Disregarding the eternal debate over 5e rangers and their viability/balance as a class, I find myself in a dilemma, Veeky Forums.
My campaign involves a great deal of travel and many kinds of foes, and though the party Ranger has not been getting the absolute short end of the stick, I feel like the class's key abilities don't really come up. To that extent, do you all think simply extending the benefits of Natural Explorer to all terrain types particularly unbalances the class in any particular way? Similarly, any ideas for how to do something similar with Favored Enemy? Both of those applying universally feels like it takes away a bit of customization from the character, but adds a lot of feel to the class and neither of them have particularly overwhelming numerical benefits.
Rangers problems is mostly GM's not letting them take advantage of there power for exploring and knowledge, because they are too used to handwaving those thing.
Natural explorer is actually a fine and even quite powerful ability if you use it right as the GM. Have a mix of using their favored terrain and not, so opening up another terrain type feels like a big thing.
William Rodriguez
I think what you're describing would be fine. Personally I'd say they should still have to choose their favored terrain and enemy per long rest or something (at least for favored enemy)
I guess it makes more than one ranger per party less viable, but there's plenty of class features that can only benefit a party once
Chase Williams
This sounds like the ideal solution, but I haven't had any ranger players so I can't weigh in on how well it works in practice.
If this doesn't work, you could also increase the number of favored enemies/terrains they get at each level.
Liam Clark
Favored enemy on the other hand is now a pretty small thing. If you want a slight bump to power just double the number of enemies they get.
The big problem for rangers are their capstone and the beast Master path. Capstone won't actually matter in most campaigns, and beast Master gets a lot better if you still let the companion act even when not ordered. They just act like an animal would in that situation.
Levi Gutierrez
The first 5e game I ran was level started with a huge scramble through dangerous woods, and because I both forgot about that feature and didn't expect anyone to actually pick ranger they bypassed a lot of danger
Sebastian Rogers
>Terrain per long rest This is as dumb as the 'after an hour' mod I saw. It basically works out to always having the advantage. And actually makes the ability feel less special. Players won't realise how good the ability is unless they are confronted with how hard things can be without it.
If you plan on having the campaign move to a region where they won't encounter the favored terrain for a long time, then having them get another terrain type is good. But don't remove it's meaning
Gavin Richardson
>was level one I meant to say. Still I don't think having it apply to every terrain is particularly OP. It's very much a thing that just often isn't of any use, and restricting it to certain climates makes that even more so
Liam Hughes
How often it is used depends on the DM. Not being on all the time I will highlight how good it is. You don't realize how much you like a thing until it's gone.
Stack up the penalties and it's still a great thing into the higher levels. Advantage, full movement and not being auto surprised when doing stuff never go out of style
Matthew Ramirez
Well there's always playing without a ranger, like I imagine most groups do. For favored enemy I like the idea of having benefits for preparing beforehand to track them so being able to change it on rest or something seems perfectly fine to me (without the language part anyway). The way I imagine that would play out in practice is they'd almost always have it prepared for the big enemy they're fighting, but it would still be a crap shot on the lesser enemies
Favored terrain just seems like a weird middle place between a ribbon and actual feature to me, and making it apply to every terrain pushes it out of that area, but depending on the nature of a game that could easily be a lot more dramatic
Thomas Reyes
You do realize that with human favored enemies you literally know everything about human culture and hunting men - along with player fiat over smoking out particularly hidden miscreants.
Christian Gonzalez
You're using literally wrong. You have advantage on survival and intelligence checks for them. A nice DM will give you free hints or whatever, but you're overplaying it.
Ayden Morgan
>Well there's always playing without a ranger, like I imagine most groups do. that doesn't actually accomplish that, because they'd first have to have played with a ranger, in a campaign where the GM bothered to present challenges to the classes out of combat utility.
Then play again without the ranger, and have the GM also provide challenges to that out of combat utility.
>but depending on the nature of a game that could easily be a lot more dramatic this is really the thing. People talk about how the Fighter is just better, but the fighter is better in combat. And they don't realize that combat being the main source of challenges is a type of campaign, not the nature of every campaign.
Tyler Cooper
Saw this over on giantitp. Seems like a nice, low-changes class. I'm hype to try it out.
Charles Bennett
I don't hate this. And that's the first ranger revision I've said that about.
Anthony Cruz
Same. Only thing I can fault is the wonky spellslot progression, but that's not really a dealbreaker.
I don't understand why the hunter's mark ability wouldn't just be once per short rest, or at-will, why have to keep track of the number of uses. I like the idea of mark being a class feature, but it should be adjusted to be one, not just copied over with one to five uses per short rest..
Thomas Watson
As always, the viability/balance of a class depends on the game the DM is running, and what type of person the DM is.
Personally I think the best DMs are the ones who only have a huge map with locations and some npcs, but pretty much just allows the story to take any direction, with no real premade plans for a plot, and just acommodating the players wishes to take the story wherever they want.
Ryder Gutierrez
I assume it's so you don't lose the offensive power of the original spell, which you could cast more than once a rest.
Logan Nguyen
>skill checks mean nothing Get out of that 3.pf mentality
