Roleplaying a Half-elf female ranger monk


Pathfinder First Edition General Discussion

The Exchange

So, how would you roleplay a half-elven girl ranger monk who is dumb as wood (int:7) averagely charismatic (cha:10) and incredibly wise (wis:20)?


I think backstory probably has more impact than "race gender class class stat stat stat" but I'll take a stab at it regardless.

Let's see, a person who's half-elven is likely used to discrimination (unless you're playing in a setting like eberron), most settings seem to have an unspoken gender equality so that likely doesn't affect her experience a whole lot. How she became both a monk and ranger is curious, it likely indicated both an affinity for nature and a bend towards discipline, so I would imagine someone who holds the "Natural Order" in high regard.

Alignment would be helpful for some of this, all I can assume right now is that she's lawful.

So...

I imagine a person who feels more at home in the wild and tends to view society as having veered too much in the direction of caring about things like prestige and family lines. Likely she's quick to notice when something is out of order and aims to correct it but is poor at both providing an adequate solution to the problems she sees and finds that communicating it in a convincing way usually fails whenever she meets people who don't already see things the same way as her.


"Dumb as wood" as you put it would explain why she has levels in monk. Some clearcutters or the like obviously got her out of the way by telling her where she could learn important wildlife secrets.

Couple of years later she walks out of that monastery not entirely certain what any of that had to do with animals. Her old forest is completely gone, but hey, ENLIGHTENMENT! One with the universe and all that stuff!

Either way she should have intense difficulties with any "buk lurninz": Math and reason generally perform stratospheric flight over her head, but she'd have an easy time with common sense, minus the whole "punching things with your face until they bleed and die" thing.

The Exchange

Great, great material! Thanks to you both a lot!


It is unlikely clearcutters would have much luck fooling a person as perceptive as she clearly is (high wis). She probably has very little patience for memorizing details (low Int) and as a result has avoided reading books in favor of exploring the wilds. Perhaps a parent or mentor was a monk and did their best to instill discipline in the half breed child. Her communication skills are average and she is disciplined and lawful so it is unlikely she would misspell simple words like book or learning... big words or knowledge specific ones like anthropogenic would give her a headache and leave her clueless.


Remember that skill ranks, after a few levels, are more important than governing ability score. At lvl 1, with 1 skill rank in a class knowledge skill, sure, a 14 int character gets +6 while a 7 Int gets +2 (3:1 ratio). But at level 5, the ratio is only 5:4 and at level 10, the ratio is 15:13. Beyond that, the only thing really holding her back is number of skill points. High-Int characters have extra skill points to slather around but low-Int characters will need to specialize in just a few fields and have less room to "spread out". That's the real difference, she is more specialized than generalized. She won't go for the fine techniques of greater disarm or greater trip, sticking with just the basic forms, but will, instead, favor the more power-oriented bull rush or sunder and maybe grappling. She already starts knowing Common and Elven and a single point of Linguistics gets her an additional language which might be useful, but it's a high opportunity cost given her limited skill points. But she wouldn't go overboard learning several languages.

As far as characterization, if you want to "act to the stats", she's very perceptive both in regards to her environment and the people around her, she's got a leg up in any profession she might pick up (better at doing a task than making an object), and she's very willful. Not so much on confidence so she puts her trust in the subjects of her training. She trusts nature and she trusts her training, probably without question. Keep in mind that "Monk" doesn't necessarily imply "Monastery". She could be a "self-trained" type who learned from nature itself (many martial arts are based on animal movements). I'd say give her a good dose of Knowledge(Nature) as well as Skill Focus and she is quite the learned sage; just so long as it concerns nature. With any other subject, she likely has the common sense (Wis) to stay silent. Depending on alignment, she might be mistrustful of "civilization" or she might be intent on getting "nature" and "people" to work together. She could have been abandoned to the forest for shame of being a half-breed, or maybe run away from home, or maybe took refuge at a later age due to problems relating to either race.


Kazaan makes an excellent point, the stats are not hugely important. I often come to the concept before I roll a single stat. In other words a scholar can have either a high Int or a low Int, it just makes the low Int one more specialized to fewer subjects and probably struggled a bit in school.


It's worth asking, I think - is this a monk with a ranger dip, a ranger with a monk dip, or are things going up evenly? That's going to have a much larger impact on how I view the character's personality than the stats.


The backstory is important for how she acts.

I once played a cheerful male gnome ranger monk. He was born to a large to a Desna-worshiping family in Sanos Forest in Varisia, The gnomes needed soldiers to defend the forest from the surrounding humans and nearby ogres, so they offered free ranger training to young gnomes in summer camp. One trainer was a gnome monk, and noticing a boy with lawful tendencies, despite his religion, trained him as a ranger-monk. He was a helpful optimist, always willing to lend a hand or to make peace.

Perhaps your half-elf was born to ranger parents who feared that her low intelligence would prevent her from learning the skills to survive in the wilderness. They fostered her to a monastery to keep her safe. Thus, she grew up partly in a wild woods and partly in a secluded monastery. The monks trained her in wisdom because their efforts at teaching book learning failed. In adulthood, she wisely knew that she should experience the world first hand, so she set out to find good traveling companions.

Int 7 is academically inept, but not mentally disabled. Dumb as wood would be Int 4. Even with her Int penalty, she receives more skill points than an Int 10 fighter. If you put her skills points into non-Int skills, simply play her as someone who does not like abstract knowledge. She learns from experience.

Wis 20, in contrast, is exceptionally gifted. It will be most visible in her AC from monk abilities, so it could be roleplayed as her being in total harmony with her own body and with nature. A high Perception could be because she pays attention to every sound around her as the music of nature.


Perception and sense motive are keyed off wisdom, which kinda give flavor to wisdom as a "instinctual/experience" representation. This may be a fairly common trope, but it fits this character in my mind. She instinctively understands how the world works, how her body works, and what others are thinking, and she can confidently act upon that instinct because it never easily seems to fail her.

However, ask her to explain why she knows just how to block that strike, or why she knew that slight shimmer means a magical trap is ahead, or even why she knows that something just isn't right about that odd cleric, and she will not be able to explain it to you.

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