Hello, I am NorroDaeker. I am wondering, does anyone have any good recommendations for making Ranger characters in Dungeons and Dragons?

I am kind of new with Dungeons and Dragons since I've recently gotten interested in the last couple of months or so. 

Its a very broad question. What do you want to know?

do you want to know what is most powerful, what is cool (which could be anything), how something works?

my general recommendation is to only take 5 levels in the ranger class and then multiclass i to something else. For a classic ranger feel a ranger 5 could go into rpgue from there on.

Multi-classing would be interesting to try, I wouldn't mind doing that once I get more acquainted with DND.

Some questions I would have regarding with making a Ranger character are: What spells/items are recommended? What are some good proficiency skills? And to end it off, what are the recommended stats for Intelligence/Strength/Wisdom/Charisma/Dexterity/Constitution? 

I hope you don't mind these questions. Thank you for replying to my post. 

Sure, but I would suggest reading a bit in the players handbook since a lot of this is pretty well described there.

For spells in the beginning there are two I think you cannot go without: Hunter's mark giving all your attacks against a target +1d6 damage and Absorb elements which gives you resistance to an element on command. Both are very strong. At level 5 you get lv 2 spells and ranger have many good spells here, some good options are: Silence (to prevent enemy spellcasting), Healing Spirit for massive healing, Pass without Trace for hiding your party.

Both Absorb Elements and Healing Spirit comes from the official Xanathars guide book.

As for proficiencies you can go with whatever you want really, but classic choices are stealth (sneak up on people), perception (for spotting and hearing) and survival (for tracking prey).

For stats usually go dexterity as high as possible, and then constitution/wisdom.

Definitely wisdom second. Wood elves are really good cause of extra dex and wis, as well as 35 ft movement speed and the ability to hide well. Aarackocra are good choice, they have flying speed, making them brilliant archers. Humans can be useful, and may get a free feat. Forest gnomes gain intelligence, but the ability to speak to small animals is cool for a ranger, and they are small, meaning as a beast master you can ride a medium sized companion! For subclasses, fey wanderers are amazing skirmishers, while hunter and horizon walker are about one or two big attacks. Gloomstalker is good for a stealthy ranger, monster hunter for anyone who hates casters. Beast master can be good if you play it well. Ask if your DM uses UA for the variant companion rules. If not, take giant poisonous snake or giant frog. Swarmkeeper is fun to play and gets extra spells that can be really useful. Again, ask DM if you use UA, as fey wanderer and swarmkeeper are both UA as well. I hope this helped!

Hey there, thanks for answering my question Kaoshi. And also, thanks for the recommendations. It was informative. I have not gotten into playing an actual DND match, but I would hope to do so one of these days, when I have the time. I've heard you can play it online as well. 

Hey Rasmus, thanks for the recommendations. This will be quite informative to know, thank you for your input on my questions. I'll have to definitely take a look at the players handbook, or at least the latest edition for more information. 

I do not reccommend beast master unless you are an advanced player. I would expand on it, but I don't think that I have the fingers to type exactly how to make a beast master powerful. For a ranger, Id reccommend literally any other subclass, my personal favorite being Horizon Stalker for roleplay and stat purposes.

And i recommend Gloomstalker as a subclass.

An interesting recommendation as a Subclass for Ranger. I'll have to think about that one.

I'm playing a half-elf Ranger (Qxyxryt, pronounced "Steve" in common), and decided to take the Horizon Walker archetype. I gave him two-weapon fighting, carrying two short swords, though he can swap out one for a hand crossbow when ranged attacks are needed. I purchased some UA content for another character concept I'm working on, and I'm trying to convince my DMs to let Steve have the telepathic feat for passing level 4 last session.

I'm going to use this character in a non-canon session, some time, using this UA material - https://media.wizards.com/2019/dnd/downloads/UA-ClassFeatures.pdf. If it works out, I might adopt these rules (crossed digits they make an official rule book some time in the near future).

