I could still accept (yeah, I am easy) that kind of thing for nobility. But what about commoners trying to get by? What about war time? Surely, you dont let young elves waste time instead of being useful. Otherwise, elven Charname is the unluckiest elf of all Faerun. Given that he likely knows how elves usually live, if I ever make an elven charname he will be chaotic evil, hating everyone for being an adventurer at the age of 20
Well, obviously, times of war are different. But if anything, they'd send the "child elves" away, to protect the future generations. Elves always think in the long term, and making sure your family/house/race survives is very long term thinking.
And of course, I am thinking surface elves during this entire time, by the way. Who knows what the "proper" drow get up to.
I should clarify I don't particularly think elves are awesomesauce who can do no wrong. I just think that viewing them as having an 80-year vacation after reaching physical maturity is probably inaccurate. They get to have youthful excesses but they're also still part of a community and likely contribute what they can to their communities. Not having adult responsibilities doesn't mean having no responsibilities or having nothing constructive to do.
I wasnt being overly serious :-) I dont think whoever cooked the whole "they grow like humans but stay teens until 110" (in 4ed manual) was either. Tolkien elves are not mature until 50 or so, which is a stretch but makes a bit more sense.
I also just realised they must use powerful contraceptive magic if they are 80 yyears as fully grown but dont become adults (unavoidable after getting offspring).
"And if I get lucky, I have the cantrip memorised" "Eldelbar, That cantrip has been sitting in your brain since 1396. You are never casting it. You might as well become a Sun Soul Monk or something" "I hate you"
I really like to play Rangers, especially Archer kit. It's very cool to play: for example, I defeated Aec'Letec with interesting tactic: my Bhaalspawn hid in shadows, shot all guards one by one and then lured the demon upstairs where all party quickly slayed him)
I also like rangers, particularly stalkers. Largely because I found that to be successful, I had to abandon my standard "break down the door and charge the enemy!" playstyle in favor of a stealthier, more tactical approach. Was a ton of fun.
Only real complaint is the spells selection/progression. Thinking about trying out the IWDification mod for my next stalker run to help alleviate at least some of these issues.
Thinking of running a ranger for my next PoE playthrough. Rangers were the weakest class in the game but have been buffed to b one of the best damage dealing there are.
Historically I've always considered rangers to be inferior, mechanically, to straight up fighters, thieves or multiclasses (except archers of course, I love archers, and the following statements exclude them). I think rangers get too few boons to make them on par with other classes. This doesn't make them bad of course, it only makes them slightly less good than fighters, F/Cs, F/Ts or even FMTs. If you are limiting your rolling, however, it pays off to choose one due to their high minimum stats and it often doesn't take long to get a decent statroll. In PnP it is the other way around then I guess, you roll before you choose class. So I've never really played a ranger but I've always felt drawn to the class and the possiblitites for RP. I often tend to create concepts for RP but end up min/maxing them anyways, and in those cases, the archer is the best kit to turn into a proper beast of a bhaalspawn.
My RL persona has a constant struggle between my extro and introvert sides. I am a somewhat of a extrovert loner. So I've read a bit about rangers, googled/pinterested alot of pictures and just recently started a new playthrough with a stalker which I will play is if it was me, meaning he prefers being alone in the wild but when around people he is still talkative and relaxed. Based on the alignment test I did in another thread I should have been LN, but I've made him NG and he will actually try to do good in the world, but as a ranger he limits himself to a certain area or group that he defends. Since being cloistered, he has no proper enemy, so I removed his choice favoured enemy to reflect this. He is slightly min/maxed, too much to be a good representation of me, but since I want to take him through a full saga run (excluding SoD, still haven't bought that) and since stalkers aren't super strong anyways, I gave him a really good str/dex score. I've also thought about it, and I am adding traps so that instead of getting an equal amount of skill increase in MS and hide. he gets two thirds in stealth and one third in traps, as well as manually added traps to his innate abilities (I traded this for the favoured enemy). That is for laying traps I mean, not detecting them since the stalker doesn't have that thief button on the GUI unfortunately.
I'm teaming up with NPC's I would prolly end up joining up with if it was the real me, so a mix of good and neutral characters. Some talkative, some less so. Currently I have my sister of course, then Garrick teamed up with me, then Kivan and just recently Coran joined the crew. The focus is massive volleys of arrows from everyone until my CHARNAME is strong enought to go into more melee. He also has twohanded sword instead of dualweilding and a smallshield and an axe as backup melee weapons. This is really not powergaming at all and for the first time ever I feel super excited about playing a ranger.
I want to thank @mashedtaters for the great explanation for why rangers and druids may clash. Hadn't thought about it that way before and it aids me in the further advancement of my CHARNAME's persona.
