lose some type of str bonus to the second hit. I'd prefer to gain multi-attacking with the same weapon, slightly earlier than a fighter, who's also slowed down in armor and less offensively minded and focused on the quick kill. Rangers are epitomized by the "quick kill", to my mind. It's risky, because if you let the enemy retaliate you will suffer. This implies a different type of balance of AC. Which is why I sincerely hope armor as DR will work, so you can have one guy who prefers to avoid blows entirely, and the other guy can shrug them off in his plate armor. A ranger may even wear a breastplate, but no more, if he wishes to use his fighting talents. Perhaps at tenth level he could be good enough at dual wielding or his two-handed bonus to do it, to work it in heavier armor. But in this game, there should be a mechanically important tradeoff between heavy and light armor to make building an effective ranger imply that it would be stupid to ever wear heavier armor. Like, you need Dex for 1/2 your attacks or your attack bonuses.
I like the idea of getting Dex bonus to damage, on top of strength, for example. Bam, heavy armor problem solved. So many ways to push players building rangers in that direction and minimize multiclassing with no synergy. There should be juicy things available at a low enough level to make the class really appealing (say 5th or 6th) to continue in, but not too low to make it front-loaded. And scaling bonuses is good too. I REALLY like whoever's idea it was to load up on favored enemies as if in a spellbook. You'd still need to have killed it, after finding its weakness through engaging it and observing it (hopefully beforehand). Actually nix that, you should be able to gain a bonus against a brand new enemy you've never fought before, through stalking it for a while and watching how it fights / kills its other opponents. Or maybe just sneaking around its lair and observing its kills for patterns. This would count as "tranferring it into your little black book of death", aka learning a new spell.
wicked new rule idea, kudos to this forum. Makes exploration and actually using your skills, fun!
Tracking is the ONE thing rangers should excel at. No matter where you are. You're in the wilderness on a rocky path. You're tailing an assassin in the streets of city X. Tracking should just work : period. Nobody would think Sherlock Holmes' powers of perception or deduction would only work in the streets of london, but not in the backyard of the Baskervilles' estates.
A ranger's perception skills should be almost inhumanly acute. This should allow the ranger to also notice that, say, there is a slight limp in the right leg of that ogre, and targetting that might make his tendon snap. The class is all about DIY, taking care of business, survival, self-reliance, hunting, sneaking, preying, climbing, and killing game, both large and small. I LOVE the idea of picking up extra bonuses AFTER you encounter your first X monster, up to the point of : rangers may get bonus XP for fighting new creatures all the time, or learning to dominate them in battle. A bear hunter would learn to set the food with an herbal poison then stab it with a long spear and run away repeatedly due to it having blurry vision. Kiting should be an option. Go for the legs, keep it at bay, finish it off in melee. Avoid enemy hits. When poisoned, investigate what its natural prey would be in that environment and find an antidote in the blood that their may possibly have evolved.
Notice that there are no large enemies, but sink holes. Maybe magic is barren in this area, how did dragons adapt to living here? By becoming more melee combat focused. Who knows. I'm just throwing ideas out there.
I also like, for two-weapon fighting buffs (I am one, sometimes, but personally prefer the Aragorn switch-hitter archetype), the way that everquest did it. Warriors get dual wielding at slightly higher level than rangers. Say a ranger starts off with the ability to fight with a longsword and a handaxe in his offhand. By the time he's got 6 levels (no more), we can dual wield longswords if he wishes. Or if he prefers a bastard sword, can attack twice with it but lose some type of str bonus to the second hit. I'd prefer to gain multi-attacking with the same weapon, slightly earlier than a fighter, who's also slowed down in armor and less offensively minded and focused on the quick kill. Rangers are epitomized by the "quick kill", to my mind. It's risky, because if you let the enemy retaliate you will suffer. This implies a different type of balance of AC. Which is why I sincerely hope armor as DR will work, so you can have one guy who prefers to avoid blows entirely, and the other guy can shrug them off in his plate armor. A ranger may even wear a breastplate, but no more, if he wishes to use his fighting talents. Perhaps at tenth level he could be good enough at dual wielding or his two-handed bonus to do it, to work it in heavier armor. But in this game, there should be a mechanically important tradeoff between heavy and light armor to make building an effective ranger imply that it would be stupid to ever wear heavier armor. Like, you need Dex for 1/2 your attacks or your attack bonuses.
