Playing with my new ranger character, I noticed there aren't any areas where the ranger's Trackless Step feat gives the bonus to Hide and Move Silently skills. This seems a little odd. The caves of the Underdark are pretty much "wilderness" in my book, and I really think rangers should have their bonus. If it is for some reason disabled, I'd like to know the reason (and also, it would be fair to mention this in the Ranger class description in the forums). Or is it just a Bioware engine limitation, that cannot be worked around? :?:

The Bioware engine does not recognize the Underdark Tileset as Wilderness.

Can't you manually set areas to "natural" or "artifical"? I know for sure you can do that, would that not affect trackless step and similar skills?

Edit -> Area properties -> "Advanced" tab -> Terrain type

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Edit: Ah, can't be.. Underdark is already set to "natural"..

I was accidentally looking at an Illithid-interior tileset when I was trying it out.. Sorry! :oops:

On one hand, I guess it could be explained, ICly, with the fact that the caverns actually aren't wilderness areas, but rather consist of rock alone, something more similar to city interior than the overworld forests and fields most rangers in our setting are presumably used to. On the other hand, however, I personally would find it very nice if a workaround would be possible, since our current rangers and druids should, once they've grown a bit more experienced with the "wilderness" that is the caverns, adopt to that, and Underdark-born rangers will logically know the dark wastes as good as their overworldly counterparts.

At the moment, I can only come up with only very cumbersome, or easily exploited workarounds, neither of which would be desirable, but I haven't really given the matter a lot of thought, yet. I'll see if I can come up with something.

Also, from a pure class balancing perspective, rangers here, at the moment, are no better at actual ranging than rogues (perhaps even slightly worse, due to less skill points and less points to put into dexterity), and also substantially worse than druids, who both get One With the Land (which only the highest level rangers get, as far as I'm aware) and sneaky animal shapes. Now, I certainly have enough role playing initiative to love rangers, but it -is- a matter that some would deem important.