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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hriston" data-source="post: 6666564" data-attributes="member: 6787503">Now it's my turn to be pedantic. What you actually said, and what I was responding to, was this:So, not that it isn't defining, as you're now saying, but that the characteristic doesn't appear at all in most cases. Now you've refined your position, which is fine. It allows me to understand your point better.I'd also like to refine my position, if I may. You seem to be responding to the idea that by saying that FE was the Ranger's raison d'etre, I was saying that FE style hatred is the main motivating factor for every Ranger character. That wasn't what was meant. The Ranger I was referring to is the class as a whole in that I see the Ranger class as taking what I would call the "FE" trope in D&D, which preexisted the class and goes back to Chainmail, and building a character class around the mechanic. Notice that this position doesn't assume the preexistence of a "ranger archetype" that the class was trying to emulate, because I don't think such a thing did exist before D&D made it what it is. Such archetypes are more properly referred to as character-class archetypes, and as such the Ranger is as much a creature of D&D as it ever was of Tolkien or any other author.You're simply not following me. I'm not substituting an unrelated example. Nathaniel Bumppo is widely acknowledged to have been based in part on Daniel Boone. Notice how similar their names are? Certain episodes of the Leatherstocking Tales are lifted right out of Daniel Boone's life. As I said up-thread, I haven't read the works of James Fenimore Cooper, so I can't speak to Bumppo's attitudes towards Native Americans, but I think since we're discussing literary archetypes that it's fair game to bring up the real life figure from which the archetype, in part, derives.It's a D&Dism that's still part of the PH description of dwarves. They hate orcs and goblins across the board. Of course, you are free to ignore the fluff when creating your own characters and campaign worlds.No, it was clearly the seductive power of the ring interacting with a tendency on the part of Boromir to see the might of Minas Tirith as the only way to resist Mordor.Beowulf didn't hate Grendel after killing so many of his men? Hunting him down across the heath doesn't seem Ranger-like to you? Keep in mind that as the subject of an epic poem, we can't expect Beowulf to conform to the details of a D&D class. Three monsters really isn't a large enough sample size to determine whether there was any specialization in play. Most epic heroes are depicted killing a very small number of monsters. If I were to build a Beowulf character, however, it wouldn't be too far off the mark to give him some sort of an advantage versus ogres, if that's what Grendel was, or dragons for that matter.If I wanted to create a character that emulated the exploits of Perseus, for example, it might be a good idea for that character to have some sort of an advantage against medusas.How narrow is a focus that includes this list of creatures?That's the D&D Ranger, and that's not even including all the humanoids that were added in UA. Even now, in 5E, the focus is far from narrow.</blockquote>

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