Frequently Asked Questions
These are things that people have asked me a lot as I went through this guide, or I expect to be asked about it and want to get out of the way.
Q: Should I read this handbook if I don’t intend to play a ranger?
A: Honestly, maybe. This is a comprehensive ranger handbook, but the comprehensiveness also led to a lot of writing that’s genuinely useful for martial builds in general. The feats section talks about stuff that could be considered class-agnostic; the spells section would be a good read for people playing wizard-list characters in general. The companion creatures chapter is useful for druids and anyone with familiars, and so on. So yeah, give it a read if you want to, it might broaden your horizons.
Q: What sections of this handbook can I get away with skimming, and what sections should I read comprehensively?
A: You can get away with skimming Chapters 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and the appendices. The skimmable sections represent the vast majority of the guide. If you’re intending to play a ranger though I do recommend reading the first two chapters (base class, favored enemy stuff, and the ACFs list) and chapter 4 (summation of companions/magic/gear) all the way through to get an appreciation of what the class does. For the rest, you can and almost certainly should skim rather than read fully.
Q: Why did you make this guide?
A: On February 15, 2016 at 11:05pm, I posted an answer on rpg.stackexchange about making “a ranger close to tier 3,” in which I made several technical inaccuracies about what ranger options could be combined together. However, actually going back and fixing it would necessitate rewriting the entire answer since my core premise (solitary hunting + mystic ranger) was flawed in the first place, and also by that point I had also realized that mystic ranger was far too strong to recommend. As silly as it might sound, this haunts me; saying “it keeps me up at night” would not be an exaggeration. I have since updated the post, but you can find the old one here.
Then, a couple months back, a friend pointed out the existence of the Uthgardt Barbarian regional ranger options and in particular the favored enemy (evil creatures) option listed in the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting. I’d been tempted many times over the years to make a proper handbook for the ranger (since no existing guide matches my thoughts on it or comprehensively approached the class), and this new information proved to be the impetus I needed to actually sit down and do it.
Q: What possessed you to be as comprehensive as you were?
A: An archon of some kind, though they prefer to call it “channeling.” Probably a word archon. A combination of spite, pride, and a complete lack of self-respect. I really like the ranger class, I really like Dragon Magazine content, and I really like digging in books for obscure options. These three things happen to be things that the 3.5 community as a whole tends to be iffy on, so I wanted to write a truly comprehensive guide to show people what I’d found.
Q: Holy crap, how long is this thing?
A: Getting an exact wordcount is tough because of it being split across several Google Docs and spreadsheets (and then converted into a webpage), but my best estimate is that it's roughly 350k words, give or take a few thousand.
Q: Are you okay?
A: I think the length of this guide speaks for itself.
Q: Why are you still putting this much effort into 3.5 in 2023?
A: Because I still play 3.5.
Q: What should I do if my DM makes sure my favored enemies don’t show up often?
A: Talk to your DM and/or not play a ranger. It’s kinda like playing a wizard with a DM who likes targeting spellbooks. This is not a thing you can solve with in-game choices, it’s a play expectations issue.
Q: What should I do if my DM doesn’t allow Dragon Magazine content?
A: Cry.
Q: How long did it take to write this?
A: According to the history of my main draft document, I wrote, researched, and edited on and off for 113 days (a little under four months). Most of my writing took place at odd hours of the day. My chronic illness often wakes me up in the middle of the night and keeps me from going back to sleep, giving me time with nothing else to do but read, write, and wait for the pain to stop.
Q: Why’d you post this as a web page instead of as a Google doc?
A: Over the years I’ve seen a lot of D&D forums die, and I admire the effort the D&D 3.5 and 4e communities have put into keeping the knowledge stored on them alive. Moving threads from one forum to another results in the handbooks and threads remaining findable in search engines, browsable on any hardware, and easily-archivable in Wayback Machine. In contrast, handbooks posted in Google docs are locked to a specific format and hosting, and if the original post for them goes down they basically vanish from the internet unless someone has copied it to their own drive, then gone out of their way to post it (which won’t show up in imprecise searches, and runs into more tricky issues around ownership of the document in my experience than archived threads do).
Plus, Google docs tend to start breaking down at the length needed for a guide like this, and having multiple Google docs linked to each other is something I consider inelegant. I considered making it a PDF, and for months was planning on making it a forum thread on GitP, but in the end after considering the amount of formatting effort and janky post handling I’d need for that (it would be a guide some 40 posts long, spread across multiple forum thread pages, and taking hours and hours to post), I just decided on a website. This is the first nontrivial web page I’ve ever made, so hopefully it does the job!
Q: Why didn’t you make a full list of available wild shape forms for rangers?
A: One, I feel like that ground has already been very well-tread by various druid and master of many forms guides. By using the Master of Many Forms Bible you can get a pretty coherent view of what’s good for wild shape. Two, in the absence of master of many forms (or primeval, which has a super limited form list), wild shape ranger is actually a downgrade on ranger when all options are in play; the Small and Medium forms available, even with Aberration Wild Shape, are just not going to be as good for most builds than your own stats and baseline form due to the heavy taxes on item use and accessing wild shape in the first place. It’s fine? But since this handbook is more about the rest of ranger (which is chronically underloved), I felt like a wild shape chapter wasn’t worth writing when other people have already made multiple excellent wild shape handbooks.
Q: This is a ton of writing! Did you use ChatGPT to write this?
A: Absolutely not. As much as I’d love to be a robot, everything here is written by fleshy, shoddily-made human hands. Even if it was ‘good’ for this kind of work (it’s not), I wouldn’t ever consider using generative algorithms of ChatGPT’s type for anything due to the numerous ethical issues in its creation and function.
Q: What's the deal with Soveliss? Why is he in so many of the banner images?
A: I just think he's funny. He looks like a mook. All the 3e iconics have a very “low-level adventurer” vibe to them that I absolutely adore, but Soveliss in particular is one of my favorites due to just... looking like, I dunno, an early tutorial boss from a Fire Emblem game or something. 10/10 iconic design.