Should he live long enough, I plan to multiclass as a Sorcerer.

UA is free. You don't need to buy it.

I've been playing my current campaign as a Gloom Stalker Ranger, variant human, took Sharpshooter as the feat. I rolled stats and ended up with 16 DEX and WIS with 15 CON, so any MADness (multiple ability dependency) is fairly balanced here, even though the ranger isn't really that dependent on Wisdom. If I didn't plan on taking Resilient: Constitution in the future I probably would've had CON at 16 instead because the ranger gets some cool and nifty spells but a lot of them are concentration and any help to maintain that will help, so having a good CON score or having saving throw proficiency will be nice. Speaking of saving throw profs, the Gloom Stalker gains proficiency in Wisdom saving throws at lvl 7, which is nothing to be scoffed at. If I remember correctly, DEX, CON and WIS are the most prevalent saving throws and having proficiency in all of them will make you more durable and resilient than you'd think. Just last session my PC died because of a failed WIS save throw. He was brought back to life though. 

Gloom Stalker specifics:

The Umbral sight feature lets have darkvision if you don't already have it and if you do adds 30 ft range to it. In darkness if someone relies on darkvision to see you, you are invisible too them. Invisibility in this game isn't actually straight up "you can't see me now no matter what you do", but it's generally pretty great, you get advantage on attack rolls which pairs nicely with Sharpshooter, oppnents have disadvantage on attack rolls againts you. Now, Trying to use this feature in a party relies on you having some darkness to go into, if the some of the party relies on a light source this can be difficult to make use of. Also it's generally a drag to keep track of so the DM might handwaive the darkness thing completely, which is understandable but nerfs a gloom stalker substantially in his supposed favorate element. We recently switched to Roll20 where we use dynamic lightning which brings Umbral Sight into the mix all the time and it's really nice to have.

Dread Ambusher let's you dish out some incredible amounts of damage on the oppening rounds if you're a little lucky. You gain an extra attack on the first round of combat, which is more useful than it sounded because most combats lasts 3-4 rounds, and you get extra damage on that attack. If you pair this with Hunter's Mark and even Sharpshooter you can do around 50 damage on the opening round, I actually did that at lvl 4 once. With Longbow and DEX boosted to 18, that's 1d8+4(DEX)+10(Sharpshooter) avg=18.5, + Hunter's Mark 1d6 avg=3.5, do that twice and add the 1d8 from Dread Ambusher's extra attack you get an average of 48.5 damage if both attacks hit. This isn't something you want to do all the time because it uses resources (spell slot for Hunter' mark) and generally makes it harder to hit your target, but know that if you need to do some big nova damage the potential is there.

Gloom Stalker also gets some decent spells actually. They gain Disgusie Self which goes with sneaky aspect of the subclass, they also get Rope Trick which allows you take a short rest almost anywhere, even when in combat if you really need a break. Fear, Greater Invisibility(now you can have advantage even in light!) and Seeming(multiple Disuise Self for a much longer time period) are all very good if you should need them.

