(no subject)

My new D&D (3.5) party: cleric, barbarian, bard, rogue, and I'm playing a half-orc ranger, aiming toward the Archery fighting tree. I have never played a ranger before, in any system. Curious to see how it'll go. It's a really weird class in 3.5, with a strange admixture of options and powers available to it. There's the animal affinity stuff, the tracking stuff, some minor spellcasting stuff, the situational combat boosts (Rangers are totally lethal against their favored enemies, when using their favored weapons, while wearing light armor, and otherwise are mediocre fighters)... hell, apparently at level 9, I get Evasion, which Rogues get at level 2. In jack-of-all-tradesness, the Ranger almost seems like the Bard of fighter-type characters.

This is a playgroup I've been playing Alternity: Stardrive with for the past six months, but the GM got bored, which is probably understandable since we never quite clicked with the game. So we're switching to bog standard 3.5, using bought modules, so the DM can recharge his creative batteries. We'll see how long this lasts until he's bored again.

I have never played a ranger before, but I have played half-orcs. It's a little tricky... there's a lot of really racist undertones to orcs in Tolkien (and thus D&D) and I try to tread carefully to avoid building my character on problematic tropes. I tend to prefer to treat half-orcs as an entirely separate race that resembles orcs and humans, rather than the usual half-orcs as the offspring of human women raped by orcs, but I think this time we're shooting for half-orcs as the consensual, wanted offspring of humans and orcs. The party's barbarian is also a half-orc, and we decided we'll be brothers. (The barbarian's player and I played dwarven brothers a few years back and had fun, so I'm looking forward to the new fraternal dynamic evolving)