Check out my savage ranger variant [Archive] - Wizards Community

Check out my savage ranger variant [Archive] - Wizards Community

Post/Author/DateTime Post
Generic Poster
09-24-06, 04:34 PM Intro:
There has always been something that bugged me about how poison is used in the game. Namely the fact that primitive people are gimped out of their most commonly used weapons. Almost every time I've seen documentaries about hunter gathers, they almost always using some sort of poison to get their tasks done. Whether it's killing fish, paralyzing monkeys, taking down fast game such as gazelle or huge game such as giraffe's, or poisoning the rival clan chieftain to wipe out the competition, hunter gathers have almost always mastered some natural poisons to make their lives easier.

Yet in the game, anyone who is not an assassin or ninja is going to poison themselves 5% of the time that they even make an attempt to apply poison. If Bob the Hunter poisons several arrows each day and only successfully captures game in 1 out 10 attempts, he's going to poison himself as often as he brings in meat, which certainly isn't making his life easier.

Not to mention it's costing him money that he doesn't even have to make this poison. If the tribe of hunter gathers actually had the money to make the large quantities of poison that they consume even given the craft(poisonmaking) skill that they would have, then they would be quite rich by dnd standards and just buy anything they need.

So here's an attempt at a ranger variant so that both hunter gathers make more sense and poison actually has enough value to be a useful tactic:

Savage Ranger

The savage ranger gets all the skills and abilities of a normal ranger except for favored enemy. Instead of favored enemy they get favored poison instead.

Favored Poison:The ranger may select a type of poison among those given in the DMG. The ranger may only select a poison whose base DC to resist is 10 + rangers level. The ranger does not risk accidently poisoning himself when handling the poison. He also gains a +2 bonus on the DC for the favored poison. Likewise he also gets a +2 bonus on craft(poisonmaking), survival, knowledge(nature), and healing when it comes to making, finding, identifying and treating said poison. He also gains a +2 bonus to saving throws to resist his favored poison.

At 5th level and every five levels thereafter (10th, 15th, and 20th level), the ranger may select an additional poison from the list from the DMG. In addition, at each such interval, the bonus against any one favored poison(including the one just selected, if so desired) increases by +2.

If a ranger has at least a +4 bonus to a favored poison, he also gains improved poison use with that poison. That means that he can apply his favored poison as a move action instead of as a standard action.

Illiteracy:The savage ranger starts off as illiterate since they uniformly come from hunter gathering tribes without a written tradition in their society. See the barbarian from the PHB for further information about illiteracy.

Survival: The ranger gains a further use of survival. He can make a survival check to find his favored poison if he's an enviroment where it's naturally available. His survival check to find the raw materials is equal to the base DC of the poison. For every 2 points which your check exceeds the poisons DC you find the materials for another dose of poison. You may travel at half your overland speed while foraging for poison.

Anyway, that's about it. What does everyone think, will this work and is it balanced, would anyone here play this ranger variant? I was thinking I might have to change the speed at which poison is crafted as well, but I'm not too sure how I'd go about tweaking that.
Generic Poster
09-25-06, 01:25 AM no comments? Has this been done before or something? Too strong, too weak, too lame? I personally think the favored enemy is the lamest ranger feature and this makes an interesting replacement to that...
IdEgo
09-28-06, 01:56 AM favored enemy allows a ranger to do more damage to a specific genus(?) (been a while since biology) because the have studied them and understand their culture and how to kill them... favored poison? how does that work into a ranger's bio?

That aside, as far as a mechanic PoV, you're making a posion, which alot of things can be affected by, harder to be resisted. this changes the spectrum from a Genus (again ?) to: what can't be affected by poison? certain humanoids, oozes, constructs, undead, outsiders, and certain animals (as well as a few PrsC's and other various exceptions) so your'e making +2 damage ito a very specific group nto: you now need a save 2 higher to resist this posion which deals an average of 2 CON (that's 1 hp PER HD) uunless your immune to it. also, you're letting the ranger go "hey, i just found 13 doses ofthis posion, when i normally would only find 1! more death to spread around!" ALso, an assassin gets posion use: they don't have to worry about posioning themselves. granted, they do gain death attack, but that's harder to pull of.

IMO: underbalanced, doesn't fit the bio. If you want to give a Ranger poison use, go for it, maybe give them bonus feats with a restricted list instead of favored enemy if you hate it that much, but making them the gods of poson isn't fair in the slightest.

We now return you to your normally scheduled broadcast.
Generic Poster
09-28-06, 02:10 PM favored enemy allows a ranger to do more damage to a specific genus(?) (been a while since biology) because the have studied them and understand their culture and how to kill them... favored poison? how does that work into a ranger's bio?

