Less Favored Terrain
If there was ever an ability that called for good GM/player communication, it’s the ranger’s favored terrain. It’s one of those supremely flavorful abilities that evokes backstory, differentiates similarly built PCs, and makes your master of the untamed lands character feel like a proper wilderness hero. I even like that it stops working when you get outside of your comfort zone. If you’ve spent your life in trackless jungles and suddenly find yourself in, let’s say, suburban New Hampshire, that’s an amazing roleplaying opportunity. The thing is, I wouldn’t want to spend my entire adventuring career playing with nonfunctional powers.
I started thinking about this issue not because of favored terrain, but because of the ranger’s other conditional ability. If any of you guys listen to the Glass Cannon Podcast, you know that a certain half-orc ranger picked up favored enemy (undead) during level-up. Many levels later and there’s still a distinct lack of undead in the campaign. This has resulted in an ongoing feud between GM Troy Lavallee and disgruntled player Joe O’Brien. The million gp question is this: Is it the GM’s responsibility to provide enough campaign information for a player to choose their favored terrain/favored enemy, or is it on the player to guess correctly from context clues within the game? My thought is that it’s on neither of them. Since they’re running a published adventure path, this is actually Paizo’s responsibility.
You can grab a free copy of the Giantslayer Player’s Guide right here, but the relevant bit appears at the bottom of page 4. It’s in the “Favored Enemies and Favored Terrains” section:
The majority of the Giantslayer Adventure Path takes place in the Mindspin Mountains, though a few adventures take the PCs into underground, hilly, and marshy environments. The best first choice for favored terrain is mountains (which includes hills), and a strong second choice of terrain is underground. Solid favored enemy choices include humanoid (giant), dragon, humanoid (orc), and magical beast.
If you’re going to build a campaign with a specific enemy, a specific theme, or a specific setting in mind, you need to communicate that information to the player. If you’re running with a published product (as in the Glass Cannon example), that work is often done for you. But even if you’re the kind of GM with a spiral notebook full of delicious homebrew, it’s still a good idea to jot down key player information and pass it along to the rest of the group. Take a look at those Paizo player’s guides. There are a lot of them. No need to create something so elaborate, but I think that they’re a great place to get ideas as you begin to draft up your own campaign intro. At the very least it will prevent future arguments about the lack of undead in your giantslaying campaign.
Question of the day then. Have you ever found yourself blindsided by a turn in the campaign? Perhaps you thought you were going on a dungeon delve only to be shanghaied into a pirate campaign without a Swim skill. Maybe you were kitted out for urban exploration and then found yourself trekking through the wilderness. How did you adapt to the situation? Let’s hear it in the comments!
ARE YOU AN IMPATIENT GAMER? If so, you should check out the “Henchman” reward level over on The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. For just one buck a month, you can get each and every Handbook of Heroes comic a day earlier than the rest of your party members. That’s bragging rights right there!
The first 5e group I played in did a little game in session 0 to determine the general course of the campaign. We all selected a plot hook regarding a kingdom that has vanished overnight, leaving both a mystery and a vacuum of power in the region. We sure never did investigate that mystery. We brushed up against it at one point, but then got distracted by a sidequest. Eventually we ended up cheating the Drow out of several million gold, which turned out to be a far more personal and interesting quest hook.
Oh BTW is Ranger just talking to herself?
I think the speech bubble’s tail on the right needs to be pointing lower is all, since I think the Drow is speaking and trying to push her in…
Ranger is a silent protagonist:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/strong-silent-type
Her speech bubbles are on the left. It is indeed Inquisitor doing the convincing. I’ll see if we can’t change up the tails before EOD.
Edit: Fixed!
Sort of happened to a friend, where he decided to roll a cleric. He knew that the gods had been forced into servitude by lovecraftian horrors which now dominated the seas, and undead ran wild on the land. His plan was he would be one if the hidden faithful trying to bring the worship of the gods back and free them from their eldritch masters. What he did not know is that, mechanically, the gods’ current state would significantly nerf him. I think he was expecting that though clerics were extremely rare, the gods would dump all of their piwer into the ones they have, mechanically making them ubchanged. Instead, he found all of his damage and heals spells nerfed, and he can only use cantrips wisdom mod+prof times per day. He’s already had to pull a “my sibling I’ve never mentioned before shows up to take my place” after an unfortunate vampire encounter. It’s a young campaign so we still don’t know if there is anything he can do to fix this in the short term. Fortunately, he got a huge boon from the random loot table, a belt of cloud giant strength at level 15. Sometimes the dice take pity on us I suppose.
Yeesh. I guess the dude is a battle cleric now.
