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FIXING THE RANGER

Ranger has had an identity crisis across multiple  tabletop games. It's a mix of multiple classes between fighter, rogue, and druid. However it doesn't tend to know what things to focus on to give it a proper identity and usually is weak compared to more focused classes. Or other classes do what it can do but better.

So here's an outline of what I would love to see in a Ranger to be good. This will probably seem like a lot but considering how weak a Ranger is and how weak martial classes are at high levels, it would take alot to make them overpowered.

SPELLS: druids tend to use there magic to heal or use offensive blasting and  battle form polymorphs. They don't tend to have enchantments, illusions, etc unless it's a fey subclass because that would let them do too many things.

To differentiate Ranger from druid let's lean into that fey theme. Let's have lots of illusion and enchantment, and general utility spells that let them be good at infiltration and getting close to a target. There a martial character! Let them use their martial prowess in fights instead of burning through spells every fight on hunters mark. Let's let spells be used in other situations so that they can do more outside of combat.

Between chameleon, invisibility, illusiory doubles, disguise self, polymorphing to turn into a rat, and knowledge in mundane camouflage and disguises, they will be the premier magical infiltrator with multiple ways to be somewhere you shouldn't be. And enchantments will let you deal with anyone who asks too many questions. It also lets you calm or befuddle your prey to make them an easier target.

Outside of this they should have a myriad of spells that are just for utility for specifically gaining information. They are masters at tracking and knowing enemy weaknesses. So they get the usual spells that let them commune with plants and animals as well as spells that let them find out where someone is and the best way to kill them. We can flavour these as a kind of green witch style divination magic. 

while these of course are very useful spells the Ranger is still a martial class and will have very limited spells per day as a result which is typical of rangers. But this let's those few spells slots that they do have go alot farther with greater utility.

So what can they do when they can't rely on magic?

HERBALIST: remember when aragorn was able to use his knowledge of healing plants to help frodo after he was wounded by nazgul?  Ranger should be able to access their survival skills to utilise plants in ways to help their allies and hinder foes.

As part of daily preparations you can get a number of healing poultices you can use that let you heal someone you can touch as well as a number of poisons you can use to apply to weapons. These poisons will scale with your class DC so they stay relevant.  We can even have different poisons that apply various different debuffs that we get more access to as we gain levels. If short rests are a thing they can recover some of their supply during them. This is useful utility without outshining a alchemist/Artificer who can utilise ALL things alchemical along with potions and bombs while the Ranger focuses solely on plants.

This is another consumable resource though. Is there something they can use to be useful when out of supplies?

MONSTER HUNTER

Once a Ranger has chosen its prey it won't stop till it tracks it down and defeats it, and it is exceptionally good at doing both. A Ranger can use an action to choose its prey. Once done, all skill checks related to tracking or finding out information about their prey gain a bonus. As well as any other skill checks that relate to their prey. Whether that be sneaking, deception, etc. They get a bonus if it involves their prey.

Once they find their prey and our planning on taking it down, they can study target. Using their extensive monster lore they recall knowledge about the creature and what it's weakness is. They get a bonus to attack and damage against their prey, as well as offensive skill checks such as grappling, tripping, etc.

they can impart to their team a smaller bonus to attack and damage against your prey as well, by calling out to them and relaying your recalled information to them.

This let's rangers not be limited to a favored enemy that they may not run into during a campaign and instead pick a single enemy in an encounter to focus down and do consistently good damage. As opposed to a rogue who does good burst damage with sneak attack but has to set it up first. It also let's them provide support to their team by imparting a buff as well, without stepping on the bards toes since its only an offensive buff against a single specific target.

In order to have more of a hunter theme though they need a little bit more then to just hit real good.

EXPERT TRAPPER.

if the rogue is the master of disabling traps the Ranger should be the master of making them. It's not often that the party has opportunities to set traps for their enemies but when the opportunity presents itself the Ranger can layout the perfect set of deathtraps for any sorry fool who stumbles upon it. A Ranger with prep time should feel like a combination of Fred from Scrooby doo and batman.

Now lastly we need something to keep Ranger competitive at higher levels. That let's them fight a kaiju and hordes of enemies and contribute in the same way a wizard dropping  meteor nukes do......

