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<blockquote data-quote="Staffan" data-source="post: 9481831" data-attributes="member: 907">The problem with niche protection is that it's bad, at least when you have too many niches. Once you decide that class X is the one that does Y, that means that everyone else has to be at best bad at Y and at worst completely unable to Y. Alternately, you can decide that Y is something everyone can be OK at, but X more-or-less auto-wins at it – but for some reason, neither designers nor GMs tend to like giving PCs the ability to just say &quot;I handle that thing&quot;.I think that if I was in charge of a team of designers for the next major edition of D&amp;D, I'd at least ask them to look into a version where backgrounds get expanded into something bigger, maybe call it &quot;profession&quot;, and have that handle most non-combat abilities. Then make classes more strictly combat-focused. That way you could put &quot;ranger&quot; in the profession category, and have it deal with the &quot;master of wilderness&quot; aspect of the class. It could then be combined with both the fighter class for a more old-school tough-guy ranger, an archer class for the more modern sniper-style, or a skirmisher for someone who focuses on mobility in combat.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Staffan, post: 9481831, member: 907"] The problem with niche protection is that it's bad, at least when you have too many niches. Once you decide that class X is the one that does Y, that means that everyone else has to be at best bad at Y and at worst completely unable to Y. Alternately, you can decide that Y is something everyone can be OK at, but X more-or-less auto-wins at it – but for some reason, neither designers nor GMs tend to like giving PCs the ability to just say "I handle that thing". I think that if I was in charge of a team of designers for the next major edition of D&D, I'd at least ask them to look into a version where backgrounds get expanded into something bigger, maybe call it "profession", and have that handle most non-combat abilities. Then make classes more strictly combat-focused. That way you could put "ranger" in the profession category, and have it deal with the "master of wilderness" aspect of the class. It could then be combined with both the fighter class for a more old-school tough-guy ranger, an archer class for the more modern sniper-style, or a skirmisher for someone who focuses on mobility in combat. [/QUOTE]

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