A couple of weeks ago, I ran an "Oops, all Rangers" oneshot with one of my weekly groups. We had a party of four Rangers (collectively known as the Power Rangers). I allowed them their choice of any of the published Ranger subclasses (making a distinction between the PHB and Tasha Beast Masters,) as well as the Drakewarden. I requested that they each choose a different subclass. The party ended up with a Gloom Stalker, a Tasha Beast Master, a Fey Wanderer, and a Swarmkeeper. The oneshot was made at Level 11 because that is where the truism that Rangers "fall off a cliff" starts to come in. In order to limit bias, I decided to run the Candlekeep Mystery of the appropriate level. In this case, it was The Curious Tale of Wisteria Vale. For the sake of limiting variables, I asked all the players to be the same race (although I did allow for them to take different subraces.) Ultimately, the party chose to play Elves. We ended up with two Wood (Fey Wanderer and Swarmkeeper), a High (Beast Master), and a Mark of Shadow (Gloom Stalker). I allowed the Tasha floating ASI rule.
Though I did not request this, it happened that each party member chose a different fighting style. The Gloom Stalker decided to go the dual-wielder route. The Swarmkeeper had a cache of thrown weapons. The Fey Wanderer chose the way of the longbow. Finally, the Beast Master had a walking stick she used as her Shillelagh.
They all received standard equipment and one basic +1 weapon of their chosen fighting style.
There's a truism that Gloom Stalker is considered to be the best Ranger class, so I spoke with the player privately to make him the 'control group' of sorts, since I wanted to measure the rest of the party's effectiveness against him. For an added bonus, the Gloom Stalker player was also the most experienced in the group.
After the session, I sent my players a survey asking them about their experience, as well as their opinions of the Rangers that were present.
Ultimately, the players had a lot of fun playing this Ranger party. They all expressed wanting to play with this specific party again, and for longer. They also agreed that the Curious Tale of Wisteria Vale wasn't necessarily the best adventure they've played (but that wasn't here nor there) due to its awkward pacing and dungeon. They agreed that the Fey Wanderer performed by far the best out of combat, while the Gloom Stalker performed the best in combat*
Beast Master and Fey Wanderer were the subclasses that impressed the party the most.
I did not flub dice in the party's favor, nor did I make any allowances for benefits given based on certain situations or roleplay. If anything, I stacked the deck against them. They still managed to come out more than triumphant.
Stray observations:
The Swarmkeeper nearly solo'ed a Roc with nothing but a single use of Ensnaring Strike
The Beast Master was not the best at anything, but was consistently the second-best at everything
Fey Wanderer's face skills were crucial for intel-gathering, followed by the the Beast Master pet's ability to scout. The module taking the party to a ball helped the Fey Wanderer out quite a bit, but it was her expanded spell list that really came through. Charm Person, Dispel Magic, and Misty Step were standouts
Outside of combat, the Gloom Stalker was pretty useless. The module doesn't really provide many shadowy places for him to stalk about.
Overall satisfaction seemed not to favor the Swarmkeeper very much, with only one player seeing them as consistently useful.
Swarmkeeper player was the only one making liberal use of his combat spells. Ensnaring Strike and Lightning Arrow came in clutch
The players were all at different levels of experience with the game (hence why I chose them.) They ran the gamut from casual players to hardcore enthusiasts. The only thing I wish I could've gotten that I didn't was a complete newbie.
One final observation that we all unanimously agreed upon was that an All-Ranger party is deadly as hell.
The Curious Tale of Wisteria Vale ends with an encounter against a Beholder. This Beholder did not make it all the way through the second round. The party did absolute bonkers damage round one, and finished him off in round two before his actual turn had even begun. It would have been a complete stomp were it not for legendary actions. And even those failed. Some of it was pure luck (like the Gloom Stalker making his Charisma Save,) but a lot of wit was because a majority of eye rays targeted Wis or Dex, which the party had a natural advantage against.
For comparison, I once ran a similar encounter a few years ago with a party composed of a Grave Cleric, a Hexblade, a Lore Bard, a Shadow Sorcerer, and an Battlemaster, and the Beholder nearly TPK'd them.
The Power Rangers were so efficient that they retroactively made a fairly well-rounded party look like a bunch of chumps.
Anyway, I ran an all-ranger party and it was a ton of fun. Ask me anything.
*An observation on my end was that while, yes, the Gloom Stalker dealt by far the most damage in combat, Stalker's Flurry pretty much carried him. Umbral Sight and Dread Ambusher weren't nearly as useful as one would've thought. And the Gloom Stalker player really did play him more like a Fighter-lite than a Ranger, to the point where only Stalker's Flurry stood out.
I allowed my players to pick and choose between the PHB features and the Tasha features as they saw fit. Ultimately, all four of them chose to go with the PHB features. For the more casual players, it was simply because they didn't care to hunt down the features presented in Tasha's, whereas the more experienced players actually preferred the flavor of Favored Enemy and Natural Explorer over the new features.
