An Alternative Ranger Fantasy

 Rangers, in 5E, don't have a great reputation.

I don't think they're unplayable: the truth about D&D is that if you're not trying to optimize the life out of your characters, you'll probably do fine (and the irony is that optimization is often about big bursts of nova damage, whereas the only real situations that can challenge a mid-to-high-level party are lengthy, sustained attrition of many fights without rest).

But I think there's a problem you run into with the Ranger:

Exploring a territory on a big hex grid is certainly a style of gameplay that you can do in D&D. The Ranger is, ostensibly, meant to be the best class to lead a party through such a challenge.

The thing is, I don't think that's really how people tend to play D&D these days - at least not most. Combat and social encounters both have the advantage of feeling like scenes in a fantasy movie, whereas crossing long stretches of wilderness is handled via montage (I'll make a brief nod to Draw Steel's use of "montage tests" to handle such challenges). They're not the meat of the story - they're the necessary transitions from one high-stakes scenario to another.

And given that I think D&D is played more cinematically than it may have originally been conceived for, this area of the game gets de-emphasized, and thus the Ranger's primary strength is pushed to the side.

Thus, I think I've tended to prefer an imagined version of a Ranger that's focused less on navigation, and more on monster-hunting.

To be sure: every class in D&D is a monster-hunter. That's kind of the whole thing. But I do think there's a strong archetype of the monster-hunting expert. Think Abraham Van Helsing (especially when later authors have taken liberties with him, like that apparently-terrible Hugh Jackman movie that made him look a lot more like Solomon Kane) or Geralt of Rivia (who is probably more of an Eldritch Knight Fighter).

The fantasy here is that you're someone who has extensive knowledge about the nature of monsters - something hinted at in the now-defunct Favored Enemy feature from the 2014 Ranger. You're the one who understands its weaknesses and how to avoid its most devastating attacks.

In terms of gameplay, it seems that this fantasy should allow you to get real, significant combat benefits if you're able to identify what you're going to fight ahead of time.

That, admittedly, can be tough: some DMs like to run adventures where there's a ton of foreshadowing, with a monster fight coming after numerous opportunities to determine what the monster is, but other DMs (or adventures) have monsters that come out of the blue to try to surprise the players.

First off, let's come up with a name for this class. And I think that name is, simply enough, going to be Hunter.

Yes, that's a little confusing because that's the "generic" Ranger subclass. But I think it sums up what the class is meant to do: hunt.

And I do think I'd want this to be its own full class, rather than a Ranger subclass. I just think there would be too many competing design elements to allow this fantasy to spread its wings.

This isn't going to be a full class breakdown, it's really just some ideas about what you'd get at, like, 1st level.

First things first:

The class would be a martial class (proficiency with simple and martial weapons) and probably, like the Ranger, get light and medium armor. Dexterity would also be the most likely primary ability.

However, unlike the Ranger, I don't think this is a spellcaster. I think we're going to eschew spellcasting and get more bespoke utility options. The intent here is that they should be competitive with Fighters and Barbarians in terms of damage output, if perhaps a little lower at Range (just to pay the tax for being far away from your enemies).

I do think that we'd have a use for one of the mental stats, to set DCs for various class features. We could go Wisdom like the Ranger, though I'd be tempted to go Intelligence instead, because of how this idea of this class would be that its strength is in your extensive knowledge. What I might do if it were going to use Intelligence is give the class a way to add its Intelligence modifier to Survival checks made to track monsters.

Now, the core idea here would be that you can take a moment (maybe a minute, maybe just an action or even bonus action) to prepare yourself to fight a particular kind of foe: specifically, you'd determine this based on creature type. Doing so would allow you to deal more damage to foes of that type for the duration of the effect.

As I conceived it, I figured that you'd be applying some particular kind of venom to your weapon, but now that I think about it, it might just add to your normal weapon damage - which would help deal with the fact that so many monsters are immune to poison.

Now, two things:

First off, there would need to be a mechanical way for the Hunter to discover what kind of monster they're going to fight. If we do make this just a bonus action, maybe we don't need to worry about that so much. But I would like the Hunter to have some feature that won't leave wiggle room for a DM to prevent them from determining the type.

Second, I also think this damage bonus would maybe be a flat increase against any foe, but with a bigger bonus for the selected monster type. Let's say you're tracking what you've determined is a Gelatinous Cube, and so you set your target type to Oozes, but while following the eerily clean path left behind by the ooze, you're attacked by Displacer Beasts.

If our Hunter's Venom (or Hunter's Stratagem, maybe?) isn't attuned to Monstrosities, you'll still get a little extra damage on these guys. Off the cuff, I figure it might be that the universal bonus starts off at a flat 1, and perhaps goes up to a flat 3, 4, or maybe 5, but then if it is our selected monster type - we catch up with the Gelatinous Cube, we get to add an additional d4.