I do think that one’s on the GM though. If you’re going to make drastic changes to the way a class works, you should probably divulge that info before the campaign starts.
For my money, I think that a new Domain would be a good way to play it. “Secret Servant” or something. Do the nerfs you mentioned, but add in a few elements from the rogue class to represent your clandestine life. That way the player gets to play something fun and flavorful rather than “the class you want to play but strictly worse.”
First off, you get more than one Favored Enemy, so it should have been obvious by the name alone what his first choice should have been. He could also have asked to pay for retraining, or at the very least taken a hit on his first choice for the sake of back story and picked up a relevant one for his second…
I picked Favored Terain (Urban) for my slayer just recently. We are currently in the desert, but that is going to be his main area of operation for the most part.
I think as long as you get the chance to retrain, it works to not know what your character will be facing next. I have a character who has retrained a LOT of his choices about three times now. (He is my first character so I didn’t know what I was doing with him at first…)
I believe “giants” was his first favored enemy. He went with “undead” as his second. It’s that second one that caused discord.
Anywho, assuming that retraining is allowed I think it’s a rock-solid strategy. If you aren’t playing with those optional rules though, I think the calculus might change a bit. I’ve got to wonder if the Glass Cannon guys are aware of Pathfinder: Ultimate Campaign. I certainly haven’t seen them invoke it at any point.
For my part, I’ve got a kind of a love/hate going on with the retraining rules. I like them in some cases (e.g. new players that desperately need a rebuild; finding a legendary training dojo as “treasure;” etc.) but if you play too fast and loose you wind up with rangers that always have the relevant “favoreds” and wizards that always know the right spells. That tends to take away some of the challenge and consequence of leveling up.
I guess it depends on how hard your GM enforces the rule about, “Training requires spending time with a character of your class whose class level is at least 1 higher than yours and who has the class feature you want.” That sounds like a solid side-quest to me, and mollifies the dickish “players have to earn nice things” GM living in the back of my head. YMMV.
Yeah that’s true. It is way easier at lower levels, but we basically put it as you retrain yourself.
It makes sense to me anyways that if you are altering a class feature that nobody else strictly taught you, then you shouldn’t necessarily need to learn the new one from someone else either. But that’s likely just one of those house rules that varies from party to party…
I just feel that being upset at someone else for your choices… I dunno. That gets into a grey area where you play with meta knowledge of an upcoming fight and somehow you are just better at fighting x creature even though you have never even seen one.
Maybe I’m just picky when it comes to character continuity.
Oof. Let’s not even get into the “I failed to identify the creature but I still add my bonus damage because the rules know that it’s my favored enemy” conundrum. That mess just hurts my head.
Personally, I’d prefer it if the Favored Enemy/Favored Terrain provided bonuses strictly to interaction/exploration side of the game and left out the combat side, and give rangers some small universal combat bonuses to compensate. I feel it would help rangers mechanically overall while also encouraging choosing more interesting and thematically fitting favored enemies, without making the DM feel obligated to throw lots of those enemies and terrains at the party.
There isn’t really a class the specializes in laying snares or traps. Maybe there’s some design space there for your ranger’s “universal combat bonuses.”
What you have described is 5e’s Ranger. The community complained about it enough that their latest revised Ranger UA goes back to giving it combat benefits.
It’s more of a meta thing, but I have had issues when other people at the table found out that my level 1 Ranger has Favored Enemy: Humanoid (Human), because apparently they suspect me to be a mass murderer or some kinda serial killer.
I think it’s realistic to have favored enemy human for most Rangers though. Many bandits are human unless your GM has a hard-on for making only orcs and goblins bandits.
The players at my table do have one specific quote on Favored Enemy though. “Favored Enemy Human is cautious, Favored Enemy Elf is racist, and Favored Enemy Halfling needs to be sentenced to a very long prison sentence.”
Aside from that, I haven’t had too many issues with the Favored Enemy/Terrain mechanics.
How do you go about tagging on favored enemy bonus damage then? Do you just let the GM handle it behind the screen?
Yeah, the old favored enemy human is a serial killer is an old cliché, unfortunately due to min-maxers being mostly the ones that take it, but there is justification for even a LG or LN character roleplaying wise.
– Bounty Hunter.
– Policeman or city guard equivalent with experience in resolving crimes.
– Vigilante.
– Typical dwarf with a eternal grudge against a group or organization.
– A normal veteran soldier on a specific war.
It just needs to rely on non-letal dmg to be believable in most cases.
Would love to see a well done ”Favored enemy Hafling” character.
idk if its misplaced but inquisitor (thats her official name right ?) is pretty hot.
