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View Full Version : D&D 3.x Class Ranger Fix: Stances [3.5]



Teapot Salty
2014-04-05, 11:45 AM
Hey guys. After some mulling over of one of my ranger fixes, and some helpful advice, I decided to give the ranger some (I think) cool abilities. These take the form of stances. (not tome of battle stances)

The ranger first gains access to stances at level 2. You are "in" stances, as in TOB. You can change between stances you know as a swift action. You may be in multiple stances at higher levels. The scaling is:

You know 1 stance at 2nd level, and you learn a new one every 2 levels thereafter. The stances available to you are provided below. At second level you may be in one stance at a time. At 5th level, you may be in 2 at a time. At 10th level, you may be in 3 at a time. At 15th, 4 at a time, and at twentieth, 5 at a time.

The stances available to you (or at least what they do) are:

1:Increase movement speed by 10ft

2:Grant Skirmish, working exactly like the scout ability.

3:+5 damage/ranger level on melee attacks, +1 damage if ranged if above opponent. (For example: On Higher ground, jumping from on top of them etc.) EDIT: +2 on melee attacks

4:Allows you to full attack as a standard action

5:Opponents hit with a ranged attack from you get -5ft to their speed until your next turn. -10 at level 10, -15 at level 15 and -20 at level 20.

6:+3 damage to each attack if fighting with two weapons. (Scale? Maybe. +6 at 10th, +9 at 15th, +12 at 20th)

7:You can take 10 (before modifiers) on any attack roll.

8:You may reroll a failed save or skill check. (Only once)

9:If you make 4 attacks in a row, in a single encounter, next attack auto crits. The “counter” Resets after the auto crit.

10:You gain a deflection bonus to you ac equal to your str modifier. Only applies if armed with a melee weapon or shield, and lose bonus if flat footed. EDIT: Totally different stance: Chose skill, gain +1/half your ranger level bonus on that skill. This stance can be taken multiple times for different skills.

11:Crit range for all weapons is increased by 1, after effects such as keen or improved critical, scales to 2 at 10th level, and 3 at 15th level.

12:Opponents provoke an attack of opportunity from everyone around them (including you), after you make an attack against them that resulted in a critical hit.

13:Choose a damage type, attacks that deal the chosen type of damage deal +1 damage/ranger level

14:You gain a dodge bonus to your ac equal to your dex modifier, If you were to be denied your dex bonus, you are denied this bonus as well.

15:Each consecutive attack you make in a round against a single opponent deals the damage of the last attack, as well as the one you just made. For example, you make your first attack and it deals 5 damage, your second attack ads 5 damage to it’s damage roll, so if you roll seven damage, you add five more, for a total of twelve damage. First attack: 5, Second attack: 7+5=12, third attack 3+12 =15 fourth attack 4+15 =19. If you are TWF, your off hand attacks are treated as if they were a different set of attacks. So they do not add your primary hand attacks damage. That probably made no sense.

16:Weapons are treated as +x weapons where x is the highest level spell you can cast.

17:You may full attack an opponent if they provoke an attack of opportunity instead of making a single attack

18:When you make a successful coup de gra, all allies (including you) gain hit points equal to half their maximum hp. EDIT: All allies within 60 ft.

19:Opponents you hit with ranged attack get -x to all attack rolls they make until your next turn. X is equal to your highest base attack bonus. EDIT: Equal to your wisdom modifier.

20:Any opponent who fails an attack roll on you provokes an attack of opportunity from you if you are armed with a melee weapon.
EDIT:
21: You gain a climb speed equal to half your base land speed.
22: You gain a swim speed equal to half your base land speed.
23: Choose something (at the dms discretion) within 90 ft of you. That thing is treated as if it was your first favored enemy. (separate favored enemy bonuses stack)

Note: The numbers are not levels, they are just listing.

What do you guys think? And as always, go nuts.

Spiryt
2014-04-05, 12:07 PM
3:+5 damage/ranger level on melee attacks, +1 damage if ranged if above opponent. (For example: On Higher ground, jumping from on top of them etc.)


Why such difference, with "if"? It's not like ranged attacks doesn't have problems with damage in 3.5

But 5 per level is probably too much anyway. Completely outperforms Power Attack+Leap attack, with no attack penalty that comes with PA



9:If you make 4 attacks in a row, in a single encounter, next attack auto crits. The “counter” Resets after the auto crit.