Favored Enemy (Aberrations) came up a few times, which allowed the Beast Master to get some intel on the Beholder. Outside of that, however, neither Favored Enemy or Natural Explorer saw much use. That is to say, the Power Rangers didn't really ask to make checks that would've triggered those abilities. As the DM, I would say that this is partly on the players not thinking to ask the right questions to proc those abilities, and partly on the module itself for not having a ton of places where those abilities would come up organically.
I have questions, since I might end up in one of these!
1) In what possible context is Charm Person more useful than Enhance Ability? It seems like the same spell but strictly worse for solving social problems usefully.
2) How did the Beast Companion report back when scouting?
3) If you played at L11, the Swarmkeeper should have been fully online, able to accomplish being in permanent half cover while ignoring OAs or knocking enemies prone. Your party's one seems to have almost... *deliberately* tanked the results by choosing thrown instead of melee, the style swarmkeepers are built to use. Can you speak to that at all? The results just seem very sus.
1. Charm Person procs Beguiling Twist, which came in handy a few times. Also worth noting is that the Fey Wanderer didn't take the Enhance Ability spell, but Charm Person was a freebie for the subclass anyway.
2. It was a combination of good insight checks from the Beast Master and the Speak with Animals spell
3. As stated, the group was a combination of casual players and more...invested players. As such, the characters weren't especially well-optimized so much as they were designed to fulfill the character idea the players had in mind. Given that the more casual players didn't know how -nor did they care to know how- to optimize, I actually preferred it that way. My reasoning being that if some characters were obviously optimized and others weren't, that would skew the results considerably in favor of the optimized characters. I liked that that the whole party wasn't especially optimized, as it kept the relative power level of the party more or less even. That said, I didn't give instructions to the players on how to build their respective characters, nor did I express my opinions on optimization (or lack thereof) to them prior to the session. It just happened to work out that way.
tl;dr: the Swarmkeeper went with thrown weapons because he liked that idea for his character; not because it was a better or worse choice mechanically.
I have questions, since I might end up in one of these!
1) In what possible context is Charm Person more useful than Enhance Ability? It seems like the same spell but strictly worse for solving social problems usefully.
2) How did the Beast Companion report back when scouting?
3) If you played at L11, the Swarmkeeper should have been fully online, able to accomplish being in permanent half cover while ignoring OAs or knocking enemies prone. Your party's one seems to have almost... *deliberately* tanked the results by choosing thrown instead of melee, the style swarmkeepers are built to use. Can you speak to that at all? The results just seem very sus.
2. I saw no reference to beastmaster scouting. There is still the whole debate that raw tasha's Beast cant do anything without the ranger. (Unless the ranger is unconscious.)
I have questions, since I might end up in one of these!
1) In what possible context is Charm Person more useful than Enhance Ability? It seems like the same spell but strictly worse for solving social problems usefully.
2) How did the Beast Companion report back when scouting?
3) If you played at L11, the Swarmkeeper should have been fully online, able to accomplish being in permanent half cover while ignoring OAs or knocking enemies prone. Your party's one seems to have almost... *deliberately* tanked the results by choosing thrown instead of melee, the style swarmkeepers are built to use. Can you speak to that at all? The results just seem very sus.
2. I saw no reference to beastmaster scouting. There is still the whole debate that raw tasha's Beast cant do anything without the ranger. (Unless the ranger is unconscious.)
"Fey Wanderer's face skills were crucial for intel-gathering, followed by the the Beast Master pet's ability to scout."
I'm not sure what the debate is - the RAW is pretty clear. The companion dodges unless told otherwise, but can move and react on its own, so you can use its move (it will refuse to dash) to scout. It just won't be stealthy unless you take steps - yet another reason to strongly consider a telepathic race. If you don't mind being broadcast only, Custom Lineage (Telepathic) and Ghostwise Halflings fit the bill, and Kalashtar are two-way. Best solutions I've found to getting the Primal Companion into a more ideal state.
Would you run this again (not the same module but a one-shot with all the same class) with a different class?
What are your expectations of the performance of each class?
What are your expectations of the enjoyment of each class?
Do you think there are any other classes better suited to be a solo class party (factoring in performance/enjoyment in all three pillars)?
How much do you think things would have changed had the restriction on race not been applied?
Do you think that players would have gravitated towards similar races, or there would have been some oddball choices?
Would you think it would be interesting to run a game with everyone on the same sub-class as well?
What would the best/worst sub-class be?
Do you think the players would have struggled without the Fey Wanderer face, or would they just have adapted with more creative solutions to the supposed social dilemma facing Rangers?
You said some players were less experienced than others, how do you think this influenced people's perceptions of each sub-class?
