Originally Posted by
Jaxby
Do you mean mechanically/combat role or do you mean fluff-wise? Beacuse I feel like all those have been answered in many different ways, many overlapping, in the thread that spawned this one. And I realy think we have a pretty good class going here, both mechanically and considering the fluff-choices behind those mechanics.
As has also been mentioned before, all classes can be distilled into fewer, if you generalize the features you are looking for more. Or spread out into many classes, if you want to get more specific about the features.
A 1 class system could be; "the class needs to be an adventurer", and many classes if its something like; "an asian flavoured martial artist, that can also use weapons, but is based on his fists, and has a deep connection with an internal energy". Personally I quite like the amount of classes we have now.
As the Hunter is the Ranger+, I think it is fair to say, that this is the essence of the Ranger as written here. The Experienced Hunter. The other two subclasses build on "the hunt" by having a hunting dog or having spells to help with the hunt.
The hunter is a very distinct figure in almost all mythologies and cultures, which is why I don't think it is unfair that it gets its own primary class.
There are also so many different ways of hunting that it lends itself well to the dnd subclass system. There are the inuit hunters tracking through the icy wastes of the polar reaches. There are the stone age mammoth hunters relying on pitfalls and strategy. There are the native american forest hunters prowling through the undergrowth. And then there are the more modern big game hunters in Africa and the English Aristocracy in their finest clothes, releasing the hounds. And that's just from real life. Then you got your batmen, your witchers, your Drizzies.
Basically, if you go back 10.000 years, there was only one of the current classes around in real life, and that was the ranger. Not that we should compare a high fantasy medieval setting to the actual stone age :)