A Tale Of Two Classes: The Sad Saga of the Ranger and the Seeker

Once upon a time, a mighty council of wizards from a far-away coast created the universe, and in their insanity, they decided to take the concept of an archer hero and make two completely different classes out of it. As per the norm at the time, they screwed up.

So, in the 4th Edition of D&D, there are two classes dedicated to shooting people with bows - the Ranger and the Seeker. I still have no clue who's bad idea this was. The Ranger is a more Martial class, so the entire concept is "ya shoodda guy wi' da bow," and aside from a few more Primal-y things, that is it. You do very little besides firing arrows at people, and in the case of the Hunter build severely breaking the laws of physics while doing so.

With the Seeker, you get all the cool Primal archery stuff, like your arrow turning into a snake in mid-air and biting it's venomous fangs into the poor victim. Unfortunately, the Seeker has very little support, since it offers few things that another class can't do better. So if you're a Ranger, you have very little fun stuff you can do. If you're a Seeker, there's very little you can do, at least not much that another class can do waaaaay better.

The answer, to me, seems simple - make the Seeker a goddamn Ranger build, maybe even combine it with the Hunter. While we're at it, let's make the normal Ranger a martial controller so we at least get something out of it's existence besides a headache.

So, the Ranger is as follows:

• Archer Ranger - You can shoot arrows at people. You have ranged weapons, you can shoot at multiple targets at once eventually, and you can at some point fire off an explosion of arrows that creates a bristling field of pointy things, which count as dangerous terrain. Thus, we have a martial controller at loooong last.
• Seeking Ranger - All the cool Primal things. When you shoot arrows at people, stuff happens. For instance, your arrow may explode into a hail of ice shards, or upon lodging in your enemy's flesh, the shaft breaks, unleashing a swarm of deadly fire ants that burns like all Nine Hells (except the ice one).
• Scout Ranger - The idea of a tracker sounds cool, so I say keep it. Besides, a good martial striker is always fun.

Okay, we're done. The moral of this story - 4e sucks, and I ramble too much.

A definition of mods

So, I have started a blog on D&D. Specifically, modding, a term which I created this post to explain in more detail.

I don't know why, but I really dislike the word "homebrew." The only reason I really included it in the URL is because I couldn't resist that title :)

In all seriousness, though, it's also a restrictive term. Homebrewing is pretty much making stuff up from scratch, which is a very small part of the community it describes. There's also reflufffing, which is retaining the mechanics but changing what they represent (for example, a friend and fellow gamer wanted to play as a wolf as a tribute to one of the Zelda games, so he took the stats for Minotaur and interpreted them as stats for a giant wolf. Goring charge became leaping up and biting enemies, his weaponry became claws, etc.). Additionally, there's edition-to-edition conversion, taking something done in one edition of D&D and changing it to fit another edition, like updating the Greyhawk campaign setting's ruleset from 3.5e so that it can be used in a 4e campaign. Probably not last and definitely not least, there's houseruling, which is making up or altering rules from the original game for your campaign, like a DM banning Pixie NPCs, as mine did.

Looking at all these ways of changing, customizing and enhancing D&D, I knew there had to be a term to describe them. Therefore, I took the liberty of stealing the word "mod" from the video game industry. Like the term I want to describe, modding is customizing and enhancing a game, generally by adding original content. It fits perfectly!

So, from now on, on this blog, enhancing and changing the original D&D game will be referred to as modding. So there.

Also, if you're wondering why this looks like it was written at 2 in the morning, it's because I barely got a wink of sleep last night and I feel like my head's full of fog.

Yeah, that's my first post. Welcome to my modding blog :)