As a DM was there anything more or less enjoyable from running this game that really stood out for you?
I have questions, since I might end up in one of these!
1) In what possible context is Charm Person more useful than Enhance Ability? It seems like the same spell but strictly worse for solving social problems usefully.
2) How did the Beast Companion report back when scouting?
3) If you played at L11, the Swarmkeeper should have been fully online, able to accomplish being in permanent half cover while ignoring OAs or knocking enemies prone. Your party's one seems to have almost... *deliberately* tanked the results by choosing thrown instead of melee, the style swarmkeepers are built to use. Can you speak to that at all? The results just seem very sus.
2. I saw no reference to beastmaster scouting. There is still the whole debate that raw tasha's Beast cant do anything without the ranger. (Unless the ranger is unconscious.)
"Fey Wanderer's face skills were crucial for intel-gathering, followed by the the Beast Master pet's ability to scout."
I'm not sure what the debate is - the RAW is pretty clear. The companion dodges unless told otherwise, but can move and react on its own, so you can use its move (it will refuse to dash) to scout. It just won't be stealthy unless you take steps - yet another reason to strongly consider a telepathic race. If you don't mind being broadcast only, Custom Lineage (Telepathic) and Ghostwise Halflings fit the bill, and Kalashtar are two-way. Best solutions I've found to getting the Primal Companion into a more ideal state.
What you are describing only applies to combat though. What happens outside of combat, where scouting normally takes place, is different.
*An observation on my end was that while, yes, the Gloom Stalker dealt by far the most damage in combat, Stalker's Flurry pretty much carried him. Umbral Sight and Dread Ambusher weren't nearly as useful as one would've thought. And the Gloom Stalker player really did play him more like a Fighter-lite than a Ranger, to the point where only Stalker's Flurry stood out.
Regarding this, how come the extra attack from Dread Ambusher wasn't considered useful? I can see why the almost extra attack of Stalker's Flurry came of as better since it can be used after turn 1 but four attacks and extra movement on the first turn must be good for something, right? :P
Also, what made the Gloom Stalker "useless" out of combat? Was it how this particular character was built or a general lack of out of combat abilities? Umbral Sight is naturally situational but anything else they lacked?
And a few general questions.
Was there ever anything that the players felt that they were missing? Certain spells, abilities, anything of the like?
Why elves? Do you think the results would have been drastically different with other races?
Any particular reason why the players chose those the subclasses that they did? Just to try them out, because they were considered particularily strong or weak, some other reason?
If you do something similar again, will you let me know so that I can ask to join?
1. It's not that the extra attack from Dread Ambusher wasn't useful. It was. What I meant is that, in the grand scheme of things, it didn't contribute as much as one would first assume by theorycrafting. Stalker's Flurry contributed considerably more. Personally, I feel like dual wielding (of all things) maybe reduced the effectiveness of Dread Ambusher, since the off-hand attack effectively amounted to an "always on" Dread Ambusher past round one. The other contributing factor was accuracy. In the combat encounters that we ran, it was 50/50 between the Gloom Stalker landing all four attacks in round one or not. If he missed two attacks, he could reroll one with Stalker's Flurry, which put him on par with his Round 2+ performance, where he's making three attacks and more likely to just miss and reroll one. As for the initiative and movement bonuses, the initiative did come in handy, I will agree. But the movement didn't matter so much with the size of the battlefield and the starting position of the monsters.
I think it's worth keeping in mind that the results are inhibited by scope. As a oneshot, we only had so much data. Perhaps in a more protracted adventure, Dread Ambusher would've shown it's worth.
2. I would say it was a combination of the module not presenting many opportunities for the Gloom Stalker to be in his element, so to speak, and the way the player built the Gloom Stalker. The player seemed to have built his character with combat in mind. Hence why he played mostly like a Fighter-lite. The only spell he cast was Hunter's Mark. There were also some pretty bad die rolls whenever he tried to do exploration, which should be taken into account.
The way the module works is that it assumes the party will go one of two routes: break into the mansion and sneak around exploring it without getting caught, or walking right into the mansion as guests to the ball. The former approach would've probably helped the Gloom Stalker more, but the latter (which put the Fey Wanderer in her element,) was the choice the party made. To be fair to the party, the module seems to have been designed around the assumption that they would break in, but consistently pushes the DM to invite them to the ball instead. This disconnect is part of why the players had issues with the module chosen.
3. Actually, not really. They felt pretty well-rounded. The Swarmkeeper handled battlefield control, the Fey Wanderer was the face, the Gloom Stalker was dpr, and the Beast Master became a pseudo-tank by forcing the bad guys to distribute the damage between her and her pets (she took Summon Beast for more flying shenanigans.) And they all had at least one healing spell to keep themselves upright. At no point did they say "Gosh, I wish we had an [x] right now," which -to be completely honest- was very surprising to me. The one note I would say would be that whenever the Fey Wanderer was busy elsewhere, the rest of the party's lack of charisma became very apparent. But that would've happened regardless of class if she was still the only face in the group.
4. I wanted to control the variables as much as I could (while still giving the players some freedom of choice,) so I asked that they all play the same race. I then asked the party to choose which race they wanted out of all the options available in 5E, and they unanimously decided to play as elves. To be honest, their being elves didn't play too much into their individual effectiveness in or out of combat, which was kind of what I was hoping for. The unique elf traits only came up sporadically (their Perception proficiency was the most used ability, but as Rangers, they wanted Perception anyway.) Personally, I don't think a different race would've produced drastically different results. But I could be wrong. Would be interesting to compare with a group who chose differently. I do think Tasha's floating ASI's influenced the decision to play elves. At least among the more hardcore players.
5. As I said in a previous comment, the players were a mix of casual and hardcore. While I didn't give them guidance on how to build their rangers, I liked that none of them optimized, as it allowed for the relative power level between players to remain more or less even. Fey Wanderer, Tasha Beast Master, and Swarmkeeper were chosen by their individual players because they liked the flavor presented. The exception is Gloom Stalker. I did ask the GS player to choose that subclass because I wanted a "control group" of sorts. Though beyond that, I also didn't give him any guidance on how to build his character. The only thing I did tell them was not to multiclass, since that would skew the results of this all-Ranger oneshot.
6. Hahaha. This one was done with one of my four home groups, but yeah. If I ever do something similar with the online community, I'll be sure to post about it. I think it would be interesting to run the same module with the same conceits, but using the Ranger subclasses that weren't chosen for this one (Hunter, PHB Beast Master, Horizon Walker, Monster Slayer, and Drakewarden) and then weighing those results against the ones I got from this oneshot. But right now, I have neither the time nor the spoons. Maybe in the future.
Thanks for the answers. Yeah, it seems to hold up to my suspicions and expectations. As you say, a lot of the results seem to be due to the scenario. It would be interesting to see what happened if you run the scenario again but if you can't play as a Few Wanderer the lack of a face PC will probably limit the options. Still, great fun. :)
Would you run this again (not the same module but a one-shot with all the same class) with a different class?
What are your expectations of the performance of each class?
What are your expectations of the enjoyment of each class?
Do you think there are any other classes better suited to be a solo class party (factoring in performance/enjoyment in all three pillars)?
How much do you think things would have changed had the restriction on race not been applied?
Do you think that players would have gravitated towards similar races, or there would have been some oddball choices?
Would you think it would be interesting to run a game with everyone on the same sub-class as well?
What would the best/worst sub-class be?
Do you think the players would have struggled without the Fey Wanderer face, or would they just have adapted with more creative solutions to the supposed social dilemma facing Rangers?
You said some players were less experienced than others, how do you think this influenced people's perceptions of each sub-class?
As a DM was there anything more or less enjoyable from running this game that really stood out for you?
Oops. I didn't see this one.
1. When I got the idea to run this All-Ranger oneshot, I did consider running the same module for each class. It's definitely something I'm interested in, but I just don't have the time or spoons to do right now.
Given the module I ran, I'd say martial classes might actually perform pretty damn well, since the Beholder blocks magic. Wizards are Wizards, so they'd probably do really well up until the Beholder battle. Clerics would perform extremely well. Paladins and Barbarians might struggle a bit since there are some strong flying enemies around. Rogues likely wouldn't bother with the social aspect. Bards would never perform poorly, per se, but I think they might take a long time to win each encounter given the relative lack of offense the class has. These are just some basic impressions I get. To be honest, I haven't done too much research into it, so I very well could be wrong.
I can't speak to class enjoyment since that's very much subjective. I personally don't care for Bards and Sorcs, which has nothing to do with those classes and everything to do with my personal taste. Assuming I ran this with the same group, I would imagine they would lean towards the more martial classes because of their simplicity and/or personal preference of the players. There is only one player in this group that seems to be a diehard full caster enthusiast
Definitely. Clerics stand out to me as the big ones. Paladins are also a strong option, though unlike clerics, they do have a blind spot when it comes to attacking at range. Rogues are excellent as well, though they lack healing. And then there are Wizards.
2. Personally, I'm of the opinion that the bulk of a character's power comes from the class; not the race. I'm not saying different racial abilities wouldn't have been useful or wouldn't have come up, but I'm hesitant to say it would've made a huge difference. Still, it would be worth running just to test my theory.
Without the race restriction, we likely would've still had at least one elf, along with probably at least one monstrous race. The other two are more tricky to pin down, but based on their previous character choices, I wouldn't be surprised with a party of three elves and a Lizardfolk or something.
3. Assuming everyone is the same race, class, and subclass, I think the big divergence points would've been feats and spellcasting. For Rangers, at least, that's not a huge level of diversity. I'd hazard a guess that the party would've felt to samey too really have fun with, at least with this group. But I can't say for certain. Full casters, on the other hand, can go crazy even with the same subclass because of their varied spell selection. I shudder at the thought of an All-Divination Wizard party or an All-Peace Domain Cleric party.
For Rangers specifically, I want to say the best subclass in this scenario is probably the Fey Wanderer because those face skills cannot easily be replicated by any other subclass. But it's hard to say. For other class/subclass combinations, the above-mentioned Divination Wizards and Peace Clerics are the big ones I think, along with Chronurgy Wizards and Vengeance Paladins
During the social portion of the game, the players struggled mightily whenever the Fey Wanderer was busy elsewhere. With that said, Rangers are a very sneaky class by default (rivaling and sometimes even surpassing the Rogue,) so I think they would've adapted pretty easily without a Fey Wanderer. Hard to say if this would still hold true in different modules, but this specific Candlekeep Mystery had branching 'sneak in' and 'stroll right in' paths. They probably would've gone the former route without the Fey Wanderer to carry the latter.
I wouldn't say the players were less experienced, exactly. Even the newest player has been playing for the bulk of 5E's existence and has multiple long-running campaigns under her belt (as well as an abundance of oneshots and mini-campaigns.) I'd say that half the party is just more casual. They're not trolling the internet for what the best race/class combos are and what the most useless/useful spells are, etc. If we were to assume that all four of them were hardcore players with a natural inclination to optimize...to be honest, I don't think the module was built for that. The party was terrifyingly efficient as it was. If they had all been optimized...I'm not sure what I could've done to challenge them. That said, even the most hardcore intense players in my group don't like to optimize. They prefer optimizing more to achieve a certain flavor than for mechanics. Nothing wrong with either approach, mind you. I'm just sharing what my party's natural inclinations are.
As a DM, the big criticism I received (besides things that were module-specific) were the lack of inter-party dynamics and the time. The players agreed that each of them individually got plenty of spotlight, but they would've wanted some more space to interact with each other from a roleplay perspective. Which is fair. In terms of time, I did really underestimate the length of the oneshot. We started playing at around 5pm and wrapped up after midnight. In terms of what I enjoyed the most (outside of the stock 'everyone had fun' answer,) it was probably seeing how the different Rangers approached a given situation differently. The Fey Wanderer would try to talk the party out of trouble, the Gloom Stalker would go looking for trouble, the Beast Master would follow her pet's lead, and the Swarmkeeper contributed with battlefield control.
For me, dread ambusher is a lot like divine smite. It jumps off the page as really impressive! But when you take the damage output that they add, and divide it over 3, 4, or 5 rounds, it ends up being the same or less than other level 3 subclass damage boosts or other uses of a single first level spell slot.
Amazing topics, insights and learnings. Rangers are awesome.
I still wanna play an AoE specialist Hunter with Horde Breaker and Hail of Thorns to test the effectiveness.
I am DMing BG:DiA now with and someone is playing a hunter doing just that! It is...very effective. They just got to level 12. When they got to level 11 he asked me if the level 11 volley feature was wrong somehow. LOL!! I told him it wasn't wrong.
Thanks very much for responding, if you run any others like this, regardless of class, I'd be interested in reading about it.
I've always disliked the mentality that I've come across in groups that you all need to be different classes, or that your group needs certain archetypes etc, so I'm really glad this worked well. I think when you're lacking something in a party it can actually promote more roleplaying or creative solutions, but that said I think the Ranger is one of the most well rounded classes, especially with a Fey Wanderer for a face these days.
Thanks very much for responding, if you run any others like this, regardless of class, I'd be interested in reading about it.
I've always disliked the mentality that I've come across in groups that you all need to be different classes, or that your group needs certain archetypes etc, so I'm really glad this worked well. I think when you're lacking something in a party it can actually promote more roleplaying or creative solutions, but that said I think the Ranger is one of the most well rounded classes, especially with a Fey Wanderer for a face these days.
Once again cheers for sharing!
This. Then again, you can usually get the different archetypes even if everyone plays the same class. I completely agree that Rangers are very well-rounded, they get a lot more flak than they deserve.
For me, dread ambusher is a lot like divine smite. It jumps off the page as really impressive! But when you take the damage output that they add, and divide it over 3, 4, or 5 rounds, it ends up being the same or less than other level 3 subclass damage boosts or other uses of a single first level spell slot.
I ran the numbers once and compared to the classes that can deal extra damage without a bonus action, IIRC I discovered the Gloomstalker will deal more average damage until the 3rd to 4th turn, and slowly fall off afterwards. That said I think most encounters would either be over or be won at that point, and all that remains is cleanup. There's also something to be said for the ability to deal burst damage and potentially remove a threat early, especially considering the high initiative a Gloomstalker will have.
