u/k33d4

Hey all, last week I put up a post on r/onednd with a survey asking everyone what they thought the ranger's core feature should be. As you can imagine, the results were split. I decided that any core feature I'd homebrew would allow rangers to be versatile warriors. That's how I came up with the idea of Aspects. The ranger can channel primal power to take on the aspect of an animal or natural force to aid them.

I'm very open to feedback so let me know what you think!

Hey all, I'm back again. Thanks to everyone (nearly 3k people!) that responded to my survey and/or left a comment on the post.

The results were as follows:

1. Pick a target and kill it (792)
2. Animal Companion (645)
3. Equally capable at melee and ranged combat (467)
4. Keep Hunter's Mark (460)
5. Preferred enemies/terrain (416)
6. Other (186)

As I stated in the original post I'm an amateur designer. This was fun for me so thank you all for helping me conquer boredom this week!

The main takeaway I got from this (I read every single comment and responded where I could), is that there's no real clear consensus about what the Ranger should be. I think we all knew that though lol

People keep bringing up LlaserLama's Knacks system and from their descriptions (I didn't read it so you'll have to forgive me if my redesign is similar) it sounded very modular. I figured that I could accomplish nearly all of the goals by taking a similar approach. What I decided on for the core feature was a system I dubbed Aspects of Nature.

In short, the Ranger can take on aspects that grant them buffs, but they have a limited number of Aspect uses.

Anyway, here's the link to the Google doc. I originally typed it up in Word so the formatting may look a little funky.

I reworked every official 2024 subclass with this system in mind, and gave each of them a new aspect at level 11. Sometimes this replaced the existing 11th level feature, some times they gained an additional feature. I tried to balance that out by tweaking existing level 11 features, but the Gloomstalker may still be too strong there.

I also created an entirely new sublclass called the Warden that's meant to be more of tank.

Let me know your thoughts. I'd be happy to polish this up with your suggestions!