Arelith

Forgoing the training in archery and dual wielding most rangers receive, this character is something far more than just a hunter. They are a predator, a force of nature running loose through the wilds. In exchange for their martial prowess, the Predator gains the same wildshape abilities that a druid has access to.

So the idea for this comes from the Predator alternate class feature for rangers found in the D&D 3.5 book Unearthed Arcana.

Predator
A ranger might forgo training in weapon combat in exchange for the ability to take animal form and move swiftly through the woodlands.
This variant simply swaps one or more of a class's features for one or more class features of another class. A class feature gained works just as it did for its original class, including the level at which it is gained and any other effects, except as noted below.

Lose: Combat style, improved combat style, combat style mastery.

Gain: Wild shape (as druid; Small or Medium animals only), fast movement (as barbarian).

I've always really liked this ACF because it puts a unique spin on the class and offers up some great roleplaying opportunities as well. What's more, I think it could work really well on Arelith, and similarly to Pen and Paper, give some great opportunities to roleplay the animalistic shapeshifter without having to default to Druid.

I have two different ideas for implementation.

• 1) Simply strip the archery and dual wielding abilities and their improvements and give basic Wildshape as a vanilla druid gets it
  2) Strip archery, dual wielding and their animal companion, but give them an improving -shapeshift command as a totem druid has, with the same animal selection and totem bonuses.

Personally, I like the second idea better. Simply adjust Totem Druid scripts and apply them to Ranger. I think this would be fun to play because one of the annoying things about running Totem Druid is that you have no access to spells while in animal form, but in the case of a Ranger, this isn't so much of a trade-off since your spells are minimal anyway. The higher BaB and HD also mean you're deadlier in that form than a Totem Druid is.
Which is exactly why for this version I suggest removing Animal Companion as well since it might get a bit nasty having deadly shapeshifter ranger and his Totem companion too. (Then you could also be literally a lone wolf )

See my reply to this:

viewtopic.php?f=26&t=21914