All stealthy groups focused on ranged weapons are great fun too... It's just a shame you can't tell them all to stealth at once (unless I'm missing some script somewhere)
I do have an old soft spot for the ranger class. It's just been a thing since first playing BG all those years ago and now that I've recently starting playing D&D with friends, I'm basically saving their asses all the time with my arrows and my survival skills. I also used my wolf companion to track down the big bad in our story by scent as he casted invisibility and tried to escape. We stopped right at his door step. Let's see a fighter be that useful!
I should roll up a nature loving Dwarf Ranger...maybe a Stalker lol.
His family is slain in a raid by Orc/Drow/other cave-dwelling denizens. Scared out of his mind (he's still a young, impressionable child...but with a beard of course) he flees his homeland. A human Ranger finds the starving child wandering the forest and takes him in, teaching him how to forage, track, and otherwise survive in the wild. As the decades passed by, the Ranger grew old and eventually died. Now alone again (except for his animal friends), the dwarf stealthily travels through the forest, protecting it from anyone who trespasses and seeks to do harm.
If I understand your point correctly, elves can mature quickly mentally (as charname) but they do not because elven society imposes they act like children for 80 more years, even if fully grown. To me that makes no sense as I dont see how that benefits elves, both as a society and as individuals. But hey, I am just a human so what do I know :-)
If you look at human current day society, in every country where overall life spans have been extended through medical advances, good nutrition, safety ect. there has been a matching extension of "childhood".
People are not getting married and having families until there are much older. Society doesn't have to enforce that, people are choosing that. In fact birth rates in all developed countries are falling behind replacement level. And in FR it's repeated over and over that elven society is shrinking.
Couple of hundred years pleasing yourself, what are the incentives to breed? Same as in the developed human world, few decades of comfortable lifestyle, many are choosing not to change by taking on the responsibility of child rearing.
Move on a few hundred years, what will be the reaction in human society to a human deciding to "settle down" and have children in their teens early twenties?
"Childhood" is the wrong word though, a long extended period of only having responsibility for yourself is surely what is meant?
Well, I must say I disagree with your first point. The contrary of childhood is not having kids. Childhood has only been extended until 18 years old (I asssume this is the case for most countries) where you are legally an adult. Not sure how it was in the middle ages where life expectancy was around half of what it is today, but it was likely not 9, if you had the means to provide for it. Otherwise regardless of how much you will live, as soon as the kid can go to the mine, he will go to the mine, so to speak. But, in any case, it doesn't matter
Elfs dont go adventuring until they are 110+. It is not "hey you do what you want until 110 and then you settle down and have a family". It is they are not in their "twenties" (when people would go adventuring because they have no family responsibilities and they are not kids) until they are 110. Now, I might be biased as a parent, but kids not being able to move from home until they are 110 is a very scary prospect. Of course the elves have less and less kids!! :-)
If someone can find a rational explanation for a race to *need* 110 years to reach mental/physical maturity, I'd like to hear it. Not trying to be confrontational, I am actually very interested :-)
Even if it wasnt like that and they mature at 20... Why the hell dont they go adventuring at 20? Why wait 80 years? We are not talking about settling down and all that boring s**t most of us end up doing. I am talking about taking a cool trip around the world working in bars and meeting people while dreaming to change the world. While killing anything that moves, of course. It is adventuring after all :-)
Thanks to EE's implementation of dual wielding in BG1, vanilla rangers are probably the most versatile warrior class in that game IMO.
I can see how the lack of grand mastery might hurt them in comparison with fighters in mid-to-late BG2, but I never play BG2 much anyway, in part (though not exclusively) due to the poor progression of certain classes from BG1. Having said that, the ranger stronghold is my personal favorite in BG2.
And then as others have mentioned, there's the RP flavor. Like paladins, rangers are warriors with a sense of purpose - but they have greater freedom over their alignment and actions than paladins.
Free TWS pips is very cool for BG1, allowing you to dual-wield at level 1 while still being specialized in a ranged weapons. And rangers still get the best of warrior abilities like Whirlwind and Hardiness and a handful of useful priest spells, namely Armor of Faith. They can hold their own.
Honestly I think this game needs a handful of lower-end classes to spice up the challenge a little. So even if the ranger is actually underpowered I'm not overly concerned.
