D&D General Which Edition Had the Best Ranger?

[JiffyPopTart]

I voted 3.5 because the best ranger is the Scout base class found in the Complete Adventurer book. The best ranger is not the 3.5 Ranger class, though.

 

[Bacon Bits]

It was an official rule book. Not agreeing with the rules meant you were a heartless DM...

I will agree with you in that I never saw a 1e Ranger that didn't have a very high Dex, I'll also say that I have never seen a DM allow anything except a few spells from 1e UA after reading Cavalier and Barbarian, the two most party disruptive classes ever printed.

I think I attribute the high Dex 1e rangers to us wanting to optimize TWF for the giant class damage bonus. That was the only reason to take the class over a fighter/mage or a mage/thief to us because it could really benefit from 4-5 high stats.

I also wonder if other tables did more with 1e rangers as woodsmen than we did. At the time, none of us had read Tolkien so I don't think we put much stock in it. Remember the entirety of the 1e ranger's abilities are: good with surprise, could track, and a single line that says, "Rangers are a sub-class of fighter who are adept at woodcraft, tracking, scouting, and infiltration and spying." That's literally it. Everything else is high level spell stuff. I seriously don't remember playing rangers as woodsmen or even really scouts until 2e. We thought of them more like Texas rangers who fought the lawless giant class enemies on the frontier.

 

[Tonguez]

uh... didn't some mammoth species live down in the temperate regions? I know that mastodons or some of their relatives lived all the way down into the tropics in the new world.

say, are we getting a tad off topic here?

Depends on what you’re referring to as Mammoth. The classic Wooly Mammoth is a beast of the northern tundra.
However its ancestors (the earliest Mammoth species) was from South Africa. The Colombain Mammoth is found as far south as Mexico.

 

[JiffyPopTart]

I think you and @doctorbadwolf are both right: dbw has it right in that there's no actual magic or magical casting involved in the knockback/prone bit and you have it right in that it's completely over-the-top for a warrior to be able to do this with an arrow.

Hard to see any middle ground there, though, that doesn't involve "play a different edition" in it somewhere.

I would, as a GM , describe that attack as hitting the dragon in a tender area of the leg or foot...causing a bit of damage but it reacts by stumbling back a few steps and falling over as it has the equivalent effect of us stepping on a Lego with our bare feat.

It's a bit of a stretch but believable, inasmuch as the "tripping an ooze" doesnt necessarily mean it falls on its side and has to stand up, knocking a dragon back 20 feet doesn't have to mean you literally launched it off the ground and it sailed through the air Street Fighter style.

 

[Minigiant]

Giants don't come in "Forest" or "Wood" versions in these parts, bucko.

But Hill and Stone Giants are common-ish there; Mountain and - in the north - Frost a bit less so...

Hill Giants are in hill caves and Stone giants are in mountains.
Mammoths are in arctic'

Giants who wander into forests don't ride mammoths.

say, are we getting a tad off topic here?

Nope.

To me, saying who is the best ranger mean discovering which edition's ranger best hunts his prey and fights in their favored environments.

The 1e ranger is a STR grassland/plains ranger in heavy armor and sword and board to fight many types of humanoids and giants on an open field.

The 2e and 3.5e rangers STR hills, mountains, or forest rangers in light armor who fit in melee with TWF or GWF to fight humanoids, giants, and dragons.

The 3.0e and 4.0e rangers are STR/DEX forest, swamp, and underdark rangers in medium armor who swap from archery and TWF to fight beasts, humanoids, and monstrosities.

The 1e is best as its job but it doesn't match the stereotypical ranger archetypes at all. It's a very narrow in scope.

 

[Lanefan]

I will agree with you in that I never saw a 1e Ranger that didn't have a very high Dex, I'll also say that I have never seen a DM allow anything except a few spells from 1e UA after reading Cavalier and Barbarian, the two most party disruptive classes ever printed.

I think I attribute the high Dex 1e rangers to us wanting to optimize TWF for the giant class damage bonus. That was the only reason to take the class over a fighter/mage or a mage/thief to us because it could really benefit from 4-5 high stats.

I also wonder if other tables did more with 1e rangers as woodsmen than we did.

As noted upthread, we introduced - and later greatly expanded - the idea of quasi-magical herbs, and gave that milieu mostly to Rangers. We also gave Rangers, somewhat informally, better outdoors abilities e.g. direction sense, weather forecasting, etc. than any other class.

As for UA, we took some of it. We took Cavaliers (and how do you see them as any more disruptive than Paladins?), though they went to d10 hit dice like any other Fighter; and we leaped at their percentile stat increment system and immediately gave it to every class. We took maybe 1/3 to 1/2 of the spells and maybe 2/3 of the magic items in UA. We took weapon specialization but toned it down quite a bit. We'd already done our own sub-species and thus didn't need what was in UA.

We did not take Barbarians (they're a mechanically-significant cultural variant on Human in our games rather than a class), nor did we take Thief-Acrobat. We didn't use Comeliness, and laughed at the variant roll-up system. We also didn't take any of the social class stuff but in hindsight I find myself wondering why not.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

The 1e ranger showed you how a ranger was supposed to campaign
The 2e ranger showed you how a ranger was supposed to look
The 3e ranger showed you how a ranger was supposed to use skill
The 4e ranger showed you how a ranger was supposed to fight

This may literally be the most fair response to a deeply polarized topic I've ever seen. Genuine kudos, that's an impressive achievement.

Personally, I voted 4e. I don't have enough experience with editions prior to 3e to evaluate them properly, and have been pretty thoroughly disappointed with the versions found anywhere else. (Also, not really sure why Essentials was called out as distinct from 4e when it was literally the same game, just a supplement, while 3e and 3.5e were lumped together when changes to the Ranger's design were among the key differences between them, but...well, I didn't make the poll, did I?) Slightly surprised to see the 4e version doing so well, but hey, I'm not complaining. (Especially if you combine the 4e and Essentials voters--who, surprisingly, happen to be completely distinct--it's a clear 2nd place, and only six votes shy of tying for first.)

Now, anecdote time! One of the coolest moments in any TTRPG I've played featured a 4e Ranger. We were fighting evil megacorporate cyber-assassins/commandos inside the stomach of a technorganic aquatic kaiju (well before Pacific Rim came out, mind!), and the party Ranger had a literal pistol (refluffed longbow as akimbo pistols) duel to the death with the assassins' leader. It was a totally one-on-one dance of death with both of them shifting, moving, pulling surprise attacks, knocking the other away. If we hadn't had the DM reminding us of the initiative order, I frankly think we would've just sat back and watched the two of them go at it because it was awesome.

And, of course, the ranger came out on top. Commander bit the dust and the other combatants didn't take much longer. One of the coolest scenes I've ever seen in gaming and it came about because of, not despite, the mechanics involved.

 

[Don Durito]

The Essentials Scout was a lot cooler than the original 4E Ranger. I think that's probably why people are separating them out.

They got some things which helped them be better Rangers out of combat which the original Ranger lacked.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

The Essentials Scout was a lot cooler than the original 4E Ranger. I think that's probably why people are separating them out.

They got some things which helped them be better Rangers out of combat which the original Ranger lacked.

Those things could be added to the much more versatile overall Ranger, though.

 

[see]

Original D&D: I never played this edition and I don't have a printed copy of it, so I can't say for sure if the Ranger even existed in OD&D. I'm including it in the poll just in case I'm wrong.

It was, in The Strategic Review Issue #2.

In fact, literally every class included in the 1e PHB was previously published for OD&D, though the bard and the ranger were only in The Strategic Review rather than the original booklets and supplements.