Apparently the Complete Adventurer contains rules for a new base class, the Scout.
Can anyone explain, at a high-level, what is the difference in character concept between a Ranger and a Scout? When should I, as a player creating a new character, decide to play one or the other?
Robin Hood is an iconic scout: moving through the wilderness unseen and dropping arrows through the hapless tax collectors' apple from a hundred paces. He can appear out of the brush, attack, and fade back without the opponent having a chance to reply. Usually scouts are part of a larger group, whether a band of merry men, as advance guard for a squadron of soldiers, or checking the trail ahead for a band of adventurers.
A ranger, on the other hand, is more like Aragorn from Lord of the Rings. He can smell danger, track prey for miles over rocks, or calm a horse with a whisper. A woodsman, usually a loner (though sometimes with an animal companion), a ranger is often at home with a campfire, the stars, and a good knife. His skill set is very similar to a scout's, but with a basis more in nature than in proficiency with stealth or weapons.
Conceptually, the Ranger suffers a great deal because it’s not particularly clear what it’s supposed to be – and the authors seemed as confused as anyone else. The original Ranger, perhaps, back when originally introduced to D&D, may have referenced Aragorn, but D&D-ified. I don’t know the history. But it was this original version that R. L. Salvatore used to create Drizzt do'Urden in his Dungeons & Dragons novels. These novels, more than anything else, seemed to inform Wizards of the Coast with respect to their 3rd Edition update.
Thus, the 3rd Edition Ranger is almost circularly-defined: it seems most based on modeling Drizzt do'Urden, a character based on the Ranger of an earlier edition. The problem with this is that Drizzt was a bit of a Mary Sue character who could do everything, and Salvatore took liberties with the class for the sake of the character. A novel’s author can do that, but a character class, not so much. A character can’t do everything, or at least if it does, it can’t do them all very well. So what you get is the Ranger, a class with a great hodgepodge of heavily-weakened abilities taken from other classes.
It’s supposed to be a warrior, so good BAB, HD, and some bonus feats, and it’s supposed to be a outdoorsmen, so good skills. It’s supposed to be related to nature, so it gets some Druid features – but because of the previous benefits, those features are drastically reduced in power.
As a result, you get a character who receives an Animal Companion that’s often too weak to do much more than scout. He has spells, which start late, have a very low Caster Level, and he only gets a very few of them. He has bonus feats for combat styles that focus on large numbers of attacks: those styles require bonus damage to work well. But the Ranger doesn’t get bonus damage. He’s supposed to know his enemy better than anyone, but Favored Enemy’s bonuses are tiny and wind up getting forgotten pretty often.
So the Ranger ends up with a bunch of half-features, and it’s very difficult to know where to take one and what to do with it.
Ultimately, the Scout isn’t really that much better than the Ranger, but at least the Scout knows what it is: it’s specifically based on an actual classical or medieval military role. The Greeks, the Romans, and medieval Europeans all had skirmishers in their armies that worked at least somewhat like the Scout. They’d move ahead of the main army, using hit-and-run tactics, and they were also excellent at reconnaissance, particularly in woodlands. This focus allows the Scout to do what it’s supposed to do, and do it well, and this specialization turns it into a better-designed class.
The Ranger does keep up because spells are powerful and because many supplements add new combat styles, alternate class features, and additional Ranger spells, while few add new features to the Scout. But a Core Ranger, or Core + Complete Adventurer Ranger, vs. a Scout? The Scout looks better to me. The Scout knows his role and simply does that well. It’s not a very powerful class by any means, but it is definitely better designed.
As @Lord_Gareth mentioned, the best answer for these two classes is to use Swift Hunter from Complete Scoundrel to get the best of both: Ranger adds better BAB, and grants you bonus feats that a Scout would want anyway. The Scout adds that bonus damage that the Ranger was badly lacking. The Ranger’s spells help shore up the fact that the Scout’s specialty, for all it does make it a better-designed class in a lot of ways, also leaves it vulnerable to having situations where it can’t really use its class features well. Spells are more flexible, which is exactly what the Scout needs.
A scout deals entirely in mundane training and a "mundane" skill set gained through hard work, understanding, intuition and experience. Flavor-wise, scouts are those adventurers and soldiers who train to operate in exotic environments and apply intelligence, understanding, and agility to their problems. Mechanically, scouts are mobile combatants with a strong base of out-of-combat utility through skills and class features. Ultimately, Scout is sort of underwhelming mechanically, but see below.