WEREWOLF FORM:

this one is a bit of a stretch but hear me out. You don't get to play as werewolves easily in these games. Older games like diablo and BG2 let druids turn into werewolves but most modern games only let druids become animals not monsters. This would let the Ranger stand out by becoming an ultimate apex predator when he's backed into a corner.

This would NOT have any of the utility of wildshape as its only a single form that has no utility other than murder. And it would NOT have the same reliability as a barbarians rage. While rage is a barbarians consistent bread and butter this is more like a last ditch effort, only to be used on the absolute toughest of foes. Its uses per day would be severely limited if not just once per day. But when you do use it you have essentially turned into the hulk for the amount of power you bring.

Again this is mostly so that when fighting high level monsters you can feel like your doing more than just "i shoot my arrow and do 1d6 to godzillas big toe" and instead can turn huge, leap at the monster and rip and tear while going for the jugular.

EVERYTHING ELSE

Other than that everything else should be pretty straight forward as what you'd expect.

They have the martial capabilites expected of a martial character as normal, along with the skills to be expected of a Ranger to be good at stealth, deception, monster knowledges, nature, and survival. Along with a pretty keen perception.

As a martial class, there will be decision points as well to customise your fighting style to your particular tastes.  Do you want to be a the classic archytpical archer? Or maybe a woodsman who fights with an axe? Class features and feats will help to flesh out these choices and make each fighting style feel unique.

SUBCLASSES

Some people like to think of the ranger as a "pet" class, one that regularly gets to fight alongside an animal companion. While a fun idea i don't like this as a "core" class feature cause it can get in the way of some build concepts. So instead I'd have the animal companion Ranger be a subclass

The werewolf feature could be expanded on to be the primary focus of its own subclass, so that people that really want to lean in on being able to play as a werewolf can get the full experience.

If someone wanted to build around fighting hordes of enemies instead of focusing down one single target, there could be a subclass that reworks how monster lore and marked prey work. This Horde slayer Ranger could be a someone who takes on monsters such as zombies that are weak individually but dealing with many can be a problem, and excel at dispatching waves efficiently.

There are many ways you can tweak the concept with subclasses, and thankfully this concept puts enough core features on the Ranger to better allow for tweaking, mixing and matching of features in other subclass concepts.

CONCLUSION:

I think a version of Ranger like this provides a lot of abilities that work thematically and mechanically, and allow the Ranger to have plenty to do both in combat and out of it. Your a master of gathering information through a truly versitile number of ways. And in a fight you can make a single target truly miserable, which makes you pretty great at fighting the toughest thing in the room, all while providing supplemental support to your party. This package makes ranger feel like they are contributing more to the party and doesn't make you feel like you should of just of picked a fighter with a bow.

Maybe one day I'll actually homebrew a version of this with proper playable outline for 5e or pathfinder, but for now I just wanted to spill my thoughts onto a page.

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I hate Freud. His whole weird theory about penis envy and children being sexually attracted to their parents and secret desires and all that shit actually came straight out of an attempt to ally himself with wealthy and influential rapists and was a direct form of victim blaming.

He had started the research looking into “hysteria” which at the time was really usually referring to women’s symptoms of PTSD. It turned out that the reason so many woman had these symptoms is because so many of them had experienced sexual violence– especially CSA and incest at the hands of their fathers. 

At first he was making real progress, and it was through working with these women that he discovered that talk therapy could be used to treat trauma. The symptoms of PTSD were lessened when women were able to safely speak about their experiences out loud and be believed. 

But it wasn’t the women who paid for the therapy. It was their fathers, husbands, the same men who were perpetuating the violence in the first place. And Freud didn’t want to validate his patients (the women) if it meant making his clients (the men) unhappy.

So he came up with a new idea. These symptoms weren’t from trauma. The memories weren’t real. These women were just sexual beings as children and had penis envy and it made them lust for their fathers and fantasize about the rape that they had reported to him. That’s where the shittiest parts of Freud’s theories emerged. Another part of it besides just the monetary aspect, though, was that there was a feminist movement on the fringes starting up at the time and by publishing work about women’s CSA he would be aligning himself with it and therefore losing support, respect, funding, prestige from his male peers and from the psychological community at large. He literally made that gross victim blaming shit up to keep his own reputation with these fucks and to make sure he still got publication and fame.