First of all, thanks for response.
Anyway, I see it working into flavor because instead of studing vulnerabilities of specific groups of creatures, he's studying the toxicology of a certain poison, how to best find it prepare it, how to best apply it and where best to hit an opponent with his studied toxin. This fits well into how hunters actually work in hunter-gathering tribe, and since hunters have a skill set so close to the ranger, it would make sense to just stat them out as rangers with improving poison use.

Genus also wouldn't be applicable term, since the divisions of classification of ranger enemies ranges from kingdoms (plants, oozes), to species or sub-species(humans,elves, orcs). They are grouped that way mostly to make it more even choice between enemies powerwise, otherwise everyone would pick humanoids are their first enemy for example if the class wasn't divided further.

That aside, as far as a mechanic PoV, you're making a posion, which alot of things can be affected by, harder to be resisted. this changes the spectrum from a Genus (again ?) to: what can't be affected by poison? certain humanoids, oozes, constructs, undead, outsiders, and certain animals (as well as a few PrsC's and other various exceptions) so your'e making +2 damage ito a very specific group nto: you now need a save 2 higher to resist this posion which deals an average of 2 CON (that's 1 hp PER HD) uunless your immune to it. also, you're letting the ranger go "hey, i just found 13 doses ofthis posion, when i normally would only find 1! more death to spread around!" ALso, an assassin gets posion use: they don't have to worry about posioning themselves. granted, they do gain death attack, but that's harder to pull of.

yup, poison does effect a wider range of creatures, thus making the ability more useful. However that's balanced by the fact that you still have to apply the poison and poison is a limited resource even for this particular ranger variant. The ranger is going to get at most a +10 bonus at 20th level to crafting a single type of poison, which isn't going to net you anything close to a 13 fold increase in poison production that your suggesting. The survival check is just to gather raw materials, the poison still needs to be processed by making a craft(poisonmaking) check.

I suppose a problem could occur if you have a campaign where there were huge stretches of character free time to gather near unlimited quantities of poison and you had enough space to hold it, but you can easily counter such a problem by simply giving the poison an expiration date, which alot of poisons actually have. So say a month after being processed for example, your poison goes bad, thus keeping poison in limited supply, but still costing you time and effort to process (I'll probably have to play around with the date after doing some calculations, but you get the idea).

Assasins gain poison use, but they are a evil prc that doesn't fit into the flavor of actual hunter-gathering societies that use such poisons much more regularly then assasins ever would. Hunters often use such poisons multiple times a day just to survive on a daily basis (only a small percentage of hunts are actually successful even using poison).

IMO: underbalanced, doesn't fit the bio. If you want to give a Ranger poison use, go for it, maybe give them bonus feats with a restricted list instead of favored enemy if you hate it that much, but making them the gods of poson isn't fair in the slightest.

We now return you to your normally scheduled broadcast.

The other problem with poison use is that it currently isn't an effective strategy. Unless it comes from a spell, or poison pops up as treasure, almost no PC actually seems to use poison, class ability or not (and certainly no one tries to optimize their poison use). Both assasins and Ninja are almost always optimized other aspects of their characters, making the poison use abilities relatively unused in comparison.

The two reason this seems to occur (both my own thoughts but what I've heard other mention) is that poison is too expensive to make and the DC for poison tends to be too low to be useful, especially at high levels. This ranger variant should solve both of these problems without making poison overpowered, thus making it an effective strategy for a character to persue.

Besides which, why should poison be limited to evil assasins and mystical ninjas? If this doesn't fit with the ranger, what class would you propose instead as fitting in with a natural hunter that uses poison as part of techique for hunting and defense? I agree that this ranger poison use upstages assasins poison use, but only in the same way that improved toughness upstages toughness. The former is a useful option as a character, the latter being pretty pointless, especially at high levels.

BTW: As an additional line on the ranger variant should read "The ranger only gets bonuses to the poison DC if he applies the favored poison himself. Poison applied in this manner by a ranger only lasts 24 hours". This along with the expiration date on poison should keep rangers from becoming poison factories for everyone else. I'll probably also keep the craft rules as they are, since the ranger still gets a bonus to craft anyway.
IdEgo
10-02-06, 03:51 PM Genus also wouldn't be applicable term, since the divisions of classification of ranger enemies ranges from kingdoms (plants, oozes), to species or sub-species(humans,elves, orcs). They are grouped that way mostly to make it more even choice between enemies powerwise, otherwise everyone would pick humanoids are their first enemy for example if the class wasn't divided further.

I still don't see how giving them a poison which doesn't affect only 4 kingdoms (undead, ooze, outsider, elemental) doesn't make a balance issue from the favored enemey...
But you did rather well under cirticism, which I admire.

