Retooling a Ranger

So we had our second round of gameplay. And we also had a new addition to our group: a classmate of my son who is playing Arden Wind, a horizon walker ranger. That last sentence glosses over a considerable amount of learning curve on my part.

I was happy to have the addition to the group. It now skews the group toward the younger cohort, which brings a host of interesting issues up. But for the moment I will focus on the simpler mechanics of integrating this new person, and what went into that.

I did a little reading up in The Players Handbook on the ranger class in 5e, and I was struck by how much less potent it seemed to be compared to other classes. When I started my hike up the 5e learning curve, I admit that I paid far more attention to the classes my players had picked (barbarian, cleric, rogue, wizard) than the ones they hadn't, so this was the first time I'd encountered a class where my reaction was, "This is wimpy." I was a little surprised given the historic popularity of rangers - heck, the character creation example in the PHB is based on a dwarf fighter character in the Drizzt Do'urden books... Drizzt being the most famous example of the ranger class in all of D&D history. I remembered that rangers were fairly overpowered when I was first introduced to them back in late 1e. In fact, I didn't like them then, because they seemed to be inherently Mary Sue-ish... a term for the "author surrogate" contrivance I would not learn for another 15 years even though my favorite television show was absolutely plagued by the phenomenon for several seasons. (Guess which show in the comments - it shouldn't be difficult!) Since I am a 5e neophyte, I thought I might go online and check out what other people thought of the class, because I figure I was just ignorant and missing key data. 

Woooo boy. To say that rangers have drawn a lot of negative attention in 5e is a bit of an understatement. When you add in the people who come to the defense of the class as written, well it's an awful lot of text to read.

As I've mentioned, I really haven't been involved in the online D&D community since the turn of the millennium. The internet was fairly new back then, and it hadn't occurred to me to join in any online communities, and even if I had, I doubt the same ones would be active today, 19 years later. So much has changed. So I googled my search string: rangers underpowered in 5e, and unsurprisingly got a ton of hits to different fora. I recognized the Giant in the Playground forum. I'd lurked there for awhile earlier in the month, impressed by the relatively non-toxic environment, which I'd come to understand was the result of draconian moderating. That in and of itself is an interesting situation that could merit its own blog post, but for now, I’ll stick to talking about rangers.

The consensus was that the PHB version of rangers is not the strongest class, and the Beastmaster build in particular leaves a lot to be desired. There were some people who said the other two builds in the PHB were fine, but they were in the minority. The concern with rangers comes down to two overall problems, 1) they’re not good enough at some specialty tasks, and 2) they’re way too good at others. I know that sounds contradictory, but stick with me, it isn’t. First, the ways in which they wind up holding the short end of the stick:

• Rangers may be able to sneak around and hide in their favorite terrain, but rogues are just generally better able to sneak around and hide themselves.
• Rangers ought to be king of the wilderness! Because rangers! But wait, there are also druids. Who are badass. Badass with flavor.
• Ranger melee combat is fine early on, but after awhile, they are totally outclassed by fighters, rogues, paladins, monks, or almost anyone else who can do melee fighting.
• You’d think they’d be supreme at ranged weapons (heck, it’s almost in the name!) but actually, the fighter can build a really great archer that is arguably more effective due to all the perks of being a fighter.
• I’d say they’re great at tracking, except anyone who prioritizes the Wisdom stat (clerics, druids) is going to have some seriously good Perception (Wisdom) skills.

Alright, so if you read the list above, you’d think the ranger suffers from never shining brighter at a task than another given class. But that’s not true. There’s one way in which rangers are spectacularly powerful – travel. In fact, rangers are so good at travel that they make travel damn near impossible to role play, because it just isn’t fun role playing having no trouble with difficult terrain, easily finding food, water and shelter, and avoiding all encounters while you get from one place to another on a map.

So if I were to sum it all up, most classes out perform rangers in every area except travel, but rangers are so good at travel that they make travel a non-issue in the game.

Three solutions were offered. The first was to use the PHB subclasses with the UA (Unearthed Arcana) revision to the ranger. (Found here.) Another was to 1) change the way rangers spellcast, where they can change their spells memorized after a long rest, instead of being restricted to a short list they only can expand when leveling up, 2) allow favored terrain status to all types of terrain instead of just one chosen terrain, and 3) let primeval awareness tell number, type and location of critters. The final option was to use the Xanathar's subclasses, which are substantially stronger than the straight PHB subclasses. 

The point was made that if you doubled up on these allowances rangers go from being underwhelming to overpowered. As a result, I offered my player options #1 and #3. She chose #3, and went with the Horizon Walker subclass. We're both new to it, and so it will be interesting to see it play out. And one unforeseen boon to my having to do all this research is that I found a forum I really enjoy that has a really active, knowledgeable and opinionated user base, that just so happens to be civil. Pretty sweet. 

Which is a perfect way to end this post, just in time for Halloween. Eat, drink and be scary!