By coming up with fake theory about little girls fantasizing about incest he not only fucked over generations of women, the feminist movement that was arising, and the entire psychology field for years to come, but he also completely swept away any progress made in understanding trauma and so we didn’t have any clue why men coming back from war had “hysteria” like women during WWI.

And our research on PTSD and trauma is still lacking to this day, especially because of the stigma that maybe traumatized people deserved it or wanted it or imagined it. People don’t want to believe it’s real. Perpetrators of traumatic violence want everyone to forget about it, not acknowledge it, or trivialize it.

And they have Freud’s cultural legacy to help them.

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I FINALLY FINISHED IT

…is Dark Souls even relevant anymore?

This is my personal farewell to a game series that has managed to captivate and move me like no other. Perhaps you will find a few of your own experiences reflected within it, too. If you’ve found this comic, I’m glad we could undertake a small part of this journey together. Enjoy!

(I would have liked to include so many more things but ajksdkflkanc I’m just glad it is done)

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I’M GONNA PISS

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@lollipop-kitty53

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Your super power is that you are average, at everything you do.

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remember the mirage island shit in pokemon r/s/e how fucked was that nonsense

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sometimes i think “wow wouldn’t it be great if the government provided this basic human necessity” then the other half of my brain goes communism. the thing you are thinking of is communism. and it was so fucking drilled into my head in school that communism is a big, giant horrible BAD THING that will destroy everything but like it actually makes a lot of fuckin’ sense

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B O N E L E S S

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Hi, my name is Paige and I’m 23 years old! I’m trying to make my dream come true, and visit the country I’ve always wanted to go to, Japan! While I do currently have a job and can pay for my plane ticket and hotel, after doing the math I will be short on funds to pay for food and transportation while I’m in the country. My plan is to go in October of 2017, with my boyfriend and best friend. I also have a Youtube channel (OtakuFelineFeatures) that I started early this year (2017). My plan would be to document my trip, and post the video’s on my channel. I would show the places we visit, and the item’s I buy, as well as doing unboxings and gashapon haul openings. My hope is that this content will not only help my Youtube channel grow, but also serve as enjoyable content for people to watch who are also interesed in Japan, and have thoughts of visiting the country.

Funds would cover: -Food -Transportaion

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i know its the mets, but this is the coolest shit i’ve ever seen a human being do

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http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2017/05/what_state_prisoners_get_to_wo.html

OMG 

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Okay so like a month or two ago a customer saw that I played games and as a prospective game developer he wanted my views, a female’s perspective, on games and gaming.

So I told him the things that crosses the girl gamer’s mind: how every main playable character is a white man, how unfortunate it is that a female’s pain, even death, is used for the feels of male characters, the unnecessary sexualization, how uncomfortable it is to be a female gamer on mic, so on and so forth. He thanked me for the insight, said he’d bring these issues to his professor so going forward they would keep these things in mind. 

Well I saw that customer today and he gave me an update. Turns out his professor was a big ole misogynist. That he belittled those concerns and said that women didn’t matter. When the customer mentioned all his female colleagues who also wanted futures in gaming, the professor said they didn’t matter either. 

So the customer went to the department head, complained about him, and the department in turn investigated the professor and found that women did have complaints about him but were afraid to come forward. So, in part, thanks to my comments on being a girl gamer, a man lost his job because he hates women.

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the fallout universe but culturally locked in the 1990s instead of the 1950s

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Onfim was a child who lived in Novgorod, Russia, in the 13th century. He left his notes and homework exercises scratched in soft birch bark (beresta) which was preserved in the clay soil of Novgorod. Onfim, who archaeologists believe was six or seven at the time, wrote in Old Novgorodian; besides letters and syllables, he drew battle scenes and drawings of himself, his family, and his teacher. [x]

Here is a picture of him as a knight stabbing someone.

(At least, he wrote his name next to the knight. Either it was supposed to be him or he was signing his masterpiece. Either way, still adorable.)

Several pictures of the original birch pieces can be found here:  [x]

(Fact Source) For more facts, follow Ultrafacts

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The main differences among Advil, Tylenol, Aleve, and Aspirin summed up in one chart.