Now: is that flawed design? After all, it's a bit of a hat on a hat - a damage bonus that then becomes... a bigger damage bonus?

One option would be simply to double the damage bonus - given that we like to make it dice so that it can double on a crit, we might say that you're getting an extra d4 of damage to start, and then that eventually goes up to a d6 and then a d8, but that we get to make it 2d4, 2d6, and then 2d8 against the selected type of monster.

Initially, my thought was that you'd have to take some time prior to the fight - maybe a minute or even ten - to make your preparations. The problem, though, is that it feels like the class is relying on the DM giving hints as to what is coming next. Depending on the campaign, that could be more or less likely, and we want class (especially base class) design to be as universally applicable as possible.

One of the frustrations with the 2014 Ranger was how your Favored Foe and Favored Terrain were both useless if you didn't happen to be dealing with the ones you built your character around. By making this Hunter's Stratagem (and I think I like that name for it) a bonus action, you can do it once you've gottten into combat.

Now, even then, there's a bit of trickiness - the DM might be using a monster that is of an ambiguous creature type. Say you face some Gnolls, well, in 2014 they were humanoids and in the 2024 rules they're fiends, and it also wouldn't be unreasonable to guess that they're monstrosities.

Thus, I might be tempted to add an element to Hunter's Stratagem that, as part of the same bonus action, you can also take the Study action to determine the creature type of a creature you can see within, say, 60 feet. The DC for this should, I think, be set by the rules to prevent any hostile DM shenanigans - perhaps the DC equals 10 plus half the creature's CR, rounded down (so that anything CR 1 or lower is only going to be a DC 10, but then you'll cap out at 25 for something like the Tarrasque or Aspect of Tiamat).

To aid with this, I think the Hunter would probably get expertise, but perhaps only in Intelligence skills - you can kinda sorta pick a "favored enemy" by picking Nature if you want to go after Dragons, Beasts, Elementals, or Plants, or picking Religion to go after Fiends, Celestials, and Undead.

Another possibility for how a Hunter benefits from fighting the specific creature type it has picked for its Stratagem is simply giving them advantage on attacks. Now, yeah, advantage is a bit cheap in 2024 D&D (Hunters might use Rapiers, Shortbows, Pistols, etc., to just get it via weapon mastery) but perhaps it could be something we build on.

As I see it, base classes want to give you something cool and new when you get a new class feature, while subclasses are often best when they build on and add flavor and unique functionality to existing features.

I'll confess that I don't think I have a full 20-level concept for this class. Given that I think we'd avoid giving them spellcasting (a potent feature, but one that I feel is sometimes a band-aid for less clear and specific class features you could have).

I do think that our Hunter would get several of the non-class-specific features the Ranger gets - they'd for sure get Extra Attack and Weapon Mastery, and I think I'd also give them a Fighting Style (er, free Fighting Style feat, I guess, is how that would technically be classified).

The Hunter's Stratagem die would be a really core, central feature - something whose scaling would probably be on the big class table. It might take some iteration to find the ideal form - whether it's a die or flat damage.

While we'd want to keep this fairly broad in terms of what kind of monsters you're hunting (my go-to image would be a Gothic Horror one that hunts vampires or werewolves or the like, but that might not fit your Ancient Greece-themed campaign).

There's room for another few big ideas: one might be a few defensive options - maybe these you choose at a short or long rest, but something like being able to boost your AC, pick a damage resistance, or get advantage on a type of saving throw.

    I think one of the big challenges to the core fantasy of this class is that that fantasy is, to a large extent, about having time to prepare yourself. In campaigns where things are relatively on-rails, or at least very firmly planned out ahead of times, this can work - if the DM knows that the party is going to face a force of goblinoids, it can be very flavorfully lined up that they realize there's some fey influence here.

But there are at least two scenarios where this kind of thing doesn't really work: one is innocuous - the DM might have a more improvisational style, saying they have some ideas prepared of course, but they're mostly responding to what the players do. The worse version is if the DM goes out of their way to screw over the Hunter by always putting in red herrings. In D&D as it currently exists, this isn't such a bad thing, because classes aren't built around fighting specific creature types (I will say that I did throw some Breath Drinkers at my party a little while back, which are coded to look very much like undead that would be weak to radiant damage, when in fact they're aberrations that absorb and are healed by radiant damage, which did result in one very bad turn for the Cleric, but that was about it).

As we learned with the 2014 Wild Magic Sorcerer, it's not a good idea to put core class features into the hands of a DM - your class should work the way that it works, without needing permission from the DM.

Now, I know that Ghostfire Gaming has the Monster Hunter class in its Grim Hollow setting, something that I, you know, probably ought to check out given that I suspect (especially given the setting's dark fantasy vibes) approaches this class fantasy as well.