Rukelnikov
2022-04-09, 12:26 AM
As a lot of people these days I've spent quite a lot of hours of these past weeks playing Elden Ring, and pretty much the whole game's pve difficulty is balanced not as much agaist your stats/gear, but agaisnt your knowledge of the land.
You would get to a new zone, get ambushed, get lost, take fights in compromising positions because you don't know how to get to the advantageous position (like a ledge over the enemies where you can safely snipe them or we). In all Raya Lucaria, I think I only leveled up like 4 or 5 levels (70-75 or somewhere around that), but the knowledge of the academy's layout meant I went from having trouble in the first fights to clearing almost the entire dungeon without resting.
So the thing is, Favored Terrain for me used to be the kind of feature which I understand what it should be representing, but it was always fuzzy, playing ER I just got repeatedly hit in the face with the effects knowing the terrain can have in travel and combat.
Now that I understand what I'd want the feature to emulate, I'm having trouble coming up with how to codify it in the system. The most obvious thing is just an initiative buff, cause in general knowing the terrain means you get to pick how the fight will start, but it seems lazy, boring and lame.
More on a tangent, there's usually talk about what a Ranger should represent, and it usually eventually devolve into, well aragorn could just be a fighter with rogue levels, but for me, instead of trying to look for a character after which to model the class, we can look at "roles" or "modus operandi" if you will, to me the ranger should feel, like a character from a metroidvania, or Shadow of War, where the knoweledge of the land and its inhabitants is what makes you strong. So if games can evoke the feeling rangers go for, why are they so hard to evoke in dnd?
You would get to a new zone, get ambushed, get lost, take fights in compromising positions because you don't know how to get to the advantageous position (like a ledge over the enemies where you can safely snipe them or we). In all Raya Lucaria, I think I only leveled up like 4 or 5 levels (70-75 or somewhere around that), but the knowledge of the academy's layout meant I went from having trouble in the first fights to clearing almost the entire dungeon without resting.
So the thing is, Favored Terrain for me used to be the kind of feature which I understand what it should be representing, but it was always fuzzy, playing ER I just got repeatedly hit in the face with the effects knowing the terrain can have in travel and combat.
Now that I understand what I'd want the feature to emulate, I'm having trouble coming up with how to codify it in the system. The most obvious thing is just an initiative buff, cause in general knowing the terrain means you get to pick how the fight will start, but it seems lazy, boring and lame.
More on a tangent, there's usually talk about what a Ranger should represent, and it usually eventually devolve into, well aragorn could just be a fighter with rogue levels, but for me, instead of trying to look for a character after which to model the class, we can look at "roles" or "modus operandi" if you will, to me the ranger should feel, like a character from a metroidvania, or Shadow of War, where the knoweledge of the land and its inhabitants is what makes you strong. So if games can evoke the feeling rangers go for, why are they so hard to evoke in dnd?