Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Character creation - Ranger

Hi guys,

I don't know if you noticed, but there's a screenshot of the character creation for the ranger.

There's some choices I haven't seen in the dnd5e material. I.e.
Favored enemy and natural explorer is different from the source material.

Do any of you know the specifics of these?

Larian found the PHB Ranger lacking, so they homebrewed something.

They said the options was based on playstyles, so we can speculate based on the names, but considering there are 4 days left until the EA release...

May I hear an Halleluyah?

Yes, please.

In the August, 18th streaming Sven announced that rangers´ features would be changed, and they will have a familiar that can attack instead of the beastmaster´s
sh...ameful feature.

The PHB says that the casting time for Find Familiar is one hour. No one is going to sit around for an hour in-game, but I imagine the cast time will still be longer than one action. So my guess is that the concentration is for the casting of the spell, but is not required to keep the familiar around - the familiar's low HP should be a big enough drawback for using it in combat.

Rangers are fantastic in 5e if you can go beyond the PHb. So bringing in ranger material from some of the other source-books to make that class better is the way to go. Fighters, rangers, and paladins are the only D&D core classes I care to play.

It's great to see they're not just adapting DnD5e, but also improving upon it.

Seeing these new options for the ranger class, I'm hoping they have/will introduce more new options for some of the other classes as well. 5e really isn't big on customization within the confines of any single class, except perhaps the warlock with its million invocations (not counting spells).

Beastmaster with find familiar??? Seriously?

It's not from beastmaster.

You get it if you take Beast Tamer in the Natural Explorer list.

Sorry, but I think "find familiar" on a ranger makes no sense.
I have not played a 5E game before, but judging from the previous games:
Familiars are small pets of casters ( mostly wizards, in pathfinder also witches) that give their owner minor bonusses, help them with spells or do stuff for them like scouting or delivering messages. They are not well suited for fighting.
In a video you saw Swen summoning a little spider that was killed when attacking Shadowheart. Thats it.

Rangers should have an animal companion.
I do not know much about 5E, but it would be cool if a ranger could charm an animal to become his companion instead of using a summon spell.
This could cause you trouble if the animal already has an owner or it is part of a group of animals.

Imagine you start as a lone ranger. Then you meet somebody riding on a horse. You charm the horse, the owner gets angry but you and the horse kill him together.
To avoid some cheese, charming might take some time and require concentration and you have disadvantage when trying this during combat.

1. Find familiars don't give bonus in 5e. They are normal creatures with the basic animal stats they represent and have their own initiative. They are useless for combat outside for pulling lever and stuff like that.
2. The find familiar has nothing to do with the animal companion. If you want an animal companion you have to pick the Beastmaster archetype at level 3 (in the PHB). But we have no idea how it will work in BG3 because Larian isn't implementing the PHB version of the Ranger.
3. Charm animal is a spell, no relation to animal companion either.

Beside coolness it would be fair logical to implement some form of real living animal companion for nature oriented character classes. The spirit or ghost forms of creatures ist some thing for shamans and druids anyway. If larian does not want to risk the contra argument of the core community that character classes have to be different and with weaknesses too there could be no magic caster, nature fighter and druid classes with all the same form of compagnions for activating levers and so on. As it is discussed in the companion topic parallel there should be a clear path for ranger class talents orientated on core values of dungeons & dragons: the picture of a wilderness loving hunter with pro and anti animals, path finding and nature skills. There could be more roleplay with more differences in character classes.

IIRC the beastmaster kit in the classic BG series could cast find familiar and do not have an animal companion. The animal companion´s a thing of later editions but it´s a feature that (sadly) almost disappeared in 5e and PF2e for rangers, besides a (not-very-good) subclass.

Rangers that take the Beast Master subrace will get an animal companion (Beast Master is a seperate thing from Breast Tamer).

I think you mean subclass and Beast Tamer; I am curious what other features a breast tamer would have though.

Man I knew this game was gonna be 18+, but now you really got my attention.

- My understanding/guess, is that the Find Familiar thing is a technical trick for the moment ... It is a rapid implementation of an animal companion (by just applying the spell they made for other classes), for this version in development.

- The Ranger has been revised by WotC, but their official version will be known in about one month in Tasha's Cauldron ...

- I am excited to see what they brewed to replace Favored Enemy and Favored Terrain. If I DM, I myself change those two features.

As it was said, the Find Familiar is part of Beast Tamer which you can select at level 1 (it's one of the Natural Explorer options). An Hunter could have it.

Favored enemy has a 5 options list with fancy names:
- Bounty Hunter
- Keeper of the Veil
- Mage Breaker
- Ranger Knight
- Sanctified Stalker

Natural explorer (Favored Terrain) options:
- Beast Tamer
- Urban tracker
- Wasteland Wanderer: Cold
- Wasteland Wanderer: Fire
- Wasteland Wanderer: Poison

We don't know what these do.

No matter what it is called, I am simply saying I believe they used the same system/effect as the Find Familiar spell, for the moment. I say "for the moment", as normally an animal companion has very different capacities than familiars.

Fextralife got access to the EA earlier and already updated their website. Here is the ranger: https://baldursgate3.wiki.fextralife.com/Ranger