What's an "Aragorn Style" ranger?

Aragorn is not a 1e Ranger. He's a 1e Paladin. He's noble to a fault: forgiving enemies and even traitors, showing mercy, abandoning his dreams to save the lives of two small comrades, and never once showing any sign of being tempted by the ring. He lays on hands. He can perform artful healing, not merely in the sense of herbcraft but overcoming the spells of Sauron with what is in D&D terms an act of magic complete with verbal and somatic components (calling back Faramir from the darkness).
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Is he a 1e Paladin? Is he a holy warrior receiving mystical abilities for faith or service in a a deity? Does he detect evil like a Paladin? Does he radiate a mystical circle or protection vs. evil? Can he, mystically, turn undead? Does he,mystically, heal by lay hands without material components like the 1e Paladin (as opposed to requiring a material component (i.e., kingsfoil)?

Doesn't sound like a 1e Paladin to me.
 
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Is he a 1e Paladin?

Obviously there are going to be differences between a literary source and the game mechanics, but of all the 1e classes Paladin is far and away the one that best represents Aragorn.

There is a good reason for this. Aragorn and the 'Paladin' have the same literary inspirations. Aragorn's 'hands of the King are the hands of healing' and a Paladin's 'lay on hands ability' have identical mythic and literary sources. Aragorn is an idealized chivilric King.

Is he a holy warrior receiving mystical abilities for faith or service in a a deity?

Yes, and in the exact same sense that the literary inspirations of the Paladin were. As the legitimate King, Aragorn is Iluvatar's appointed representative on the earth and appointed leader among mortal men. His ability to heal and command mystic forces is proof of his legitmacy not merely by blood, but by divine ordination. In Middle Earth this differs from the source material only in as much as Iluvatar is an unrevealed God, but Aragorn bears symbolicly the light which illuminates the path back to the creator through those that have born witness to Iluvatar directly or indirectly. In fact, if we read the background material in the Simirillion, we realize that Aragorn is not only the rightful heir to the throne of vanished Numernor and the subsequent Numernorean kingdoms in Middle Earth, but he is the lone rightful High Priest to Iluvatar because only the High King performed direct worship of and petition to Iluvatar. He is the High Priest and High King over the Children of Iluvatar, and through is elven linage the means by which knowledge of Iluvatar - through the Valar, thence to the high elves who had seen the light of Valinor, and thence to the decesdents of the ancient elf friends among the tribes of men - is to be brought to the rest of humanity.

Does he detect evil like a Paladin? Does he radiate a mystical circle or protection vs. evil? Can he, mystically, turn undead? Does he,mystically, heal by lay hands without material components like the 1e Paladin (as opposed to requiring a material component (i.e., kingsfoil)?

There is no reason from the text to believe that Aragorn cannot detect evil, cannot radiate protection from evil, and cannot indeed 'turn' undead. Indeed, much of what is somewhat mysterious in the text is a lot easier to explain if we assume that Aragorn in some way possesses these mystic qualities. For example, it is very difficult to explain how Aragorn drove away the assembled Nine from Weathertop and saved Frodo, when we consider that Gandalf by his own account had a great deal of trouble doing so unless we assume that there is something about Aragorn's nature as the King which caused the Ringwraiths to (seemingly) unaccountably fear him.

Granted, as with most of the 'magic' of Middle Earth, these things aren't nearly as explicit and mechanical as they are in a game and we should not expect 100% agreement mechanically with the 1e Paladin and any fictional source, but that is no reason to suggest that if you were running middle earth in D&D that the Paladin is not Aragorn's primary or possibly even sole class.

Doesn't sound like a 1e Paladin to me.

Be as that may, Aragorn is much better approximated by the 1e Paladin than the 1e Ranger. I bring this up as a testimony to how poorly most people seem to follow the text, and to point out that those people who are snearing at Drizzt because he's not a 'real Ranger' should note that because of the poor correspondence between the D&D Ranger and any of the source material and because of the prominence of D&D in shaping what people think when they think of fantasy, the D&D Ranger has become its own inspiration and its own archetypal source. Drizzt is a 'real Ranger' and Aragorn is not. The Rangers of Middle Earth are exactly what Tolkien said they were - the last remenent of the Nobility in Middle Earth. Not all those that wander are lost.
 

That's an interesting assertion and one worth considering, but I think it is important to remember that there is also the issue of Aragorn being of the Dunedain...

