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Grey Robe
2007-06-20, 03:46 PM
For a homebrew campaign I'm working on I'd like to give the Ranger some alternatives to Favoured Enemy as it often doesn't seem to fit well with player concepts. I"m looking for alternative abilities that would keep flavour more with hunter, stalker, trapper, woodsman, rather than assassin of specific demihuman etc.

So far I've thought of:
-Limited Sneak Attack progression.
-Additional weapon style bonus feats
-Use poison (natural poisons only). This one is similar to the Blackguard abilitiy but only allows safe use of naturally occurring/found poisons and can give a competence bonus of some kind to handle animal checks to milk animals for poison

So now I'm looking for other ideas, any thoughts?

Jasdoif
2007-06-20, 03:50 PM
There's always the favored environment variant (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/classes/classFeatureVariants.htm#favoredEnemyVariantFavore dEnvironment).

Oeryn
2007-06-20, 04:20 PM
The way I see "Favored Enemy" is that the ranger has been around 'em enough to know where the weak spots are. In my games, you're not allowed to pick Undead, if you've never seen one.

It makes sense for a ranger to at least have Animal as his favored enemy. After all the hunting, skinning, tracking, etc., he'd at least know where to hit something to kill it.

Also, the use of poison doesn't fit in too well with the idea of a hunter, as it generally does bad things to meat that you'd normally want to eat. But the idea of being able to CURE poison using roots and berries and stuff fits in pretty well.

Some stealth or camoflague type of stuff might also work to go with the Hunter you're looking for.

Matthew
2007-06-20, 04:22 PM
If you give him limited Sneak Attack progression, consider either using the Scout Skirmish Ability or else using a +1 DB per level Sneak Attack (roughly half the average for Sneak Attack).

Grey Robe
2007-06-20, 08:39 PM
The favoured environment works well as an alternative. For Sneak Attack I had just halved the Rogue progression to keep it relatively balanced.

Poison was included more for personal tastes. Not so much to make a Hunter style Ranger but more of the evil stalker killer type that is using all the appropriate knowledge of the wild.

A bonus Stealth feat or extra ranks in skills sounds quite good.