What makes rangers and fighters different again?

>>49181624
skills

>>49181624
Fighters have a coherent class identity.

>>49181624
One's just a generalized, all purpose beat stick. The other has a focus on nature shit which sometimes brings stuff like animal companions or spells.

>>49181624

Fighter is a generic term that covers everything from knights to pikemen to pit gladiators to jaguar warriors to a robber baron's brigands. The only common factor is that they fight mainly with melee weapons and can wear heavy armour.

Rangers are typically associated with the wilderness - scouting, good survival skills, a wandering lifestyle, hunting, etc. They're often (but not always) skilled in magic. It's also quite common that they're bow specialists, while being skilled with melee weapons too.

>>49181624
One is a focused warrior, tactician and fighting expert. Fighters fight, fittingly.
The other is a wilderness specialist, a stealthy explorator and usually possesses some attunement to nature magic. Rangers focus on exploring, scouting and survival.

>>49181624
One is slashy, the other is shooty

>>49181624
they are two different names.

>>49181624
One is a generic combatant, The other is a specialist in magical guerrilla fighting.
Why do both exist, when you can simulate The second with The first and choosing feats? Because DnD is a shitty game.

>>49182475
>Fighters can cast spells
>Fighters get animal companions

>>49182525
Okay so there's this thing now called 5e where fighters can choose to learn spells as their subclass
Also anyone can train a pet it just takes time and money

>>49182525
mechanical designations have no bearing on story designations

>>49181624
Nothing, because "Fighter" is a stupid idea for a character.

"Guy who fights good" describes 90% of all fantasy heroes, and D&D is shit for pretending that it's some unique archetype instead of something that every goddamn character can fulfill.

>>49183343
That's a warrior, a fighter is guy who fights BEST.

Rangers have nature related magical abilities and possibly an animal companion depending on edition and selected class feature.
Rangers are also significantly more limited in their armament loadout, preferring short blades or bows, whereas Fighters can wield anything and basically everything.

>>49181624
Dogs like rangers.

>>49183371
But he doesn't.

He hadn't for like 4 editions now.

>>49181624
You have difficulty understanding the difference because, spoiler alert? WotC has turned D&D into a giant piece of shit.

Take >>49183287, for instance.

Fighters were the basest of base classes. The cannon fodder of PCs. Rangers needed to roll higher stats, and were an elite kind of fighter. >>49183343 is correct, but misses the point. The point of fighters is that they're the class everyone who couldn't be good at something else was. Attribute and race restrictions were lifted by the shitfest that is every WotC edition. So it no longer made any sense, because all PCs had to be just as good as each other and it was inconceivable that anyone would ever have to roll a new character after theirs died.

Want to understand the difference? Play the original release of Dark Sun, where each player is encouraged to roll 3 characters, because at-least 2 of them are gonna die.

>>49183425
>Fighters were the basest of base classes. The cannon fodder of PCs.
This is how you spot somebody who's never actually played a TSR edition of D&D.

>>49183464
Except it's accurate.

>>49183487
No it isn't. The fighter is less 'cannon fodder', more 'brick wall', and calling it the 'basest of base classes' doesn't exactly work when all three/four of the core classes have 'a 9 in one stat' as their requirement.

>>49181649

>Fighters
>coherant class identity

Pick one

>>49182525
>>I can't make feats that would let a fighter do just that.
>>49183425
Except now all classes work similary and we don't have to kneel before any pesky "stat requisite". That's a good thing, it makes you free of playing wtf You want.

>>49182163
ranged fighter ftw