Also thank you for pointng the above out.

Post/Author/DateTime	Post
Generic Poster 09-24-06, 04:34 PM	Intro: There has always been something that bugged me about how poison is used in the game. Namely the fact that primitive people are gimped out of their most commonly used weapons. Almost every time I've seen documentaries about hunter gathers, they almost always using some sort of poison to get their tasks done. Whether it's killing fish, paralyzing monkeys, taking down fast game such as gazelle or huge game such as giraffe's, or poisoning the rival clan chieftain to wipe out the competition, hunter gathers have almost always mastered some natural poisons to make their lives easier. Yet in the game, anyone who is not an assassin or ninja is going to poison themselves 5% of the time that they even make an attempt to apply poison. If Bob the Hunter poisons several arrows each day and only successfully captures game in 1 out 10 attempts, he's going to poison himself as often as he brings in meat, which certainly isn't making his life easier. Not to mention it's costing him money that he doesn't even have to make this poison. If the tribe of hunter gathers actually had the money to make the large quantities of poison that they consume even given the craft(poisonmaking) skill that they would have, then they would be quite rich by dnd standards and just buy anything they need. So here's an attempt at a ranger variant so that both hunter gathers make more sense and poison actually has enough value to be a useful tactic: Savage Ranger The savage ranger gets all the skills and abilities of a normal ranger except for favored enemy. Instead of favored enemy they get favored poison instead. Favored Poison:The ranger may select a type of poison among those given in the DMG. The ranger may only select a poison whose base DC to resist is 10 + rangers level. The ranger does not risk accidently poisoning himself when handling the poison. He also gains a +2 bonus on the DC for the favored poison. Likewise he also gets a +2 bonus on craft(poisonmaking), survival, knowledge(nature), and healing when it comes to making, finding, identifying and treating said poison. He also gains a +2 bonus to saving throws to resist his favored poison. At 5th level and every five levels thereafter (10th, 15th, and 20th level), the ranger may select an additional poison from the list from the DMG. In addition, at each such interval, the bonus against any one favored poison(including the one just selected, if so desired) increases by +2. If a ranger has at least a +4 bonus to a favored poison, he also gains improved poison use with that poison. That means that he can apply his favored poison as a move action instead of as a standard action. Illiteracy:The savage ranger starts off as illiterate since they uniformly come from hunter gathering tribes without a written tradition in their society. See the barbarian from the PHB for further information about illiteracy. Survival: The ranger gains a further use of survival. He can make a survival check to find his favored poison if he's an enviroment where it's naturally available. His survival check to find the raw materials is equal to the base DC of the poison. For every 2 points which your check exceeds the poisons DC you find the materials for another dose of poison. You may travel at half your overland speed while foraging for poison. Anyway, that's about it. What does everyone think, will this work and is it balanced, would anyone here play this ranger variant? I was thinking I might have to change the speed at which poison is crafted as well, but I'm not too sure how I'd go about tweaking that.
Generic Poster 09-25-06, 01:25 AM	no comments? Has this been done before or something? Too strong, too weak, too lame? I personally think the favored enemy is the lamest ranger feature and this makes an interesting replacement to that...
IdEgo 09-28-06, 01:56 AM	favored enemy allows a ranger to do more damage to a specific genus(?) (been a while since biology) because the have studied them and understand their culture and how to kill them... favored poison? how does that work into a ranger's bio? That aside, as far as a mechanic PoV, you're making a posion, which alot of things can be affected by, harder to be resisted. this changes the spectrum from a Genus (again ?) to: what can't be affected by poison? certain humanoids, oozes, constructs, undead, outsiders, and certain animals (as well as a few PrsC's and other various exceptions) so your'e making +2 damage ito a very specific group nto: you now need a save 2 higher to resist this posion which deals an average of 2 CON (that's 1 hp PER HD) uunless your immune to it. also, you're letting the ranger go "hey, i just found 13 doses ofthis posion, when i normally would only find 1! more death to spread around!" ALso, an assassin gets posion use: they don't have to worry about posioning themselves. granted, they do gain death attack, but that's harder to pull of. IMO: underbalanced, doesn't fit the bio. If you want to give a Ranger poison use, go for it, maybe give them bonus feats with a restricted list instead of favored enemy if you hate it that much, but making them the gods of poson isn't fair in the slightest. We now return you to your normally scheduled broadcast.