11:Crit range for all weapons is increased by 1, after effects such as keen or improved critical, scales to 2 at 10th level, and 3 at 15th level.

Heavily favours 'heavy criting' weapons. Could use something for those weapons that crit often anyway.


12:Opponents provoke an attack of opportunity from everyone around them (including you), after you make an attack against them that resulted in a critical hit.

That works for high critical range weapons indeed. Not sure how often it will came to play though...


15:Each consecutive attack you make in a round deals the damage of the last attack, as well as the one you just made. For example, you make your first attack and it deals 5 damage, your second attack ads 5 damage to it’s damage roll, so if you roll seven damage, you add five more, for a total of twelve damage. First attack: 5, Second attack: 7+5=12, third attack 3+12 =15 fourth attack 4+15 =19. If you are TWF, your off hand attacks are treated as if they were a different set of attacks. So they do not add your primary hand attacks damage. That probably made no sense.

I'm no math expert, but this probably can go out of hand really fast.


19:Opponents you hit with ranged attack get -x to all attack rolls they make until your next turn. X is equal to you base attack bonus.

That's probably bit much at high levels... Completely robs multiple other high BaB characters out of their hitting ability.


So some of those, particularly adding flat damage seem redundant, Ranger class could use some more 'not so directly combat' rangery, utility stuff, that's always nice and fit the theme.

Something to defend against spells as well, all of those are mostly useful against other things that hit and shoot you. 'Melee' characters in 3.5 can deal with those quite fine, but at any higher levels they obviously struggle with anything that can do even a bit more. Let alone high level spells.

I remember that stuff like Baldurs Gate kits had some decent ideas.

All in all, good ideas.

Amnoriath
2014-04-05, 01:36 PM
As Spiryt said this is all very redundant which basically adds up to lots of numbers for damage. You need to diversify. Honestly though I don't see rangers as having an exclusive flavor for stances at all.

toapat
2014-04-05, 01:50 PM
1: Meh
2: Jiriku did this better (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?170358-3-5-PEACH-The-ranger-reborn!)
3: Overpowered, biased towards melee too much, exceeds everything it competes with
4: Overpowered and Redundant.
5: Fine
6: No. Just give full attack stat to offhand
7: Pointless but should be a standard action
8: Good
9: Not a ranger thing
10: Deflection is a Dex thing, and normally Ranger doesnt actually need an exceptional dex
11: Should not scale before epic
12: Rogue ability
13: Choose a damage type, attacks that deal the chosen type of damage deal +1 damage/ranger level
14: Double Stacking is considered Uncouth
15: you skipped Rocket Tag and skipped right to WW3 with this
16: +X enhancement bonuses are not worth it
17: Should be combined with the other Multiattack action as standard, should only give +1 attack for every 10th BAB+EAB, so +1 attack at 11/21/31
18: Coup De Gras is not a Ranger signature.
19: Penalty should be limited to number of itteratives.
20: Overpowered, expecially in the hands of tanks.


Overal you have a poor grasp of scale, and typically put numbers that are way too big into things.

Ranger is also never supposed to be a pure offensive class, they should not be the most damage, they are supposed to be like the rogue, a class which is generally useful, but has their own specialization

Just to Browse
2014-04-06, 12:27 PM
Jiriku did it identically by giving the ranger a passive skirmish. Unless you consider bad indenting and line breaks "better", there's legitimately no skirmish difference.

Teapot Salty, this is a pretty good idea. Stance-shifting is a resource mechanic that doesn't get used nearly often enough but makes great balancing material. However your work has some high-level failures, like granting something at level 2 and expecting it to be competitive at level 18, and the large number of stances rangers can be in at any given time. I recommend writing 3-4 lists of stances that come in at later levels (ex: Basic Stances @ lvl 1, Adept Stances @ lvl 5, Master Stances @ lvl 10, Paragon Stances @ lvl 15) and then give those stances different sets of abilities and don't let the ranger use multiple. This lets you do things like write flight stances and put them at level 5 so low-level rangers can't abuse it.

Most of the current effects also (as said above) focus a lot on damage/hitting, which isn't something the ranger really needs. Mostly the ranger needs quality-of-life improvements that make archery, TWF, and animal companions not so terrible, he also needs stances that provide some sort of tactical niche beyond "FULL ATTACK". Focus on giving your stances special things for the ranger to do, and you'll see it come to life.

