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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5823413" data-attributes="member: 54877">The "archer" is a good concept with which to find fault lines--because people's conception of "archer" are all over the place, and sometimes based on wildly divergent views of archers in history and fantasy. In the sense of "guy who can pick up a bow and do some good with it," fighters have made pretty decent archers in every editions--including 4E.  And when they didn't, it was as much about Dex as anything else.   In the sense of "crack shot that is the medieval fantasy equivalent of Navy Seal high on magic Legolas juice and would only deign to use a knife in an emergency," fighters aren't so hot.  And they really can't be, without prestige classes or other "bolt-on" mechanics, unless you just decide that "fighter" equal "martial guy" and everyone else has to be substandard to that.   When Monte did Arcana Evolved, he split the "fighter" concept into "warmain" and "unfettered".  The former was brute strength, heavy weapons, heavy armor.  The latter was a more skirmish-oriented character with Dex, who nevertheless was quite competent in melee combat (though not nearly as able to take a lick as the warmain).  You could make a very good "archer" who didn't have any ranger baggage, quite easily.  What you couldn't do was one that totally sucked at melee.   Several people complained bitterly about this.  "Where's my Archer class?" they hollared.  I kept thinking, "Did you guys read any history?  Any remotely plausible fiction?  Any fantasy with typical archers?  Try Arthur Conan Doyle's 'White Company'?  Have any concept of what it means to be an archer?"  Archers run out of arrows.  They get overrun.  Their bowstrings get wet.  The Dark Lord has protection versus every killer arrow.  It took me a long time to realize that they didn't want an archer.  They wanted Navy Seal Legolas.  (And they missed the knife work in the movies.) <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /></blockquote>

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