NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="steeldragons" data-source="post: 6664088" data-attributes="member: 92511">Perhaps. But, no, not the same. We (and others) are all in agreement: The Ranger base class should NOT include/be defined by an animal companion. A subclass dealing with this particular archetype for players that want it is sufficient.So what's with the pushback?I had, in fact, thought of Silver, though I'll admit Tarzan had not come to mind. I dismissed Silver as an example based on my view of "Westerns" (and the same for whatever genre you want to consider Tarzan) not being a "Fantasy" archetype with which D&D should have any concern...imho.I'll give you Brego and Aragorn...yet the paladins got the "loyal steed" and the rangers, in 1e, had nothing to do with animals (beyond the druidic magic, at level 8, having access to the Animal Friendship spell). 2e brought in their proto-animal empathy and the animal/fantastic beast followers.POINT IS, and several of us agree, the Animal Companion as a central defining feature for the BASE class of Ranger would be a mistake. It would be narrowing and unnecessarily constraining to the archetypes of ranger...in the 5e format and design philosophy, it would be a BAD thing. Which is nice to see since I was only saying something (perhaps too strenuously) to refute those few posts that said they thought/wanted the Ranger to have an animal companion "by default"/"the pet class". That is something I VERY much disagree with and would find detrimental to the class and game as a whole.SO, for anyone on the design team poking around on ENworld [HI GUYS/GALS!], I wanted to make sure they understood that that is a distinctly MINOR view of what people want from the Ranger...and, to the thread topic of the OP at hand, that "animal companion" is not on MY [and judging by the amount of XP I've gotten for it, others] list of what "makes" a ranger a ranger/their defining trait.</blockquote>

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