🧿Ranger Impactful Choices

Redesigning the ranger class from the ground up is going to be a core part of the next book. Follow the Kickstarter project, so you don't miss out.

What if I want an urban ranger? How can I have choices that fit my ranger vision, but don't suck and aren't dependent on the GM and the campaign that unfolds?

I stumbled on a subreddit focused on the ranger, dropped a post, and received some great feedback. I took this feedback, reviewed with Discord, and made some updates.

One of the original design decisions for the Ranger Rework was putting the agency back in the hands of the player. If your game has extensive exploration and relies on Survival checks, the Ranger will be right at home. But what if it doesn't?

I built additional features for the Ranger leveraging Survival checks to overcome this as mentioned previously:

🧿Rangers are Resourcful

Level 9 Ranger redesign features

Tome RaiderKnight Vision Creative (Brendan)

However, there were a few points raised that led to some reworked features.

Focused

Survivalist, the previous "super advantage" feature has opened up to give the player a choice on which skill to focus on (giving that agency back to the player theme).

• Survival might be a great option for the full ranger build, but not giving the player a choice removes that agency.
• Having a choice supports a wider set of builds such as the urban investigator, animal whisperer, etc.
• Dipping into ranger gives an option for honing your craft, which doesn't have to be survival.
• Some GMs never use survival checks in the city, so if the campaign takes place completely in the city it may be an unwelcome skill to have focused on:
  • The ability reads (emphasis mine): Survival is a skill used for dealing with the wilds. Situations that can call for Survival include tracking footprints, foraging for food or water, navigating wilderness, identifying signs of creatures nearby or living in the area, predicting the weather, and avoiding hazards such as pits or quicksand.
  • 5.5E isn't much better: Follow tracks, forage, find a trail, or avoid natural hazards.
• Providing an option still allows for the intended build, but doesn't limit characters to that.
  • The skills provided are more observational rather than actionable (Athletics, Perception, Persuasion/Deception/Intimidation, Performance, Stealth, etc.)
  • I don't know 5.5E as well as I know 5E. I don't think there are any holes with these options, but the technical editor will find them if there are.

Prey Preparation

There were some balance concerns raised with the original +1 to attack rolls foundation of Prey Preparation. After additional review (I'm sure the technical editor would have caught it when it made it there), I agreed that the feature needed some rework.

• If your creature type doesn't come up, you can still use this ability.
• If your creature type does come up, you can double up the damage if you want.
• You can add it to your trap damage (level 3 feature described here).
• You can attempt to save it for crits for extra impact or multi damage spells, racial abilities, etc.
• The ranger gets better and better at preparing for their prey, evoking the survivalist/prepper theme and not tied to a specific environment. Urban, post apocalyptic, high fantasy forest, cyberpunk futuristic bounty hunter, etc. all work.
• It scales both increasing in frequency and damage to reward staying with the class, but perfectly viable as a 1 level dip as well.
  • In this vein, a level 1 dip for a wizard could be focused on investigation and get extra damage on some spells.
  • A druid could dip for nature/animal handling and increase the damage of their wild shapes.
  • Lots of build ideas without feeling overwhelmingly powerful.
• Initially, I was thinking the fighter can give you a +1 AC as a level 1 dip, so the ranger giving a +1 to hit is comparable, but a few additional arguments were made.
  • The fighting style requires you to be wearing armor versus the ranger option would apply to everyone regardless of weapon, spell, unarmed strike, etc.
  • A +1 to hit and Prey Preparation would be really hard to ignore for classes that get extra targets with their spells, such as scorching ray and eldritch blast, which would dramatically amplify the damage.
• If we removed the +1 to hit to tone the ability down, it really decreases the value since that was the static "always good" benefit even if you didn't face the creatures you had prepared for.
  • However, if we gave the player the agency of when they wanted to apply it, we could make it even more impactful.
  • By giving them free uses per day, the player gets the agency back regardless of whether their creature type ends up being part of the encounter.

Next week we'll take a look at the 10th level Adventure's Calling Improvement options.

I've been playtesting the ranger redesign for several months. Here are the sessions if you'd like to see how it has evolved over time: