Check out the new D&D 5E Ranger

Well, in the tradition of this century we now have a ranger revision to compensate for the arguably substandard ranger from the D&D 5th edition Player's Handbook. The new ranger can be found here, and is a full 20 level build for people to test out. I'd say tentatively, without seeing it in action yet that the new design for the class definitely addresses some of the issues with the ranger my game table noticed, and which I house-ruled a bit to fix.

Some of the context of this article is with regards to how WotC needs to approach such larger rule changes in the future for D&D, which up to now they have preferred avoiding. From the looks of it, they have plans in the (near?) future to publish an Unearthed Arcana rules tome with new rules, house rules, alternative class builds like this and other things. For my money, I hope that book comes sooner than later, simply because my table loves more options than less.

Modifying Classes in 5E

Rodney Thompson's latest post at Wizards.com is on modifying existing classes in D&D 5E. He provides two detailed "ready to use" examples as well, one for a spell-less ranger and the other for the Favored Soul, of 3E fame. Actually really interesting read and the two class options detailed look quite playable.

Here's to hoping stuff like this somehow sees print some day, even if it's just in an official Player's Guide PDF on dndclassics.com.