For me, dread ambusher is a lot like divine smite. It jumps off the page as really impressive! But when you take the damage output that they add, and divide it over 3, 4, or 5 rounds, it ends up being the same or less than other level 3 subclass damage boosts or other uses of a single first level spell slot.
I ran the numbers once and compared to the classes that can deal extra damage without a bonus action, IIRC I discovered the Gloomstalker will deal more average damage until the 3rd to 4th turn, and slowly fall off afterwards. That said I think most encounters would either be over or be won at that point, and all that remains is cleanup. There's also something to be said for the ability to deal burst damage and potentially remove a threat early, especially considering the high initiative a Gloomstalker will have.
I found close to the same thing.
The single attack is powerful if it removes a big enemy. Less powerful if there are many enemies. And about round 3 is the cutoff for the higher damage.
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A couple of weeks ago, I ran an "Oops, all Rangers" oneshot with one of my weekly groups. We had a party of four Rangers (collectively known as the Power Rangers). I allowed them their choice of any of the published Ranger subclasses (making a distinction between the PHB and Tasha Beast Masters,) as well as the Drakewarden. I requested that they each choose a different subclass. The party ended up with a Gloom Stalker, a Tasha Beast Master, a Fey Wanderer, and a Swarmkeeper. The oneshot was made at Level 11 because that is where the truism that Rangers "fall off a cliff" starts to come in. In order to limit bias, I decided to run the Candlekeep Mystery of the appropriate level. In this case, it was The Curious Tale of Wisteria Vale. For the sake of limiting variables, I asked all the players to be the same race (although I did allow for them to take different subraces.) Ultimately, the party chose to play Elves. We ended up with two Wood (Fey Wanderer and Swarmkeeper), a High (Beast Master), and a Mark of Shadow (Gloom Stalker). I allowed the Tasha floating ASI rule.
Though I did not request this, it happened that each party member chose a different fighting style. The Gloom Stalker decided to go the dual-wielder route. The Swarmkeeper had a cache of thrown weapons. The Fey Wanderer chose the way of the longbow. Finally, the Beast Master had a walking stick she used as her Shillelagh.
They all received standard equipment and one basic +1 weapon of their chosen fighting style.
There's a truism that Gloom Stalker is considered to be the best Ranger class, so I spoke with the player privately to make him the 'control group' of sorts, since I wanted to measure the rest of the party's effectiveness against him. For an added bonus, the Gloom Stalker player was also the most experienced in the group.
After the session, I sent my players a survey asking them about their experience, as well as their opinions of the Rangers that were present.
Ultimately, the players had a lot of fun playing this Ranger party. They all expressed wanting to play with this specific party again, and for longer. They also agreed that the Curious Tale of Wisteria Vale wasn't necessarily the best adventure they've played (but that wasn't here nor there) due to its awkward pacing and dungeon. They agreed that the Fey Wanderer performed by far the best out of combat, while the Gloom Stalker performed the best in combat*
Beast Master and Fey Wanderer were the subclasses that impressed the party the most.
I did not flub dice in the party's favor, nor did I make any allowances for benefits given based on certain situations or roleplay. If anything, I stacked the deck against them. They still managed to come out more than triumphant.
Stray observations:
One final observation that we all unanimously agreed upon was that an All-Ranger party is deadly as hell.
The Curious Tale of Wisteria Vale ends with an encounter against a Beholder. This Beholder did not make it all the way through the second round. The party did absolute bonkers damage round one, and finished him off in round two before his actual turn had even begun. It would have been a complete stomp were it not for legendary actions. And even those failed. Some of it was pure luck (like the Gloom Stalker making his Charisma Save,) but a lot of wit was because a majority of eye rays targeted Wis or Dex, which the party had a natural advantage against.
For comparison, I once ran a similar encounter a few years ago with a party composed of a Grave Cleric, a Hexblade, a Lore Bard, a Shadow Sorcerer, and an Battlemaster, and the Beholder nearly TPK'd them.
The Power Rangers were so efficient that they retroactively made a fairly well-rounded party look like a bunch of chumps.
Anyway, I ran an all-ranger party and it was a ton of fun. Ask me anything.
*An observation on my end was that while, yes, the Gloom Stalker dealt by far the most damage in combat, Stalker's Flurry pretty much carried him. Umbral Sight and Dread Ambusher weren't nearly as useful as one would've thought. And the Gloom Stalker player really did play him more like a Fighter-lite than a Ranger, to the point where only Stalker's Flurry stood out.
Question about which Features were used? for each of the rangers. Tashas varriant options or PHB or a mix?
I allowed my players to pick and choose between the PHB features and the Tasha features as they saw fit. Ultimately, all four of them chose to go with the PHB features. For the more casual players, it was simply because they didn't care to hunt down the features presented in Tasha's, whereas the more experienced players actually preferred the flavor of Favored Enemy and Natural Explorer over the new features.