Generic Poster 09-28-06, 02:10 PM	favored enemy allows a ranger to do more damage to a specific genus(?) (been a while since biology) because the have studied them and understand their culture and how to kill them... favored poison? how does that work into a ranger's bio? First of all, thanks for response. Anyway, I see it working into flavor because instead of studing vulnerabilities of specific groups of creatures, he's studying the toxicology of a certain poison, how to best find it prepare it, how to best apply it and where best to hit an opponent with his studied toxin. This fits well into how hunters actually work in hunter-gathering tribe, and since hunters have a skill set so close to the ranger, it would make sense to just stat them out as rangers with improving poison use. Genus also wouldn't be applicable term, since the divisions of classification of ranger enemies ranges from kingdoms (plants, oozes), to species or sub-species(humans,elves, orcs). They are grouped that way mostly to make it more even choice between enemies powerwise, otherwise everyone would pick humanoids are their first enemy for example if the class wasn't divided further. That aside, as far as a mechanic PoV, you're making a posion, which alot of things can be affected by, harder to be resisted. this changes the spectrum from a Genus (again ?) to: what can't be affected by poison? certain humanoids, oozes, constructs, undead, outsiders, and certain animals (as well as a few PrsC's and other various exceptions) so your'e making +2 damage ito a very specific group nto: you now need a save 2 higher to resist this posion which deals an average of 2 CON (that's 1 hp PER HD) uunless your immune to it. also, you're letting the ranger go "hey, i just found 13 doses ofthis posion, when i normally would only find 1! more death to spread around!" ALso, an assassin gets posion use: they don't have to worry about posioning themselves. granted, they do gain death attack, but that's harder to pull of. yup, poison does effect a wider range of creatures, thus making the ability more useful. However that's balanced by the fact that you still have to apply the poison and poison is a limited resource even for this particular ranger variant. The ranger is going to get at most a +10 bonus at 20th level to crafting a single type of poison, which isn't going to net you anything close to a 13 fold increase in poison production that your suggesting. The survival check is just to gather raw materials, the poison still needs to be processed by making a craft(poisonmaking) check. I suppose a problem could occur if you have a campaign where there were huge stretches of character free time to gather near unlimited quantities of poison and you had enough space to hold it, but you can easily counter such a problem by simply giving the poison an expiration date, which alot of poisons actually have. So say a month after being processed for example, your poison goes bad, thus keeping poison in limited supply, but still costing you time and effort to process (I'll probably have to play around with the date after doing some calculations, but you get the idea). Assasins gain poison use, but they are a evil prc that doesn't fit into the flavor of actual hunter-gathering societies that use such poisons much more regularly then assasins ever would. Hunters often use such poisons multiple times a day just to survive on a daily basis (only a small percentage of hunts are actually successful even using poison). IMO: underbalanced, doesn't fit the bio. If you want to give a Ranger poison use, go for it, maybe give them bonus feats with a restricted list instead of favored enemy if you hate it that much, but making them the gods of poson isn't fair in the slightest. We now return you to your normally scheduled broadcast. The other problem with poison use is that it currently isn't an effective strategy. Unless it comes from a spell, or poison pops up as treasure, almost no PC actually seems to use poison, class ability or not (and certainly no one tries to optimize their poison use). Both assasins and Ninja are almost always optimized other aspects of their characters, making the poison use abilities relatively unused in comparison. The two reason this seems to occur (both my own thoughts but what I've heard other mention) is that poison is too expensive to make and the DC for poison tends to be too low to be useful, especially at high levels. This ranger variant should solve both of these problems without making poison overpowered, thus making it an effective strategy for a character to persue. Besides which, why should poison be limited to evil assasins and mystical ninjas? If this doesn't fit with the ranger, what class would you propose instead as fitting in with a natural hunter that uses poison as part of techique for hunting and defense? I agree that this ranger poison use upstages assasins poison use, but only in the same way that improved toughness upstages toughness. The former is a useful option as a character, the latter being pretty pointless, especially at high levels. BTW: As an additional line on the ranger variant should read "The ranger only gets bonuses to the poison DC if he applies the favored poison himself. Poison applied in this manner by a ranger only lasts 24 hours". This along with the expiration date on poison should keep rangers from becoming poison factories for everyone else. I'll probably also keep the craft rules as they are, since the ranger still gets a bonus to craft anyway.
IdEgo 10-02-06, 03:51 PM	Genus also wouldn't be applicable term, since the divisions of classification of ranger enemies ranges from kingdoms (plants, oozes), to species or sub-species(humans,elves, orcs). They are grouped that way mostly to make it more even choice between enemies powerwise, otherwise everyone would pick humanoids are their first enemy for example if the class wasn't divided further. I still don't see how giving them a poison which doesn't affect only 4 kingdoms (undead, ooze, outsider, elemental) doesn't make a balance issue from the favored enemey... But you did rather well under cirticism, which I admire. Also thank you for pointng the above out.