Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="TheCosmicKid" data-source="post: 6665883" data-attributes="member: 6683613">No, I identified these characters as rangers and then claimed that having a favored enemy did not define them.  It's not the character trait that sets their archetype apart from other archetypes.What do you think the purpose of the class mechanic is?  Does this model you're implying, where the rules give you an ability more or less arbitrarily and then you try to justify it to your character concept ad hoc, really seem ideal to you?  Shouldn't it be the other way around?  Shouldn't the rules be giving you abilities you already expect and want out of the archetype you have chosen?When you're rolling a wizard, you expect to learn magic spells, because all characters in fantasy fiction who fit the wizard archetype know magic spells.  You don't have to read between the lines to find the wizards' magic -- it is immediately obvious; it defines their character's capabilities in their world.  If the wizard class in a game did not have magic spells, that would be a glaring and bizarre omission.  And that's just not true, at all, of rangers and favored enemy.  I am quite confident that had rangers in previous editions of D&D not had the favored enemy ability, you would not be here arguing that they should. How can it possibly be a defining feature of the archetype if the class can support the archetype just fine without it, or if other classes could just as easily have had the feature instead?Come on, dude.  You can't just discard one example and substitute another one that better fits your position.  Remember, you're trying to convince me that all rangers should have favored enemy.So now not only should everyone in an entire class have the same motivation, everyone in an entire race should too?What drove him to try to seize the ring?  A burning hatred of Mordor.  Of the entire Fellowship, Boromir is by far the purest example of hatred of one's enemies as a defining character trait.  Your position has driven you to downplay this in order to rationalize the "favored enemy = ranger" identity.  Are you starting to see the problem here?Beowulf isn't driven by hatred at all, doesn't specialize in a particular type of monster, and doesn't display any other particularly ranger-like skills.I'm accusing you of outlining a "favored enemy"  that is so broad as to be essentially meaningless and certainly not consistent with the narrow focus displayed by the D&D ranger.</blockquote>

Verification