With Wizards of the Coast working hard to get us all to pick up three new core rulebooks, they’ve been trickling out details of changes for months now via Dragon Magazine and the official D&D website.

In the past couple of weeks I’ve seen their teasers for the Ranger and Druid classes in specific. These classes, along with the Bard, have been the red-headed stepchildren of the main character classes. Generally speaking, I would consider this to be right and fitting (I still think of Cleric, Fighter, Thief, and Wizard as the proper D&D character archetypes).

However, they’re making a big push to right all the perceived wrongs with the 3.0 d20 system. Rangers will have fewer hit points, more skill points, and a more useful “Favored Enemy” system. Druids will have some serious improvements to the “Wild Shape” class ability, and pick up a spontaneous-casting ability for “Summon Nature’s Ally.” In addition, Wilderness Lore and Intuit Direction have been merged into a single skill “Survival” and “Animal Empathy” has been dropped in favor of a new skill available only to Rangers & Druids that functions much like “diplomacy” but only for creatures of animal intelligence.

I’m not sold on it yet, but amongst my coworkers I’m sure I’ll be able to browse the finished product and see how it all balances out. Supposedly each of the main classes will be more fully balanced and useful, with an eye toward accentuating the distinctions of the mongrel classes of Barbarian, Bard, Druid, Monk, Paladin, and Ranger. Word is that Sorcerers (also a mongrel class IMHO) are practically unchanged apart from some reworded spell rules that also apply to Wizards.

Time will tell.