Well, I must say I disagree with your first point. The contrary of childhood is not having kids. Childhood has only been extended until 18 years old (I asssume this is the case for most countries) where you are legally an adult. Not sure how it was in the middle ages where life expectancy was around half of what it is today, but it was likely not 9, if you had the means to provide for it. Otherwise regardless of how much you will live, as soon as the kid can go to the mine, he will go to the mine, so to speak. But, in any case, it doesn't matter
Elfs dont go adventuring until they are 110+. It is not "hey you do what you want until 110 and then you settle down and have a family". It is they are not in their "twenties" (when people would go adventuring because they have no family responsibilities and they are not kids) until they are 110. Now, I might be biased as a parent, but kids not being able to move from home until they are 110 is a very scary prospect. Of course the elves have less and less kids!! :-)
If someone can find a rational explanation for a race to *need* 110 years to reach mental/physical maturity, I'd like to hear it. Not trying to be confrontational, I am actually very interested :-)
Even if it wasnt like that and they mature at 20... Why the hell dont they go adventuring at 20? Why wait 80 years? We are not talking about settling down and all that boring s**t most of us end up doing. I am talking about taking a cool trip around the world working in bars and meeting people while dreaming to change the world. While killing anything that moves, of course. It is adventuring after all :-)
Well, I must say I disagree with your first point. The contrary of childhood is not having kids. Childhood has only been extended until 18 years old (I asssume this is the case for most countries) where you are legally an adult. Not sure how it was in the middle ages where life expectancy was around half of what it is today, but it was likely not 9, if you had the means to provide for it. Otherwise regardless of how much you will live, as soon as the kid can go to the mine, he will go to the mine, so to speak. But, in any case, it doesn't matter
Elfs dont go adventuring until they are 110+. It is not "hey you do what you want until 110 and then you settle down and have a family". It is they are not in their "twenties" (when people would go adventuring because they have no family responsibilities and they are not kids) until they are 110. Now, I might be biased as a parent, but kids not being able to move from home until they are 110 is a very scary prospect. Of course the elves have less and less kids!! :-)
If someone can find a rational explanation for a race to *need* 110 years to reach mental/physical maturity, I'd like to hear it. Not trying to be confrontational, I am actually very interested :-)
Even if it wasnt like that and they mature at 20... Why the hell dont they go adventuring at 20? Why wait 80 years? We are not talking about settling down and all that boring s**t most of us end up doing. I am talking about taking a cool trip around the world working in bars and meeting people while dreaming to change the world. While killing anything that moves, of course. It is adventuring after all :-)
I think that the point here is somewhat different, it's not that they actually -need- so long in order to mature, it's just that time for them is different. An elf in his 30s and 40s isn't very different mentally and physically than one in his 100ies, it's that for them, that period of time is so short that it's meaningless. In that period of time I assume that elves that live with elves still study or train and are allowed to take their time because everyone acknowledge the fact that it's such a short period of time. Elves simply take things slowly.
Also, as someone mentioned before - in western societies in the real world where people live longer and where people don't -need- to normally work in hard labours, people are also maturing more slowly, having families later, starting their careers later, because they simply can take their time with that. I assume that elven society is similar, it's just that for them a 100 years is a kin to several of our real-time-years.
Comments
And of course, I am thinking surface elves during this entire time, by the way. Who knows what the "proper" drow get up to.
I am also curious as to how "doesn't necessarily take on adult responsibilities" becomes "waste time instead of being useful."
I also just realised they must use powerful contraceptive magic if they are 80 yyears as fully grown but dont become adults (unavoidable after getting offspring).
You don't need contraceptive magic, just contraceptives. There are herbal options in the real world, at least. Magic probably helps a lot, though.
"And if I get lucky, I have the cantrip memorised"
"Eldelbar, That cantrip has been sitting in your brain since 1396. You are never casting it. You might as well become a Sun Soul Monk or something"
"I hate you"
Only real complaint is the spells selection/progression. Thinking about trying out the IWDification mod for my next stalker run to help alleviate at least some of these issues.
I'm over 30 and still act like I'm in middleschool. Maybe I'm an elf!
O_o
Exhibit 1
I think rangers get too few boons to make them on par with other classes. This doesn't make them bad of course, it only makes them slightly less good than fighters, F/Cs, F/Ts or even FMTs. If you are limiting your rolling, however, it pays off to choose one due to their high minimum stats and it often doesn't take long to get a decent statroll. In PnP it is the other way around then I guess, you roll before you choose class. So I've never really played a ranger but I've always felt drawn to the class and the possiblitites for RP. I often tend to create concepts for RP but end up min/maxing them anyways, and in those cases, the archer is the best kit to turn into a proper beast of a bhaalspawn.
My RL persona has a constant struggle between my extro and introvert sides. I am a somewhat of a extrovert loner. So I've read a bit about rangers, googled/pinterested alot of pictures and just recently started a new playthrough with a stalker which I will play is if it was me, meaning he prefers being alone in the wild but when around people he is still talkative and relaxed. Based on the alignment test I did in another thread I should have been LN, but I've made him NG and he will actually try to do good in the world, but as a ranger he limits himself to a certain area or group that he defends. Since being cloistered, he has no proper enemy, so I removed his choice favoured enemy to reflect this. He is slightly min/maxed, too much to be a good representation of me, but since I want to take him through a full saga run (excluding SoD, still haven't bought that) and since stalkers aren't super strong anyways, I gave him a really good str/dex score. I've also thought about it, and I am adding traps so that instead of getting an equal amount of skill increase in MS and hide. he gets two thirds in stealth and one third in traps, as well as manually added traps to his innate abilities (I traded this for the favoured enemy). That is for laying traps I mean, not detecting them since the stalker doesn't have that thief button on the GUI unfortunately.
