Quote Originally Posted by willpell View Post
My problem with this kind of archetype has always been that it uses a dice roll to determine whether you've heard of a creature and learned its weaknesses even if you've already encountered that creature in-game. It's like the way Skills don't improve over the course of a level; it's completely contrary to what logic suggests to me should qualify as "earning experience".
Yeah Willpell, it's true - skills don't improve over the course of a level, you can't earn fighting style feats just by training and most DMs won't let you invent custom spells. Why are these things? Because the system is an abstraction that happens to be saddled with a bunch of extremely poor attempts to also be realistic. You can't have both, and of the two, it's easier to refluff something to sound realistic than it is to rebalance messed up mechanics.

Favored Enemy: Goblins would apply to CR 15 Fiendish Bugbear Paladins of Slaughter just fine. If something doesn't scale across levels, then it is an unwise choice of favored enemy, but most creature types have some representation in nearly every level. You probably don't want to pick Outsider or Dragon at 1st level, but beyond that most of the choices are at least semi-valid.
No, they aren't, because in order to cater to the Ranger you still have to reach past what's reasonable to occur. We can all agree that Humanoid (Reptilian) might be too narrow, but what about Magical Beast? How many of those can sustain a plot on their own? Aberration level-jumps wildly and OH, HEY, ABERRATIONS WITHOUT DISCERNIBLE ANATOMIES AREN'T SUBJECT TO YOUR DAMAGE BONUS. How about Undead? I suppose if the DM says, hey, this'll be an undead-heavy campaign but just like aberrations they're immune to a bunch of your bonuses!

Shall I go on? Favored Enemy is a terrible feature and it needs improving both conceptually and execution-wise. It's my hope that 5e manages to do this, but trying to claim there's no problem whatsoever strikes me as being unhelpful in the extreme. I'd like to hope that after 10+ years of 3.5 the community might know what it's talking about.