This is about as far as I've come in the progression (just levelled up to lvl 5). Overall the ranger class is  just as good a fighter as a fighter or paladin(I have played them before) but they are different, they can be more sneaky, more specialized and as such can seem somewhat useless. This is generally because of the Favoured Enemy and Natural Explorer mechanic. So far all it's done for me is let me forage extra food meaning I don't really but rations and thus saving small amounts of money. This is also the reason many seems to say that you should never go past lvl 5 as a ranger because all you get at lvl 6 is litterally nothing. You gain an extra Favoured Enemy and an extra terrain for Natural Explorer. This could actually be useful if you your campaign has taken you somewhere new and you need to track some kind of creature, it is very lackluster though. However, don't let that discourage you form sticking to it as a ranger, I mean, if you want to play a ranger you should play a ranger. They offer great combat ability as well as combat support and utility with spells,  along with some nice flavour for exploration and such both form features and spells. Speaking of spells it's generally difficult to use (and it should be since you are just as good as fighting as anyone else without spells) because of few known spells available, and you don't prepare spells every day like a paladin so you have to choose carefully, and few spell slots which means concentration spells look nice if they have a contineous effect. This leads into the issue of using a spell slot for a spell with concentration and then loosing concentration before your next turn, meaning you just lost a spell slot for almost nothing, this is why CON is important. Also, beeing the only class with the spell Hunter's Mark you feel like you have to both take it (which you should) and use it all the time (which you actually shouldn't in my opinion unless you are in a combat where you are gonna be keeping your concentration and you know it's not gonna be over quickly, or you need to do as much damage as possible as quickly as possible or if you think you need to track something). In my opinion you should choose the spells that make your character feel more like the character you thought of. Also, if you are light on healing in the party like only having one character with cure wounds or healing word, you should probably take Goodberry and use it every day and distribute the berries around the party so that everyone can bring someone downed back up to 1 HP and thus preventing some potential feailed death throws and deaths.

Something the Ranger might struggle with is non-magical damage resistances and immunities. A Ranger does generally good damage and has some cool ways to do extra damage by way of subclass feature(which lessens the need to cast Hunter's Mark for damage) or Hunter's Mark, but it's almost all just more of the weapons damage type, except for the Horizon Walker since they can make all the weapon damage into Force damage with the same feature that gives some extra damage.

So after all that I really only have two advices: Consider you ranger character a fighter with a different focus than fighters so that the very lackluster Favoured Enemy and Natural Explorer features don't drag your mood down, when you get to use them they are actually very useful, you also get extra languages from this. Rangers also get more skills than most and are only really bested by the Bards and Rogues because of expertise. Second advice, make your choices based on what reinforces your character, both thematically and mechanically. It's really easy to get hung up on min-maxing and that makes it less fun to play ranger since you have that big bloat of Favoured Enemy and Natural Explorer not always providing you with something, but also because the things you are really good at noone else is going to be much better at it than you. I can personally recommend Gloom Stalker but it may clash with your party, rangers in general is actually really nice to play.

Thanks for the advice, littlegonzo. It was quite informative. 

Great advice.  I'm starting a new character he will be a variant human rogue scout/ ranger gloom stalker. Doing 4 levels rogue. Just not sure if i should start rogue or ranger lol. With rogue and descent rolls as scout I get expertise in multiple skills. Taking crossbow expert  and hand crossbow. 

Starting as a Ranger you start out with a d10 hit dice, so automatically 10 hp + CON there, you get STR and DEX save proficiency. You get 3 skill proficiencies and can choose from 8. Learn an extra language from Favored Enemy(which you'll get whenever you take lvl 1 Ranger).

Starting as Rogue gets you 8+CON starting hp, DEX and INT saves. 4 skill profs from a pool of 11. Whenever you take lvl 1 Rogue you get expertise in 2 skills you have prof in.

When you multiclass these two you won't really loose anything like when you multiclass into Fighter you won't get Heavy Armor prof. With both Ranger and Rogue you'll get medium armor, shield, martial weapons(all types), one skill from the new class and if you're not a Rouge already you'll get Thieve's tools prof. Going Scout Rogue lands you Nature and Survival prof and expertise even if you don't have prof in those skills beforehand so that's an option to use to gain a lot of profs by not taking any of those two from the Ranger list.

If you want more skills, Rogue start is the obvious one, more hp go for Ranger(only guaranteed 2 more hp though). Do you favor STR or INT saves? Rouge is a little more versatile with the starting equipment packs available. If it was me I'd ignore the hp part even though it can become important at some point, I'd look at what save proficiency I want the most(probably leaning towards STR as that is likely to be a dump stat more than INT) and if I really need one more skill(look at your party and the skills you can get, also some classes only gets 2 skills profs so you ending up with 6 if you start as Ranger and then go Scout Rogue vs you getting 7 if you start the other way around is debatable if it is really necessary IMO)