Is she part of the anti-party since we saw her with paladin ? It feels weird to have one of your “player character” be a drow given how much special needs they usually have
Inquisitor is the leader of “Team Bounty Hunter.” Their story starts over here:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/evil-twins
She and Paladin just happened to share a mark that day. 🙂
As for Inquisitor’s relative hotness, our Handbook of Erotic Fantasy strips live over here:
https://www.patreon.com/laurelshelleyreuss
Some of them do feature a bit (read: a lot) more of Inquisitor.
That thing been itching me for a while but as a poor student, i cant afford it 🙁
I feel you on the ‘poor student’ thing. My wife went to art school. :/
https://frugal-millennial-cqfzxaryvbit.stackpathdns.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/student-loan-debt.jpg
As always, Inquisitor is my favorite. I particularly enjoy getting to see the long loopy hair, that’s a treat.
I’d say something about wizards having learned a bad spell list for what they’re facing, but wizards in general have a very malleable set of ‘class skills’ insomuch as ‘you get more of them by going to the library.’
To be honest, the DMs I’ve played with have been pretty good about forewarning of the general scheme. My ranger has been appropriate to setting, my bard was informed of the right ways to schmooze a crowd (and had a crowd to schmooze often enough for it to matter), my rogue wasn’t stuck fighting undead and constructs from sun up to sun down. I’ve been lucky.
I feel like a good way of managing the severe misdirection (in lieu of Session Zero) is to wait until after, say, the second session and allow a free retrain for anyone that feels like they’ll need it. From there, build as thou wilt, but at that point we all got a shot to optimize after tasting the air.
My favorite part of Inquisitor’s design is that her hat is always on the other side of her head. Jaunty angles for days!
My groups tend to do the “free rebuild for the first few sessions” thing too. It’s a nice safety valve if the thing doesn’t work like you though it worked.
I was playing a wizard, and my character had joined the party as they were passing through a magical university to get a magical item identified. I assumed there was going to be plenty of magical stuff to look at. Nope. Ancient sci-fi nonsense was the focus of the next 5 sessions and I had essentially no ability to do anything. There wasn’t even any interesting combat to deal with. Seriously. We had 2 encounters to deal with, and one was against an enemy we weren’t actually supposed to kill. This was the same character where I later tried to kill the rest of the party because they were all assholes to my character. I ended up leaving the game a bit after that for unrelated reasons.
“No, you don’t understand! Arthur C. Clarke said this really neat thing about how any sufficiently advanced technology is…”
“If you finish that sentence I’m going to lightning bolt the shit out of your character.”
“Yes, but will that lightning bolt be technological or magical in nature? See, it all depends on the way you look at–”
KKRAACKA THOOM!!
Well, it was more like:
“Can I use spell craft to identify this?”
“No, it’s ancient technology that’s better than magic, only the android character can actually do anything with any of this, they are the only character who actually matters. Continue to do nothing for this entire dungeon.”
“Okay, now we’re out of that dungeon and in a dwarven city. Can I use magic now?”
“Nope. There’s another tech dungeon in the basement of the city, and all the door codes in there only work for the android character.”
“Okay, now we’re out of that tech dungeon and and need to break into the dwarf lord’s vault. I have a ton of spells that could be incredibly useful when combined with the rogue’s natural abilities while the rest of the party causes a massive distraction. Seriously, dimension door, teleport, overland flight, earth glide. I can finally be of actual fucking use.”
“Nope, the rogue hates you because you have a totally irrational grudge towards the android character who I and the rest of the party hold a blatant favoritism towards, so the rogue has used a poison that makes use unable to use spells for the day. The party now plans to leave you in your hotel room while they walk straight in to the dwarven hold and ask to be let in to the vault nicely, and they will totally get in.”
I proceeded to then use the only spell I could still use(the bonus “any spell from spell book” from my bound item) in conjecture with some already prepared explosive runes in attempt to kill the party. That didn’t work(party had a lot of hp), so I fled, and the party summoned their OP allies(which I’ve mentioned before), to kill me. GM let me summon a demon with my dying breath, but the OP allies literally teleported any downed party member away when they got close to death.
Yeah. Maybe leaving that group was the right call.
I was so bored and useless during the first tech dungeon that I literally resorted to ripping the paneling out of the walls because I suspected that it might be worth something to a smith.
I’d have to say, that sounds pretty bad. Keeping a character from having any usefulness by what seems to be conscious effort according to your account is much worse than the accidental “Oh, you took favored enemy: demons? I don’t really use extraplanar creatures much, sorry.”
If you’re smart, you can get away with just knowing your DM.
