A Wilder World: A Range Of Rangers

[alexandraerin]

To a large degree, it was meditating on "Rangers" in fantasy games that led me to start working on A Wilder World, originally called A Wider World. The name was always about the range of possibilities presented... I added the "l" to emphasize that it's not just about the number of options.

Anyway, the Ranger has always been one of the sore spots of 4E character design to me, for a couple of different reasons.

First, there was very little that made it a "Ranger" and not a "Mobile Fighter" or "Skirmisher". Giving all Rangers one of the two wilderness knowledge skills and access to the other was really the extent of the wild flavor, despite the nutshell description of the character being "Warrior of the Wild". In terms of actual abilities, they reduced the character to a couple of fighting styles, which meant if you wanted to make a wildernessy character you were short on options and if you just wanted to make a Skirmishing Warrior you were stuck with this odd bit grafted on.

There are sufficient "primal" bits that can be grafted on (through MCing, or using the feats in Primal Power that don't require a primal class... they're perfect for what I think of as a "Ranger") that I don't really resent the fact that when they took the class down to its core they decided to focus on the martial mechanics rather than the wilderness flavor. I just think they did so imperfectly, and that until the Primal stuff came out, they left a design hole.

And of course, the fighting styles they stripped it down to are kind of... arbitrary and weird, when divorced of the context of D&D history. There's no thematic connection between "Skirmishing Warrior With A Bow" and "Skirmishing Warrior With Two Swords"... none that couldn't have been shared with a Skirmishing Warrior using another arrangement of weapons. The only reason Rangers in D&D are associated with these choices is Drizzt&Do'Urden history.

So I didn't really like Rangers as they appeared in the PHB, but I understood that they had come about from a process of taking the classes and boiling them down to simple concepts. The Ranger was a Martial Striker; that meant less focus on anything wilderness or primal, and more focus on moving around the battlefield delivering damage. Okay. There way is viable as a game design concept, but it causes people to run into creative walls because their idea of what's central to a Ranger might be very different.

It might focus on the idea of having animal empathy, or animal companions, or wilderness survival, or nature magic.

And the same is true of other classes. For Druids, 4E gave an overwhelming focus to the idea of Wild Shape. For Fighters, the idea of being the "meat shield" was enshrined as a game mechanic and indeed an entire role that the Fighter exemplifies. The new Essentials line has opened up the design space a bit, giving us alternate Rangers who have smidgeon more wilderness flavor, Druids who don't Wild Shape, and Fighters who are more of a meat sword, but we're still... outside of a patchwork multiclass feat tree and a warranty-voiding hybrid system... stuck with the game designers' interpretations of these concepts.

The idea behind A Wi(l)der World was to break character concepts down further and then allow them to be mixed and matched in a more comprehensive way than the Hybrid/Multiclass systems did. If your idea of a Ranger was someone who was a skilled archer, tracker, and rider who knows a little wilderness magic, you can make that. If your idea of a Ranger is a wily old man who can slip unseen through the forest and give people cryptic but strangely helpful advice, you can make that. If it's someone who wears light armor and fights with two swords and runs around the battlefield a lot, you can make that. There is an Archetype called "Ranger", but there is no Ranger class and any character guide for making a ranger would merely list it as a suggestion along the other ones that could be used for an interpretation of that concept.

• Ranger is a trailblazer/pathfinder, inspired in large part by the "Strider" part of the prototype of the D&D Ranger, Aragorn. "Rangers get around" is the easy way to sum up their abilities. In combat, they focus on using the terrain to their best advantage. Their keen eyesight does give them some synergy with archery, as they can overcome penalties for distance or obscured targets.
  
• Tracker is the faultless tracker of TV and fantasy fiction. "He can track a falcon on a cloudy day, he can find you." The same suite of abilities also works for a psychometric reader, or a cinematic forensic detective like Sherlock Holmes or Special Agent Paul Smecker.
  
• Archer is a Weapon Master Archetype for using bows... or actually, ranged weapons in general.
  
• Survivor started off as part of Ranger but branched off when I realized I was dealing with two too different concepts. This is a wilderness survival expert, though it can also work as the non-combat half of a "die hard" character.
  
• Tactician, Scholar and Leader work for the "wise mentor" schtick that Rangers often have. (A lot of the more interesting Utilities that 4E Rangers have fall into this category.)
  
• Alchemist also works as "Herbalist" with no rule changes.
  
• The various "Companion" Archetypes can serve to give the Ranger a mount, hawk, cat, etc.
  

A glance at the list might make you think that there's not much room for customization of a Ranger-like character... once you take Ranger, Tracker, and Survivor you've only got room for one other Archetype. But it's all in what you choose to emphasize. Someone with those three Archetypes would be the consummate Nature Guy. Not taking Tracker wouldn't mean you couldn't track, just that you wouldn't have Track-Fu as a character-defining special ability. Not taking Survivor wouldn't mean you'd die outside the city walls. You could skip Ranger and be an outdoorsy type who's just not particularly light on your feet. Or you could take Ranger, Acrobat, and Skirmisher to be an outdoorsy type who's incredibly light on your feet. Acrobat and Skirmisher have nothing to do with the wilderness except that they work inside of it... they're just two more ways to emphasize mobility in and out of combat.

So, anyway, all of this is to say that I think Ranger's going to be the next Archetype that I preview. I was thinking of doing Ranger, Tracker, and Survivor, just to give a compare/contrast of "Rangery Archetypes", but I think I'd rather give a broader view, and those latter two need more work. Balancing these Archetypes involves way more art than science, as they're by definition useful under differing circumstances, but I aim to make sure that each Archetype has some abilities that are useful in general to avoid the Aquaman problem. ("Oh, look... this adventure also takes underwater, with a problem that can only be solved by talking to fish.")

I started by teasing one of the less obvious Archetypes (Coward). So I think I'm going to alternate. Ranger is one of the more traditional ones, so I'll follow it with another less traditional one (Fool? Tavern Dweller?) and then another more "character classy" one.

Comments

[kynn.livejournal.com]

I still sorta like the old 1e ranger.