What makes rangers and fighters different again?

What makes rangers and fighters different again?

skills

Fighters have a coherent class identity.

One's just a generalized, all purpose beat stick. The other has a focus on nature shit which sometimes brings stuff like animal companions or spells.

Fighter is a generic term that covers everything from knights to pikemen to pit gladiators to jaguar warriors to a robber baron's brigands. The only common factor is that they fight mainly with melee weapons and can wear heavy armour.

Rangers are typically associated with the wilderness - scouting, good survival skills, a wandering lifestyle, hunting, etc. They're often (but not always) skilled in magic. It's also quite common that they're bow specialists, while being skilled with melee weapons too.

One is a focused warrior, tactician and fighting expert. Fighters fight, fittingly.
The other is a wilderness specialist, a stealthy explorator and usually possesses some attunement to nature magic. Rangers focus on exploring, scouting and survival.

One is slashy, the other is shooty

they are two different names.

One is a generic combatant, The other is a specialist in magical guerrilla fighting.
Why do both exist, when you can simulate The second with The first and choosing feats? Because DnD is a shitty game.

>Fighters can cast spells
>Fighters get animal companions

Okay so there's this thing now called 5e where fighters can choose to learn spells as their subclass
Also anyone can train a pet it just takes time and money

mechanical designations have no bearing on story designations

Nothing, because "Fighter" is a stupid idea for a character.

"Guy who fights good" describes 90% of all fantasy heroes, and D&D is shit for pretending that it's some unique archetype instead of something that every goddamn character can fulfill.

That's a warrior, a fighter is guy who fights BEST.

Rangers have nature related magical abilities and possibly an animal companion depending on edition and selected class feature.
Rangers are also significantly more limited in their armament loadout, preferring short blades or bows, whereas Fighters can wield anything and basically everything.

Dogs like rangers.

But he doesn't.

He hadn't for like 4 editions now.

You have difficulty understanding the difference because, spoiler alert? WotC has turned D&D into a giant piece of shit.

Take , for instance.

Fighters were the basest of base classes. The cannon fodder of PCs. Rangers needed to roll higher stats, and were an elite kind of fighter. is correct, but misses the point. The point of fighters is that they're the class everyone who couldn't be good at something else was. Attribute and race restrictions were lifted by the shitfest that is every WotC edition. So it no longer made any sense, because all PCs had to be just as good as each other and it was inconceivable that anyone would ever have to roll a new character after theirs died.

Want to understand the difference? Play the original release of Dark Sun, where each player is encouraged to roll 3 characters, because at-least 2 of them are gonna die.

>Fighters were the basest of base classes. The cannon fodder of PCs.
This is how you spot somebody who's never actually played a TSR edition of D&D.

Except it's accurate.

No it isn't. The fighter is less 'cannon fodder', more 'brick wall', and calling it the 'basest of base classes' doesn't exactly work when all three/four of the core classes have 'a 9 in one stat' as their requirement.

>Fighters
>coherant class identity

Pick one

>>I can't make feats that would let a fighter do just that.
Except now all classes work similary and we don't have to kneel before any pesky "stat requisite". That's a good thing, it makes you free of playing wtf You want.

ranged fighter ftw