What DO you DO for... Rangers?

[Shades of Green]

My general idea for Rangers was to replace their Favoured Enemy ability with a Sneak Attack ability, reflecting their skill with hunting, stalking prey, and wilderness guerilla tactics; I was also thinking about cutting some of their spells (how many?) in exchange for Woodland Stride and Trackless Step, reflecting keen knowledge of moving through nature quickly and untraceably.

 

[Nyaricus]

I think you are overlooking the usefulness of certain combinations of the 'effective feats' for use in PRC prerequisites, or for some of the advanced feats which require prereq's (such as in the PHB2).

Useful combinations, yea. But if a 4th level TWF ranger with the right feats and a 11th level ranger with Cavalier are nearly exactly identical, what's that point? It's just not a great fix, IMO, which is why we need better mounted combat feats. If Knights were the tanks of the day, then lets see some feats to back that up.

Anyway, I do see your point as well - maybe tweaking the styles with additions from the PHB2 may help the power-level conundrum.

I will try and do a little brainstorming for you. For now though, I have to head off to work this evening, but tomorrow I will break out some books and see if there are some good options that you can incorporate into your Ranger-redesign.

okay dude, that's be awesome every little bit helps, of course.

The Ranger is one of my favorite archetypes, yet I have disliked all the 3.x treatments thusfar. Your concept seems more in-line with my thinking (so far), so I would love to see your final design.

Yeah, I am going to have to see what ebcomes of it. AT this point, I am even leaning towards 3/4 BAB just so I can fit in all of the neat abilities I have in mind

Like I said, you'll be seeing more in the upcoming months.

Tonguez, nice job dude; I'll have to look it over when I'm not about to fall asleep

 

[Aus_Snow]

What DO I DO?

Well, I look at the core Ranger class, think "gee, that sucks", and proceed to make a base class only related by name and other minor connections.

It's basically a wilderness 'Fighter' (i.e., made up of grunt + bonus feats).

 

[Spatzimaus]

Back after 3E came out, we reworked the Ranger like this:

> HD -> d8, SP -> 6/level
> Instead of the TWF feats, the Ranger picks one pseudo-Feat at 2, one at 6, and one at 10. (Pseudo- because they still keep the light armor limitation) These feats are from a list of 15 or so Feats; generally speaking these are all weapon-related. TWF feats, bow feats, Weapon Focus, Combat Reflexes, that sort of thing; basically a shortened version of the Fighter list.
> We reworked Favored Enemy. Instead of 1 at level 1, 2/1 at 5, 3/2/1 at 10, 4/3/2/1 at 15, and 5/4/3/2/1 at 20, we said that at 1,3,5,7,9, and 11-20, the Ranger put +1 into one favored enemy group. It's still 15 points, but now it's more flexible; the limit was that you couldn't have more than 2 in any one group from 1-4, 3 from 5-9, and so on.

For 3.5E, the PHB ranger was changed to something disturbingly close to our setup. So, all we did was the favored enemy change; instead of 2 at 1, 2+2 at 5, 2+2+2 at 10, etc., we gave 1 point at 1-10 and 2 points at 11-20, with the caveat that no group could have more than (level/2) points (except that at level 1, you can of course put 1 point into something). Maybe we should have tied it to a skill, like Knowledge(nature).
Oh, and we also added some of the other suggested Combat Styles, like one for polearms.

 

[SCMrks]

For my camapaigns I use the Scout and Wilderness Rogue variant as the wilderness skirmishers so I changed the Ranger back into the nature magic wilderness warrior. I gave the Ranger a d10 hit die, made his reflex save poor, and took away evasion. For the combat style I let the Ranger take any feat tree that he qualifies for. The feats do not stop working in armor heavier than light armor. Animal companion gets max hit points and the Ranger's favored enemy bonuses.
Because favored enemy is so dependant on the DM's adventure I give rangers bonus spells so they can use spell's like Hunter's Mercy or Blade Thirst in combat when favored enemies aren't around. So rangers get 1 bonus spell for each spell level they have. So at 4th level they get 1 spell instead of 0.
Rangers also lose camouflage and hide in plain site. Ranger's have several spells that give +10 to hide and move silently and swift invisibilty can make them disappear from sight. Instead I give them improved spell casting which gives them +2 caster level and Slippery Mind. I chose slippery mind with the idea that any warrior living in the domain of the Fey better build his mental defenses to fight off their charms and enchantments.
The bonus spell and improved spellcasting are ideas I got from the Forgotten Raelms book Champions of Valor. It is given as substitution levels for rangers of Mystra.

 

[airwalkrr]

I give rangers a bonus feat at 16th level to continue their weapon fighting style. I also give them a rogue special ability at levels 12 and 18, but limit their options to Defensive Roll, Improved Evasion, Skill Mastery, and Opportunist (Crippling Strike, Slippery Mind, and Feat are not options). I reduce their Reflex save to a medium save (I developed a medium save progression that goes from +1 to +9 at 20th). I swap the level Endurance and Track are gained (Track is gained at 3rd, Endurance at 1st; few PCs will cherry pick a class for Endurance). I also like the idea I heard from someone else that rangers have an animal companion that is treated as a druid's level -3. I think I may have to yoink that.

 

[JRRNeiklot]

I use a 1e ranger conversion that I did a while back. Sadly, it's lost in cyberspace due to my hard drive exploding. I have a hard copy somewhere, I'll see if I can find it.

 

[Fredrik Svanberg]

Well, it's been long enough, so I want to know... what DO you DO for rangers? Do you give them new combat styles? Make them Spell-less (and no, those ones from ComWar don't count )? Something else entirely?

I'm considering changing the favoured enemies to make the groups larger. I can't really see a reason for a separate favoured enemy for every kind of humanoid. So Humanoids become a single favoured enemy option. This alone would make Ranger a lot more attractive. I might consider doing the same to the outsider groups and turn them into a single Outsider option.

In addition to this I can imagine adding alignment-based options, so you could choose Evil (anything) as a favoured enemy. This would stack with the other options, so if you fight Evil [+2 favoured enemy] Outsiders [+4 favoured enemy] you would get a total bonus of +6. I don't think this is overpowered.

Spells are completely unnecessary and should be replaced with bonus feats or more special abilities which improve the Ranger's bonuses against his Favoured Enemies, improves his animal companion, possibly adds more animal companions, and improves on his combat style.

 

[Raven Crowking]

Well, it's been long enough, so I want to know... what DO you DO for rangers? Do you give them new combat styles? Make them Spell-less (and no, those ones from ComWar don't count )? Something else entirely?

What DO you DO?

Well, you know the answer to this one for me. No spells for you, Mr. Ranger! Here are some standard abilities; here are a couple of alternate abilities. Of course, I also have an awakened chimpanzee ranger PC in my campaign!

RC

 

[Eltharon]

I use a varient (no spells, no animal companion) ranger with a few more bonus feats and expanded combt styles.