I like the idea of getting Dex bonus to damage, on top of strength, for example. Bam, heavy armor problem solved. So many ways to push players building rangers in that direction and minimize multiclassing with no synergy. There should be juicy things available at a low enough level to make the class really appealing (say 5th or 6th) to continue in, but not too low to make it front-loaded. And scaling bonuses is good too. I REALLY like whoever's idea it was to load up on favored enemies as if in a spellbook. You'd still need to have killed it, after finding its weakness through engaging it and observing it (hopefully beforehand). Actually nix that, you should be able to gain a bonus against a brand new enemy you've never fought before, through stalking it for a while and watching how it fights / kills its other opponents. Or maybe just sneaking around its lair and observing its kills for patterns. This would count as "tranferring it into your little black book of death", aka learning a new spell.
wicked new rule idea, kudos to this forum. Makes exploration and actually using your skills, fun!
Because the last three and a half editions of the game strongly encouraged this? (and really, 2e didn't even support the guy with the bow well)
Blackwarder
Adventurer
That's brainwashing to you...
You know, tbh, I have no problem with the idea of rangers being more proficient in using two weapons, it's easy to imagine a Ranger using a sword and dagger or a torch or some other simple weapon simply because carrying a shield everywhere he goes is bothersome, what I don't like is rangers using two battle axes or two long sword, etc etc.
If we are insisting on helping the ranger fight with a weapon in both hands make it a military weapon in main hand and a simple one in off hand, if a player wants to have a character using twin long swords or long sword/hand axe combination or somthing like that they should take a fighter and specialize in that fighting style.
What I don't want though is to pigeonhole the ranger into using exclusively two weapons or exclusively bows (the way it's in 4th ed). I just came back from our weekly session, we have a ranger in the group and all she did was firing arrow, even when she was five feet from the enemies all she could effectively do was twin strike with her bow, that's because she is pigeonhole into the role of the archer, and distilling a class to essentially being only an archer is an insulte to the class and in a way also to the player.
Warder
You know, tbh, I have no problem with the idea of rangers being more proficient in using two weapons, it's easy to imagine a Ranger using a sword and dagger or a torch or some other simple weapon simply because carrying a shield everywhere he goes is bothersome, what I don't like is rangers using two battle axes or two long sword, etc etc.
If we are insisting on helping the ranger fight with a weapon in both hands make it a military weapon in main hand and a simple one in off hand, if a player wants to have a character using twin long swords or long sword/hand axe combination or somthing like that they should take a fighter and specialize in that fighting style.
What I don't want though is to pigeonhole the ranger into using exclusively two weapons or exclusively bows (the way it's in 4th ed). I just came back from our weekly session, we have a ranger in the group and all she did was firing arrow, even when she was five feet from the enemies all she could effectively do was twin strike with her bow, that's because she is pigeonhole into the role of the archer, and distilling a class to essentially being only an archer is an insulte to the class and in a way also to the player.
Warder
I am going to go out on a limb and presume Katrineholm is not a municipality of 10 million or so.....cause out here in greater Los Angeles, the concept of the Urban Ranger..not so silly.
Dumplings in Arcadia, Drinks Downtown, and sober up in a Hollywood Dinner and it's corresponding fantasy equivalent in Lankmar, Ptolus or the City of Brass, or insert fantasy metropolis here *, seems viable to me.
Likewise the expression of Knowledge: Local...rather important as well.
grimslade
Krampus ate my d20s
But what is the difference between an urban ranger and a forest ranger, other than terrain? Or the difference between an urban ranger and a rogue with a more combat focus?