I’ve recently moved to a new area so all bets are off, but in my old hometown I could pretty easily guess what he was going to use.
He was a bit of a pyro, so I selected a fire resistant race and my friend chose create and destroy water as a spell.
He loved necromancy, so the party consisted of 2 paladins, a cleric, and a ranger (not sure if he took favored enemy undead).
All of his NPCs were lying jerks, so the zone of truth and detect thoughts spells were auto-picks.
He thought we were super overpowered, but I think that more of our success than he realized was in our knowledge of his preferences.
Now that I’ve moved though, I don’t know how to optimize for the campaign any more. It is going to take a little while to learn the new golden choices.
I do think I’ve figured out that dwarvish is a good language to have though. We’ve gone through an unusually high number of old dwarven strongholds so far.
That’s what I’m saying! Ask your GM for a campaign intro. A one-pager that includes a “Favored Enemies and Favored Terrains” blurb seems like a nice thing to have on hand. Even if your GM isn’t the writing type, I’d think that they would at least be willing to discuss campaign themes.
I suppose that what I was trying to get at (in a poorly worded sort of way) is that the DMs often don’t realize what is different about their campaign and how it makes choices good or bad themselves, apart perhaps from the obvious examples of favored terrain and enemy.
Asides from the obvious features, there are countless more ways that you can tailor your playstyle and character build to be successful with a particular DM, and they may not even be aware of their own little quirks.
A DM night not know that they take away players’ armor and weapons more than other DMs, but fighter will still be a comparatively worse choice and monk a comparatively better one in that game.
Sidetracked and then TPK’ed in a Call of Cthulhu campaign. We were (and still are) playing the Mask of Nyarlathotep campaign, and we were told to prepare investigators for an expedition to East Africa. So we did. Speaking Swahili, having Jungle skills and all that. And then we spend more than two RL years (with monthly sessions) in the first chapter of the campaign (which takes place in New York), and eventually got a TPK of all the East African optimised characters. Talk about fish out of the water….
So now (still only half way Chapter 1), we have New York optimised characters, who probably will travel to East Africa, among other things, in the near future….
Oh man… Monthly sessions are the worst! I’ll do ’em because I like gaming and I want my friends’ campaigns to succeed, but it’s so easy to feel like you’re going nowhere at that pace.
This reminds of some “hilarity” that ensued in one campaign. Namely that every time the Rogue gained a way to backstab something and my Ranger took the enemy type as a favored enemy, suddenly we’d never see that foe again.
Seriously, we started out fighting Orcs, so no problems right? I had Favored Enemy Orc, the Rogue can backstab Orcs. Golden. Then we start fighting a lot of Undead (and never see another Orc, or even Humanoid enemy ever). So I take Undead as my FE, the Rogue gets a Feat or ability that let’s him backstab Undead. Literally the next adventure and every one there on: No Undead. Instead the big bad for a few levels is Constructs… So the Rogue picks up the ability to backstab Constructs, I take Constructs as a FE.
Can you guess what we never saw again for the rest of the campaign? The running joke become, “Hey, Rogue and Ranger, we’re tired of fighting X, you guys need to learn how to properly fight X so we never have to see another one again”.
Ouch. Did the GM never take a hint? I mean, I can understand having themed dungeons, but if you’ve straight up got players that are being hosed by your session notes, it seems like a good time to change tactics.
Since nobody picked up the GCP-reference yet: Praise LOG!
Leave it up to Joe to make the worst decisions. (Actually, three years later: they did encounter quite some undead- I just don´t remember if Lorc was still on the team then. If so, it was short-lived…
But I do think, it´s the GM´s responsibility to either provide the players with one to three useful pieces of information beforehand or change the AP according to the players abilities. There is no sense in sending a party of barbarians in a social encounter (well, maybe there is, could be fun, but you know what I mean). And I do not recommend to follow the Skyd Maher school of thought by reading the whole AP up front. As a player, that is.
Oops- edit Skid…
Praise Log!
I wound up doing my MA thesis on the GCP, so it’s a pod that I hold near and dear to my gamer heart.
Wow! What´s the thesis of your Thesis then?
Here’s the abstract:
This MA thesis examines the relationship between tabletop role-playing games (TRPGs) and convergence culture. As a genre, TRPGs are characterized by multi-author collaboration and narrative agency for participants. Drawing upon the text of a pre-written scenario, as well as audio recordings from a play-through of that scenario, this essay catalogs significant points of departure between the two. This demonstrates the limits of authority between different types of authors (i.e. game designers, module writers, game masters, and players). It also reveals the points at which these roles bleed into one another, showing that professional and amateur authors are participating in much the same activity despite their apparent differences. Because TRPGs are predicated on creating texts in which amateur authors are engaged in the same work as their professional counterparts, and because texts are created with the expectation of input from lower-order authors, TRPGs represent a uniquely democratic form of convergence culture.