The Merovingian kings of France rested their claim to the rightful kingship of the Franks on the grounds that they had an ancestor who was a sea serpeant. It was common for the pagan germanic kings to claim as the source their authority some sort of uncommon and mystical connection to greater than mortal powers. Aragon's inherent nobility also rests upon a similar claim - having had an fairy ancestor. But I don't think the issue of Aragorn being the Dunedain means much more than he is qualified by birth to be a Paladin or other class restricted by virtue of birth. There are of course differences that Tolkien explicitly blames on Aragorn's blood (or more accurately on the spiritual significance of his blood, because he notes that inbreeding weakened rather than strengthened the line) such as his long life, but most of what makes Aragorn different IMO comes from the fact that he is the rightful King.
 

The suggestion that an author of Tolkien's calibre "made a mistake" in spending a lot of time on the way out of the shire is, frankly, silly.

<snip>

I only feel the need to defend the work, as one with a degree in English literature, when individuals make the bold, false assertion that it isn't "good."
I didn't say that it's not good. I canvassed that a mistake can be made.

Obviously opinions can differ, but I happen to think that Graham Greene is a better writer than Tolkien. But he can still make mistakes.

Even Tom Shippey in The Road to Middle Earth suggests that Tolkien is guilty of sentimentality, and that it is not necessarily a virtue of the LotR that the hobbits have to depart 5 homely houses before the events of the novel really get underway.
 

To quote Tolkien's original British publisher: "One does not edit Tolkien!"

...

All that said, as much as I love Tolkien, I wish more writers would step out of his shadow more. The genre needs to go some different directions (and lately, it very much has been, which is good), and those who imitate him too closely risk being compared to him, which is not likely to be a favorable comparison. Leave the Tolkienisms to Tolkien, I say. Base the ranger on a more generic outdoorsman archetype--a Robin Hood, perhaps, or a fantasy version of Davy Crockett, or even Bear Grylls.

The reason that Tolkien gets away with breaking a lot of "rules" that an editor would impose, is that Tolkien has something to say that works well the way he is saying it. A lot of his imitators don't have anything in particular to say, but seem to be under the impression that high page count correlates to epic. Of the currently writing authors, I think Tad Williams comes closest to justifying his page count (and word count density in a scene) of anyone. If he would quit wimping out on plot in favor of trying to write psychological characterizations, he might even pull of something comparable. :p

On the issue of game mechanics derived from literature, I have never once been a fan of conflating the characteristics of a small subset of characters, or even a single character, as entirely representative of what goes into a "class". As far as I'm concerned, if you can't make a D&D "class" with at least some reflection of three separate literary influences, it is probably overly constrained.
 

[MENTION=4937]Celebrim[/MENTION], I'm surprised that your comment is at all controversial.

But equally, there is little denying that the AD&D Ranger is an attempt to create a class that mirrors Aragorn's functional (as opposed to thematic) role in LotR, right down to use of the palantir.
 

I agree with Celebrim's view as a way to view Aragorn. I've always said that Aragorn exhibits Paladin-like qualities in the text. Glorfindel is a Paladin, too.

Similarly in D&D terms, Gandalf, Elrond, and Galadriel are Clerics. Going by function within the milieu those class roles fit the characters.
 

[MENTION=4937]But equally, there is little denying that the AD&D Ranger is an attempt to create a class that mirrors Aragorn's functional (as opposed to thematic) role in LotR, right down to use of the palantir.

I don't at all disagree that Tolkien's concept of the Ranger, both Aragorn and the descriptions of the Rangers of the North and Ithilien, is the inspiration of the Ranger class. I think that that is a matter of historical record, albiet one that TSR tried to bury in order to avoid getting sued.

But, for instance, the 1e class had restrictions on the weapon proficiencies that the Ranger could begin with and the order in which they could be taken that is clearly based on passages in the text describing how the Rangers are equipped. But there is a lot about the implementation where the decisions made by the person who wrote up the class are mysterious to me, and which, to me reflect the typically poor understanding of the text at the time. The 1e Ranger is based on the text of LotR in the same way that the text of LotR is an allegory for WWII. It's clear that someone saw it that way at one time, but not at all clear to me from this priviledged vantage why they thought that. To what extent the problem is explained by the crude understanding of the text, and to what extent it is explained by the biases built into the average rules smith at the time due to the relative primitive state of RPG technology at the time the class was wrote up, is something I can't answer.
 

Anyway Celebrim, the subject at hand isn't 'what class is Aragorn,' but 'what is an Aragorn-style Ranger in D&D,' in the context of the rules changes over the various editions. Of the Ranger options available, it's clearly the Strategic Review or 1e version (with or without Unearthed Arcana).
 

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