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Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Quixote" data-source="post: 528993" data-attributes="member: 694">No, no it isn't.  The 1e ranger had a lot of... shall we say quirks... that didn't make it the best class in the world.  For one thing, no stealth skills.  The original ranger was best played in platemail.  Another thing, the double hit dice at level 1, like the monk -- major rules inconsistency -- and the twin spell lists, arcane and divine.  The 1e ranger was every ninja fan's dream.  But at least it had a class focus: tracking, and goblin/giant-slaying.  That's what a ranger is.2e cleaned it up.  d10 hit die, like the other fighers.  Divine spells only, like the other fighters (meanwhile, the rogue group was arcane spells only in 2nd edition).  And more importantly, they added Move Silently, Hide and Shadows, and Two-Weapon fighting, when the ranger wore light armor.  These were three huge benefits available to the ranger who stuck to studded leather.  Species enemy had been so nerfed in 2e that people seemed to forget that the ranger's prime focus is monster-slaying, and that woodcraft was a means to that end.  But 2-weapon skill made sense if you knew anything about the 1e rules.In 1st edition, like in 2nd edition, 2-weapon fighting was available to any warrior or rogue, at -2/-4 penalties, offset by your Dexterity bonus to ranged attacks.  That meant that rangers, who required a Dex 15 and often had a higher score there, could often fight with 2 weapons at no penalty in 1st edition anyway.  And since 1st edition allowed only daggers and hand axes as off-hand weapons, the ranger with his hunting knife and woodsman's hatchet was in gold.  The fact that the 2e rules expanded two-weapon fighting to include same-size weapon pairs at a further -2/-2 was quite realistic; in 1st edition, only dark elves could carry two swords (when real-world human martial artists have been doing so with broadswords for centuries <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f644.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":rolleyes:" title="Roll eyes    :rolleyes:"  data-smilie="11"data-shortname=":rolleyes:" /> ).</blockquote>

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