Favored Enemy (Aberrations) came up a few times, which allowed the Beast Master to get some intel on the Beholder. Outside of that, however, neither Favored Enemy or Natural Explorer saw much use. That is to say, the Power Rangers didn't really ask to make checks that would've triggered those abilities. As the DM, I would say that this is partly on the players not thinking to ask the right questions to proc those abilities, and partly on the module itself for not having a ton of places where those abilities would come up organically.
I have questions, since I might end up in one of these!
1) In what possible context is Charm Person more useful than Enhance Ability? It seems like the same spell but strictly worse for solving social problems usefully.
2) How did the Beast Companion report back when scouting?
3) If you played at L11, the Swarmkeeper should have been fully online, able to accomplish being in permanent half cover while ignoring OAs or knocking enemies prone. Your party's one seems to have almost... *deliberately* tanked the results by choosing thrown instead of melee, the style swarmkeepers are built to use. Can you speak to that at all? The results just seem very sus.
1. Charm Person procs Beguiling Twist, which came in handy a few times. Also worth noting is that the Fey Wanderer didn't take the Enhance Ability spell, but Charm Person was a freebie for the subclass anyway.
2. It was a combination of good insight checks from the Beast Master and the Speak with Animals spell
3. As stated, the group was a combination of casual players and more...invested players. As such, the characters weren't especially well-optimized so much as they were designed to fulfill the character idea the players had in mind. Given that the more casual players didn't know how -nor did they care to know how- to optimize, I actually preferred it that way. My reasoning being that if some characters were obviously optimized and others weren't, that would skew the results considerably in favor of the optimized characters. I liked that that the whole party wasn't especially optimized, as it kept the relative power level of the party more or less even. That said, I didn't give instructions to the players on how to build their respective characters, nor did I express my opinions on optimization (or lack thereof) to them prior to the session. It just happened to work out that way.
tl;dr: the Swarmkeeper went with thrown weapons because he liked that idea for his character; not because it was a better or worse choice mechanically.
2. I saw no reference to beastmaster scouting. There is still the whole debate that raw tasha's Beast cant do anything without the ranger. (Unless the ranger is unconscious.)
"Fey Wanderer's face skills were crucial for intel-gathering, followed by the the Beast Master pet's ability to scout."
I'm not sure what the debate is - the RAW is pretty clear. The companion dodges unless told otherwise, but can move and react on its own, so you can use its move (it will refuse to dash) to scout. It just won't be stealthy unless you take steps - yet another reason to strongly consider a telepathic race. If you don't mind being broadcast only, Custom Lineage (Telepathic) and Ghostwise Halflings fit the bill, and Kalashtar are two-way. Best solutions I've found to getting the Primal Companion into a more ideal state.
What you are describing only applies to combat though. What happens outside of combat, where scouting normally takes place, is different.
First of all, very cool idea and thanks for sharing.
Regarding this, how come the extra attack from Dread Ambusher wasn't considered useful? I can see why the almost extra attack of Stalker's Flurry came of as better since it can be used after turn 1 but four attacks and extra movement on the first turn must be good for something, right? :P
Also, what made the Gloom Stalker "useless" out of combat? Was it how this particular character was built or a general lack of out of combat abilities? Umbral Sight is naturally situational but anything else they lacked?
And a few general questions.
1. It's not that the extra attack from Dread Ambusher wasn't useful. It was. What I meant is that, in the grand scheme of things, it didn't contribute as much as one would first assume by theorycrafting. Stalker's Flurry contributed considerably more. Personally, I feel like dual wielding (of all things) maybe reduced the effectiveness of Dread Ambusher, since the off-hand attack effectively amounted to an "always on" Dread Ambusher past round one. The other contributing factor was accuracy. In the combat encounters that we ran, it was 50/50 between the Gloom Stalker landing all four attacks in round one or not. If he missed two attacks, he could reroll one with Stalker's Flurry, which put him on par with his Round 2+ performance, where he's making three attacks and more likely to just miss and reroll one. As for the initiative and movement bonuses, the initiative did come in handy, I will agree. But the movement didn't matter so much with the size of the battlefield and the starting position of the monsters.
I think it's worth keeping in mind that the results are inhibited by scope. As a oneshot, we only had so much data. Perhaps in a more protracted adventure, Dread Ambusher would've shown it's worth.
2. I would say it was a combination of the module not presenting many opportunities for the Gloom Stalker to be in his element, so to speak, and the way the player built the Gloom Stalker. The player seemed to have built his character with combat in mind. Hence why he played mostly like a Fighter-lite. The only spell he cast was Hunter's Mark. There were also some pretty bad die rolls whenever he tried to do exploration, which should be taken into account.