And if you’re morbidly curious and actually want to read the silly thing:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_fri7q3-57MR3ktb0I5OUNzbkk/view?usp=sharing
I was morbidly curious and I did read the everything else than silly thing- you already got my at the dedication.
But seriously, I really enjoyed the reading (though I wouldn´t profess to have grasped all the finer points yet). And I´m still not sure if I agree wholeheartedly with one of the most interesting (and amusing) theories: The players as the required chaotic element of the game. So if we players go along with the ideas of our GM and do not counteract them at any given moment, we are falling short on our part!? Have to reread it probably…
No worries. I’m not sure I agree with that either. 🙂
If your group enjoys a highly structured game, and if you want to zoom from one of the GM’s plot points to the next, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. In some modules, the game breaks if you do much more than that. But I do think that it can be an exciting play experience when players push their boundaries and try to see how far the game can stretch to accommodate their ideas. That’s part of the fun of collaborative fiction: discovering what the other folks at the table will add rather than relying on your own resources. It’s something that other forms of narrative — film or comic books say — can’t do.
Of course, there are probably legions of games scholars that would object to my referring to RPGs as narratives.
Thanks for reading in any case! I’m flattered that you took the time. If you want to delver further into theory, the authors from the works cited that I recommend most are Jennifer Cover, Jessica Hammer, and Henry Jenkins. They are more or less the core of my work in this paper.
I want to see the over specialized ranger whose favored enemy is dragons and whose favored terrain is piles of gold. Just think of the bonuses to finding the loot fast and stealing the dragons magic items to make killing him easier tomorrow!
This would probably have to be an NPC, though, because they are near useless against dragons.
Against not dragons I mean. Man I feel dumb.
“You don’t fight dragons! Those things are huge and deadly! Naw man, you sneak past dragons and take their stuff. That’s the path of the true ranger!”
“Are you sure you’re not a rogue?”
I had this happen to me twice in two semi-consecutive A:tLA campaigns. In the first campaign, the party started out in the Fire Nation, so I created a perfectly loyal firebender. About two sessions in, the local Fire Nation general turned out to be a traitor and framed me on charges of being an earthbender, and the rest of the campaign was fighting against the traitor general and his followers. Then in the second campaign (which was supposed to be a sequel to the first), one of the PCs was playing the new Avatar (earth-born), while the rest of us were supposed to be playing his bending tutors, so I created what was supposed to be a friendly but apolitical Fire Sage. Halfway through the first session, we get pulled through some kind of portal and spat out in the deep past, in an area full of energybenders. Now, my character both loathed and was terrified of energybenders, to the point where (under normal circumstances), killing any energybender he encountered was his highest priority, superseding and premempting all other goals, and I’m nearly certain the GM knew this. Now, even my character was smart enough to realize that he couldn’t take down an entire nation of energybenders on his own. My character probably would have committed suicide, so that he would be safely dead before the energybenders could get at him, but the GM improvised a plotline about Princess Azula’s ghost appearing to me and recruiting me as a spy in the party. I ended up turning on the party at the climax, and managed to kill the Avatar, force the rest of the party to kill me, and then successfully made my Will save to resist healing and die before any of the energybenders could get at me. I’m still not certain whether that was the plan from the start or if the GM improvised it.
In my case it was the most clichéd it could be:
In my first 3.x campaign i was playing a lvl5 full typical Rogue around Rogue skills and the Campaign was Curse of Stradh. I was so happy when we finally found our first non-undead that i run to him, to fall into the pit (due to a bad check and not knowing that i had to roll it if i were just nearby) and find his ”son” and skeletal friends. To make matters worse i suspected this could happen and got a magical cold weapon to be a bit more versatile and because i wanted to avoid the more common fire resist enemies, but undead are usually cold resist/immune …
I was half happy when all in the party save one got permanently blinded and I had to make another character (Barb/Rogue this time), so when the DM revealed a few sessions later that it was not permanent, i still kept on using the second character. To make the joke bigger, the party got TPK later and i could have prevented that if i had gone with the first character instead.
I remember someone in the party told me, don’t know at which point, that i could take a feat to be able to sneak attack undead but i did not take it because changing a character’s feats felt like cheating and back then and was narrow minded enough to not understand how that feat could be explained outside of rollplaying and min-maxing.
All in all, it was an interesting experience and i still play Rogues the most.