MarkB
Legend
How is befriending creatures and turning them to your side as a core feature not a pet class?
D&D 5E Why are non-caster Ranger themes so popular?
- Thread starter ECMO3
- Start date
He can craft the same sorts of traps as every other class. Get thieves tool proficiency and have at it .... or just buy some hunting traps.
Kinematics
Hero
The one I worked on is here. There is a lot of discussion on whether ranger even deserves to be a full class, and if it does, what it's supposed to actually be. We ended up with something fairly decent, but if I started again (as this thread has motivated me to do), I'd take a slightly different approach.
Kinematics
Hero
My current thought on Yet Another Ranger Rebuild is to make an animal companion part of the base class, but make it entirely non-combat. It won't fight for you or with you, enemies won't attack it, and the few things that can hurt it just leave it as "injured", with no concern whatsoever about hit points. It would heal up after a long or short rest, depending on what happened.
This is mainly because a lot of players (anecdotally) really want the animal companion (and thus pick Beastmaster as the only way to get it), but the mechanics make it so that if you sneeze hard, the animal is going to die, and if you don't use it in combat, what is even the point of taking the subclass? So my thought was to simply give the entire class an animal companion (with its own benefits and uses outside of combat) that will always stay with them, while giving Beastmaster a complete overhaul since it's no longer bound to the pet itself.
Anyway, there were a bunch of reasons for that approach, one of which would be to avoid the feat chains.
The Green Hermit
Hero
Personally, I think the Ranger works perfectly good as is. Leave it alone.
Composer99
Hero
Just as a follow-up @niklinna, that I just trawled through two dozen or so pages of threads and couldn't find it, and my site search-fu is weak, so no luck on my part. But hopefully the concept serves as inspiration!
Ah well. Thanks for looking!
doctorbadwolf
Heretic of The Seventh Circle
I guess I just don't see it. They're specific Rangers, but they're all very much Rangers. I don't see any departure in any of them. Especially Gloomstalker, Beastmaster, and Monster Slayer, I'm not sure I even see much these Archetypes are adding to the concept, much less acting as any sort of soft multiclass or departure from the core concept. The Gloomstalker seems to me to literally just be a somewhat more magical Ranger that excels and patrolling at night and hunting the nocturnal dangers of the wilds. That isn't even a Ranger order or anything, that's just what some of the rangers in any given order of rangers would be in a magical world. Same with Monster Slayer and Beast Master.
IDK, sorry, not trying to tell you your feeling about the class is wrong, I just was surprised by it because I don't see it at all, and would love to give a different perspective on those archetypes.
doctorbadwolf
Heretic of The Seventh Circle
It...doesn't have a pet? Like...the concept doesn't even require turning creatures to your side in a fight. It's not normal at all for animals to get into deadly skirmishes, after all.
The ability to communicate basic ideas, calm creatures, and befriend them (ie, gain their help later while in the same area if needed, in an exploration and investigation context), doesn't make a pet class.
And if the Ranger isn't even good with animals, on top of all the other things they seem not allowed to be, what even is a Ranger? If it's just a scout, that isn't a Ranger. That's any number of characters with certain skills and/or the outlander background.
I was out for my walk and had some thoughts come, as they do while one is out walking. One problem is the classic idea of Ranger features a lot of exploration/journey stuff, which is outside the turn by turn thrill of combat & encounters. Most 5E classes are built more around combat & encounters, after all. Also, several of those Rangers features just bypass the exploration/journey challenges rather than making them more interesting or solvable in different ways. Rests are an in-between space there, normally just used for bookkeeping.
I started wondering if some more concrete benefits along those lines, that feed back into combat/encounter stuff, might be fun for some people. Say, a Ranger can make rests quicker, or during a short rest allow other party members to recover a few uses of abilities that normally require a long rest (gated by use, skill check, bare die roll, what have you).
I started wondering if some more concrete benefits along those lines, that feed back into combat/encounter stuff, might be fun for some people. Say, a Ranger can make rests quicker, or during a short rest allow other party members to recover a few uses of abilities that normally require a long rest (gated by use, skill check, bare die roll, what have you).
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