This is a continuation of my previous post, in spirit. I’ve been hammering out some rules for a skill-based dungeon-crawling game with five classes, one of which is the Ranger which is meant to be the overland travel specialist. That’s a pretty narrow niche, so I’ve been trying to flesh them out by making them really, really good at mysteries. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far:
- If you are feeling stumped, you can privately ask the DM for help
- If you are exercising judgement on par with the average koala, the DM can warn you before your character does something uncharacteristically idiotic.
- If you are looking for clues, you don’t have to roll a skill check to find it as long as you are using an appropriate skill in an appropriate manner.
Basically, Rangers get to operate as if they were using the Gumshoe system, plus the Common Sense feat from GURPS. There’s also some more traditional Ranger stuff that I’ve come up with:
- You can make an effective ghillie suit in under an hour, and can use Naturalism (the primary ranger skill) to hide using it while in your favored terrain.
- You can speak with your favored quarry (a mundane animal; you can pick multiple of these if you are fine with dumping all your levels in getting really good at hunting and taming). They likely have different senses and priorities than you and may be helpful in giving you a different perspective, although most will be very food-motivated and dim-witted.
Not sure what to do other than this. Do any of you have other ways I could make give Rangers little buffs to their ability to play as an Aragorn-Batman hybrid?
The thing about investigation is that it is primarily a player skill.
Also, (and this is true for lots of things the ranger does) adding investigation as a skill tends to trivialize investigations.
Using travel as an example:
Player: wants to explore the wilderness
Player: chooses the Ranger, a character that thematically fits that desire
Character: has features that trivialize the challenges of exploration
GM: since there’s no way for you to fail, we’ll just handwave away travel and teleport to our destination
Player: is sad
Investigation is the same way. Players who enjoy mysteries tend to pick investigation heavy characters, but many games use those characters to make investigation easier. This actively takes away from the gameplay the player was wanting.
If anything, these specialties should unlock new styles of play. For example, a ranger’s exploration skills should unlock access to ever more dangerous types of terrain, so that the difficulty of exploration increases as the character levels up. The character is getting more tools, sure, but they’re mostly unlocking the play experience the player is seeking.
What about some social advantages, may be not as powerful as D&D detect lies which kill investigation, but like once a session “detect a lie” or the ability to follow.
I would say have a look at various PBTA moves, may be in monsters of the week (But I don’t have the books)