Teapot Salty
2014-04-06, 08:07 PM
Jiriku did it identically by giving the ranger a passive skirmish. Unless you consider bad indenting and line breaks "better", there's legitimately no skirmish difference.

Teapot Salty, this is a pretty good idea. Stance-shifting is a resource mechanic that doesn't get used nearly often enough but makes great balancing material. However your work has some high-level failures, like granting something at level 2 and expecting it to be competitive at level 18, and the large number of stances rangers can be in at any given time. I recommend writing 3-4 lists of stances that come in at later levels (ex: Basic Stances @ lvl 1, Adept Stances @ lvl 5, Master Stances @ lvl 10, Paragon Stances @ lvl 15) and then give those stances different sets of abilities and don't let the ranger use multiple. This lets you do things like write flight stances and put them at level 5 so low-level rangers can't abuse it.

Most of the current effects also (as said above) focus a lot on damage/hitting, which isn't something the ranger really needs. Mostly the ranger needs quality-of-life improvements that make archery, TWF, and animal companions not so terrible, he also needs stances that provide some sort of tactical niche beyond "FULL ATTACK". Focus on giving your stances special things for the ranger to do, and you'll see it come to life.

Thanks for the advice :smallbiggrin:

Spiryt
2014-04-08, 11:18 AM
18:When you make a successful coup de gra, all allies (including you) gain hit points equal to half their maximum hp.

Needs some range of effect probably... Otherwise, decent, if pretty random.


19:Opponents you hit with ranged attack get -x to all attack rolls they make until your next turn. X is equal to your highest base attack bonus.



Came to my mind that reducing it to Wisdom/Dexterity/Intelligence/whatever modifier would be fair enough.

Probably Wisdom or Intelligence, so while at lower level it could be easily be boosted to levels exceeding BaB, it would come at a cost - no direct correlation with attack bonus/damage, so balanced.

TuggyNE
2014-04-08, 08:12 PM
One thing that should be noted is that if you grant access to a widening selection of abilities from a single fixed pool with no restrictions, generally a character will select the best available at first, move on to the next best, and so on, which means that eventually they'll be scraping the bottom of the barrel. This is an unfortunate dynamic, since high levels should be granting you more awesome abilities, not less. There are several ways to prevent this: you can have level prerequisites that open up new options at higher levels, stance prerequisites that require lesser options before greater, or other stranger sorts of prerequisites. But generally there needs to be some reason a character can't start out with the very best.

toapat
2014-04-08, 08:41 PM
One thing that should be noted is that if you grant access to a widening selection of abilities from a single fixed pool with no restrictions, generally a character will select the best available at first, move on to the next best, and so on, which means that eventually they'll be scraping the bottom of the barrel. This is an unfortunate dynamic, since high levels should be granting you more awesome abilities, not less. There are several ways to prevent this: you can have level prerequisites that open up new options at higher levels, stance prerequisites that require lesser options before greater, or other stranger sorts of prerequisites. But generally there needs to be some reason a character can't start out with the very best.

The problem i have with it is, honestly, a class based on the use of mutually exclusive stances should either be Monk or something else entirely, it shouldnt be a mechanic for a hunter type. there would be level gating of some stances of course, and it should be an interesting class, but the mechanic itself doesnt belong crowbar'd into any old class.

Grod_The_Giant
2014-04-08, 11:53 PM
I agree with most of what Just ToBrowse and TuggyNE have said. Adding on to that, I'll suggest more... if not out-of-combat, than at least combat-neutral stances. You've got a few with your alternate movement mode stances, but try to come up with more. Things like blindsense/sight, invisibility to animals, stuff like that.

Also, a minor note: it's kind of hard to read a post when you have <text> EDIT <change to previous text>. Better to just change the original sentence than try to keep both.


The problem i have with it is, honestly, a class based on the use of mutually exclusive stances should either be Monk or something else entirely, it shouldnt be a mechanic for a hunter type. there would be level gating of some stances of course, and it should be an interesting class, but the mechanic itself doesnt belong crowbar'd into any old class.
Meh. If it makes sense to you, Teapot, go for it-- don't let random people on the internet tell you what your fluff should be.

toapat
2014-04-09, 09:18 AM
Meh. If it makes sense to you, Teapot, go for it-- don't let random people on the internet tell you what your fluff should be.

i cant. That atrocity i did with Dragon ACFs for monk would tint any ideas i want to implement, and the result would probably end up making an intentionally overpowered monk with a feel that is too modern