Quote Originally Posted by Jaxby View Post
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 :)
I agree with most of this. And being the one that created the previous thread I can tell you that there was never any agreement on what a Ranger was.

But this right here, your post, describes perfectly what THIS Ranger is. It is the epitome of a Hunter. Something that has never come through from the PHB or any WotC rewrite is an identity that actually brings the class together. Many people SAID that the Ranger was a lot of the things you described in this post, but the truth was that the class didn't actually match what they were saying. And this does. This is my favorite rewrite that I've seen for the Ranger and I have to give props to those that helped create it.

Because of this I will firmly and confidently admit that (with a rewrite like this) the Ranger can actually stand on it's own in a 5e game.

Kane0 and those that helped him with this have created a class that has an identity in both the mechanics and the narrative. Something that (at least without play testing) is balanced and full of good features from level 1 to level 20.

My appreciation goes out to you and I will certainly be using this (or maybe a slightly modified version to make it to my preference a bit more) as a choice for my players in my next campaign.