The ranger should be broad enough to encompass an urban thief catcher with the appropriate skill and feat choices or theme and background choices, as well as the badlands protector of the wilds. The class should not cater to the specificity of individual builds it is broader than that or on a different level.
Remathilis
Legend
Here's the problem with trying to say "X is a theme or background, not a class" is that if you work hard enough, you get left with very few classes.
Lets say WotC takes all the PHB1 classes (Fighter, Cleric, Wizard, Rogue, Bard, Ranger, Paladin, Druid, Illusionist, Assassin, Monk, Sorcerer, Barbarian, Warlock, Warlord) and decides to try to make some Themes or Backgrounds instead.
Its really easy to make warlock a theme (eldrich powers) and background (pact) so its gone. Sorcerer and Ilusionist could also be replicated with just a Theme and proper spell selection.
Bard could be a background (with music/knowledge talents) applied to a rogue (troubadour), wizard (loremaster) or fighter (skald). Assassin likewise is really just a theme (with lots of killing powers/feats).
A druid could a darn good example of a specialty priest, so lets make that a nature background and a shapechanger theme. A monk could work just as well as a martial arts theme and acrobat background; one could imagine priestly monks (shugenja), rogue-monks (ninja) or warrior monks. Even wizard monks (super sayians!)
A ranger is an archer theme (or two-weapon theme) + a natural background. Barbarian is the same, but with a rager theme. Even a Paladin could be a fighter or cleric with the "smite evil" theme. Warlords are pretty much akin to our warrior-bards above but more shouty and less singy.
That leaves us: Fighter, Cleric, Wizard, Rogue. But wait! What's a rogue but a skill-monkey and sneak attack? You could make them a theme (stabby) and a Background (criminal) and have fighter-rogues and wizard rogues. Even our buddy the cleric could theoretically just be a theme/background if not for the arcane/divine magic split.
Hmmm... Fighter, Cleric, Wizard. Where have I heard that before... Oh yeah, OD&D (1974).
....
Its probably for the best at this point to accept ranger, assassin, and all the other PHB1 classes as being unique special snowflakes, even if they could in theory be themes or backgrounds. What is one person's indespensible class is another's talent tree in X supplement.
Lets say WotC takes all the PHB1 classes (Fighter, Cleric, Wizard, Rogue, Bard, Ranger, Paladin, Druid, Illusionist, Assassin, Monk, Sorcerer, Barbarian, Warlock, Warlord) and decides to try to make some Themes or Backgrounds instead.
Its really easy to make warlock a theme (eldrich powers) and background (pact) so its gone. Sorcerer and Ilusionist could also be replicated with just a Theme and proper spell selection.
Bard could be a background (with music/knowledge talents) applied to a rogue (troubadour), wizard (loremaster) or fighter (skald). Assassin likewise is really just a theme (with lots of killing powers/feats).
A druid could a darn good example of a specialty priest, so lets make that a nature background and a shapechanger theme. A monk could work just as well as a martial arts theme and acrobat background; one could imagine priestly monks (shugenja), rogue-monks (ninja) or warrior monks. Even wizard monks (super sayians!)
A ranger is an archer theme (or two-weapon theme) + a natural background. Barbarian is the same, but with a rager theme. Even a Paladin could be a fighter or cleric with the "smite evil" theme. Warlords are pretty much akin to our warrior-bards above but more shouty and less singy.
That leaves us: Fighter, Cleric, Wizard, Rogue. But wait! What's a rogue but a skill-monkey and sneak attack? You could make them a theme (stabby) and a Background (criminal) and have fighter-rogues and wizard rogues. Even our buddy the cleric could theoretically just be a theme/background if not for the arcane/divine magic split.
Hmmm... Fighter, Cleric, Wizard. Where have I heard that before... Oh yeah, OD&D (1974).
....
Its probably for the best at this point to accept ranger, assassin, and all the other PHB1 classes as being unique special snowflakes, even if they could in theory be themes or backgrounds. What is one person's indespensible class is another's talent tree in X supplement.
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