The way the module works is that it assumes the party will go one of two routes: break into the mansion and sneak around exploring it without getting caught, or walking right into the mansion as guests to the ball. The former approach would've probably helped the Gloom Stalker more, but the latter (which put the Fey Wanderer in her element,) was the choice the party made. To be fair to the party, the module seems to have been designed around the assumption that they would break in, but consistently pushes the DM to invite them to the ball instead. This disconnect is part of why the players had issues with the module chosen.
3. Actually, not really. They felt pretty well-rounded. The Swarmkeeper handled battlefield control, the Fey Wanderer was the face, the Gloom Stalker was dpr, and the Beast Master became a pseudo-tank by forcing the bad guys to distribute the damage between her and her pets (she took Summon Beast for more flying shenanigans.) And they all had at least one healing spell to keep themselves upright. At no point did they say "Gosh, I wish we had an [x] right now," which -to be completely honest- was very surprising to me. The one note I would say would be that whenever the Fey Wanderer was busy elsewhere, the rest of the party's lack of charisma became very apparent. But that would've happened regardless of class if she was still the only face in the group.
4. I wanted to control the variables as much as I could (while still giving the players some freedom of choice,) so I asked that they all play the same race. I then asked the party to choose which race they wanted out of all the options available in 5E, and they unanimously decided to play as elves. To be honest, their being elves didn't play too much into their individual effectiveness in or out of combat, which was kind of what I was hoping for. The unique elf traits only came up sporadically (their Perception proficiency was the most used ability, but as Rangers, they wanted Perception anyway.) Personally, I don't think a different race would've produced drastically different results. But I could be wrong. Would be interesting to compare with a group who chose differently. I do think Tasha's floating ASI's influenced the decision to play elves. At least among the more hardcore players.
5. As I said in a previous comment, the players were a mix of casual and hardcore. While I didn't give them guidance on how to build their rangers, I liked that none of them optimized, as it allowed for the relative power level between players to remain more or less even. Fey Wanderer, Tasha Beast Master, and Swarmkeeper were chosen by their individual players because they liked the flavor presented. The exception is Gloom Stalker. I did ask the GS player to choose that subclass because I wanted a "control group" of sorts. Though beyond that, I also didn't give him any guidance on how to build his character. The only thing I did tell them was not to multiclass, since that would skew the results of this all-Ranger oneshot.
6. Hahaha. This one was done with one of my four home groups, but yeah. If I ever do something similar with the online community, I'll be sure to post about it. I think it would be interesting to run the same module with the same conceits, but using the Ranger subclasses that weren't chosen for this one (Hunter, PHB Beast Master, Horizon Walker, Monster Slayer, and Drakewarden) and then weighing those results against the ones I got from this oneshot. But right now, I have neither the time nor the spoons. Maybe in the future.
Thanks for the answers. Yeah, it seems to hold up to my suspicions and expectations. As you say, a lot of the results seem to be due to the scenario. It would be interesting to see what happened if you run the scenario again but if you can't play as a Few Wanderer the lack of a face PC will probably limit the options. Still, great fun. :)
Oops. I didn't see this one.
For me, dread ambusher is a lot like divine smite. It jumps off the page as really impressive! But when you take the damage output that they add, and divide it over 3, 4, or 5 rounds, it ends up being the same or less than other level 3 subclass damage boosts or other uses of a single first level spell slot.
Amazing topics, insights and learnings. Rangers are awesome.
I still wanna play an AoE specialist Hunter with Horde Breaker and Hail of Thorns to test the effectiveness.
I am DMing BG:DiA now with and someone is playing a hunter doing just that! It is...very effective. They just got to level 12. When they got to level 11 he asked me if the level 11 volley feature was wrong somehow. LOL!! I told him it wasn't wrong.
Thanks very much for responding, if you run any others like this, regardless of class, I'd be interested in reading about it.
I've always disliked the mentality that I've come across in groups that you all need to be different classes, or that your group needs certain archetypes etc, so I'm really glad this worked well. I think when you're lacking something in a party it can actually promote more roleplaying or creative solutions, but that said I think the Ranger is one of the most well rounded classes, especially with a Fey Wanderer for a face these days.
Once again cheers for sharing!
This. Then again, you can usually get the different archetypes even if everyone plays the same class. I completely agree that Rangers are very well-rounded, they get a lot more flak than they deserve.
I ran the numbers once and compared to the classes that can deal extra damage without a bonus action, IIRC I discovered the Gloomstalker will deal more average damage until the 3rd to 4th turn, and slowly fall off afterwards. That said I think most encounters would either be over or be won at that point, and all that remains is cleanup. There's also something to be said for the ability to deal burst damage and potentially remove a threat early, especially considering the high initiative a Gloomstalker will have.
I found close to the same thing.
The single attack is powerful if it removes a big enemy. Less powerful if there are many enemies. And about round 3 is the cutoff for the higher damage.