I'm teaming up with NPC's I would prolly end up joining up with if it was the real me, so a mix of good and neutral characters. Some talkative, some less so. Currently I have my sister of course, then Garrick teamed up with me, then Kivan and just recently Coran joined the crew. The focus is massive volleys of arrows from everyone until my CHARNAME is strong enought to go into more melee. He also has twohanded sword instead of dualweilding and a smallshield and an axe as backup melee weapons. This is really not powergaming at all and for the first time ever I feel super excited about playing a ranger.
I want to thank @mashedtaters for the great explanation for why rangers and druids may clash. Hadn't thought about it that way before and it aids me in the further advancement of my CHARNAME's persona.
His family is slain in a raid by Orc/Drow/other cave-dwelling denizens. Scared out of his mind (he's still a young, impressionable child...but with a beard of course) he flees his homeland. A human Ranger finds the starving child wandering the forest and takes him in, teaching him how to forage, track, and otherwise survive in the wild. As the decades passed by, the Ranger grew old and eventually died. Now alone again (except for his animal friends), the dwarf stealthily travels through the forest, protecting it from anyone who trespasses and seeks to do harm.
That's a really great bio and it fits either default ranger or stalker very nicely.
If you look at human current day society, in every country where overall life spans have been extended through medical advances, good nutrition, safety ect. there has been a matching extension of "childhood".
People are not getting married and having families until there are much older. Society doesn't have to enforce that, people are choosing that. In fact birth rates in all developed countries are falling behind replacement level. And in FR it's repeated over and over that elven society is shrinking.
Couple of hundred years pleasing yourself, what are the incentives to breed?
Same as in the developed human world, few decades of comfortable lifestyle, many are choosing not to change by taking on the responsibility of child rearing.
Move on a few hundred years, what will be the reaction in human society to a human deciding to "settle down" and have children in their teens early twenties?
"Childhood" is the wrong word though, a long extended period of only having responsibility for yourself is surely what is meant?
Well, I must say I disagree with your first point. The contrary of childhood is not having kids. Childhood has only been extended until 18 years old (I asssume this is the case for most countries) where you are legally an adult. Not sure how it was in the middle ages where life expectancy was around half of what it is today, but it was likely not 9, if you had the means to provide for it. Otherwise regardless of how much you will live, as soon as the kid can go to the mine, he will go to the mine, so to speak. But, in any case, it doesn't matter
http://www.d20srd.org/srd/description.htm
(I am guessing the numbers are similar for 2ed)
Elfs dont go adventuring until they are 110+. It is not "hey you do what you want until 110 and then you settle down and have a family". It is they are not in their "twenties" (when people would go adventuring because they have no family responsibilities and they are not kids) until they are 110. Now, I might be biased as a parent, but kids not being able to move from home until they are 110 is a very scary prospect. Of course the elves have less and less kids!! :-)
If someone can find a rational explanation for a race to *need* 110 years to reach mental/physical maturity, I'd like to hear it. Not trying to be confrontational, I am actually very interested :-)
Even if it wasnt like that and they mature at 20... Why the hell dont they go adventuring at 20? Why wait 80 years? We are not talking about settling down and all that boring s**t most of us end up doing. I am talking about taking a cool trip around the world working in bars and meeting people while dreaming to change the world. While killing anything that moves, of course. It is adventuring after all :-)
Thanks to EE's implementation of dual wielding in BG1, vanilla rangers are probably the most versatile warrior class in that game IMO.
I can see how the lack of grand mastery might hurt them in comparison with fighters in mid-to-late BG2, but I never play BG2 much anyway, in part (though not exclusively) due to the poor progression of certain classes from BG1. Having said that, the ranger stronghold is my personal favorite in BG2.
And then as others have mentioned, there's the RP flavor. Like paladins, rangers are warriors with a sense of purpose - but they have greater freedom over their alignment and actions than paladins.
Honestly I think this game needs a handful of lower-end classes to spice up the challenge a little. So even if the ranger is actually underpowered I'm not overly concerned.
Also, as someone mentioned before - in western societies in the real world where people live longer and where people don't -need- to normally work in hard labours, people are also maturing more slowly, having families later, starting their careers later, because they simply can take their time with that. I assume that elven society is similar, it's just that for them a 100 years is a kin to several of our real-time-years.
Also, hi everybody
~T