A ranger is a character that blends skill with divine magic gained through reverence for nature. Rangers aren't as mobile as scouts and instead focus on experimenting with specific combat styles, learning to hunt and understand specific kinds of creatures, and on bonding with nature on a conceptual level. A scout treats nature as the terrain upon which they do their job - a ranger reveres nature as a force to be respected in its own right and gains magical power thereby. Ranger is another class that's underwhelming mechanically, but they have more options than scouts do to improve or trade away features that are undesirable.
The Swift Hunter feat lets you count Ranger levels as Scout levels for the purpose of Skirmish, which is a great boon to a mobile-combatant concept since it lets you move and still deal respectable damage, and when combined with some of Ranger's spells it gets even handier in terms of damage. A definite suggestion if the idea of a mobile combatant interests you.
Incidentally, and as an aside, Aragorn is not well-modeled by the D&D ranger class, unless you'd like to tell me where his spells and animal companion(s) were for the entire movie. Aragorn is more along the lines of a particularly martial scout, or perhaps a Warblade. D&D's ranger is different enough from almost all other fantasy versions thereof that I cannot think of a comparison in media.
The scout is more like a rogue for the wilderness environment. It has many similar traits to rangers, true, but with some rogue-like abilities that can be used outdoors, such as extra damage dealt while moving. For outdoor campaign environments, the scout makes an excellent multi-class addition to a ranger and his two-weapon fighting abilities. If your campaign is mostly underground, you should probably steer clear of the scout.
Honestly, most characters that could be a ranger could also be a scout. And vice versa. They're just different sets of mechanics that could be applied to the same sort of character.
imo despite their similarities they are very different in two major points : personality and origins.
past: former soldier / deserter / an exile / paladin who lost his faith.
where to find him: in any tavern, wandering the continents away from home.
qualities: adventurous, fearless to a certain extent.
weapons: light to medium armor, sword + bow.
assets: tracking, fighting, guts, instinct.
motive: no purpose embracing new purposes as he sees fit.
example: Aragorn
alignment: neutral good / chaotic good / true neutral / chaotic neutral
past: a very skilled hunter.
where to find him: in a sentinel post, enrolled by the army, his own motherland.
qualities: cautious, methodical.
weapons: light armor, bow + dagger + traps.
assets: outstanding terrain knowledge, tracking, scouting, preemptive tactics.
motive: mission dependent.
example: Edgtho the silent
alignment: lawful good/lawful neutral
a ranger has a past as a soldier or any other formal corpus he could be lord even.. switching his lifestyle for a personal reason...(in a broader sens a "ranger military unit" performs special mission overseas or outside frontier.. a unit specializing in risky mission including huge uncertainty factors).. therefore what in this specific fantasy sens a ranger would mean.. an individual already skilled in soldiering which have learned ways to survive the nature be it from battling ogres or mages of course he can hunt to survive almost anything due to his survival skills he is an above average swordsman (depending of his previous rank captain for ex.) he can also track intelligent beings like humans to track them down (using good amount of instinct and hunches) is his unsurpassed specialty and what comes in second is his soldierly skills with a sword as a first weapon and a bow as a secondary..he recklessly embraces any adventure with a death wish.. a ranger could track almost anything, especially humans anyone except a scout.. because a scout is overly cautious.. a scout is always miles away, away from any threat.. a scout can never be detected trailing someone..
..a ranger have keener senses honed by his adventurous lifestyle his instincts are very sharp.. he would sleep in a forest next to a firewood relying on his sharp instincts alone to wake up at any danger.. whether a scout is very cautious he would screen the perfect area use his good sense for finding the perfect spot to sleep..
a scout is more like a hunter that turned a scout meaning a skilled hunter in tracking animals who is rewarded for his missions to track men or to lead merchant caravans or to hunt a dangerous animal.. he has very deep knowledge of the terrain that he studied.. he is overly cautious.. he is all about calculating risk factors..it would take him months to scout an unknown area he is less adventurous unless he is in a party lead by someone else.. he is a bow user and a trap connoisseur but he can also wield a dagger to defend himself the same dagger that he uses to poaches his game, he likes nature..
so i terms of personality a ranger has more depth.. and i would say that he is a neutral/chaotic since he abandoned his former soldierly life he is wandering the lands..he is bold and reckless.. whether a scout is neutral/lawful since he accepts any missions for rewards.. he is cautious and methodical..
in a tavern a scout would reject any mission that he would judge too risky you would have to pay him a good deal to change his mind or trick him, whether a ranger would accept the mission despite the risks if you already paid the barkeeper.. so to survive a travel and to avoid unnecessary risks the best bet is to add in your party a scout .. but when chaos strikes a ranger is the one you should follow and trust your life to without any second thought..
