Scouts are very skilled at sneaking and tracking, and are as good or better than Barbarians at surviving in the wild. But instead of getting stuck in melee like Barbarians, they love to reach out across the distance between people and touch their hearts (with arrows).

This is ultimately a very simple template, but it also does its job extremely well, and it’s likely to be your main point of engagement with the DFRPG’s ranged combat rules.

Base Stats

Scouts start out with ST 11, DX 14, IQ 11, HT 12. Their Perception is increased all the way to 14, and their Basic Speed to 7.

Advantages

All Scouts have Heroic Archer and two levels of Outdoorsman. The former cements them as the profession most focused on ranged combat, as it makes their archery attacks much more accurate and lets them shoot more often. The second is the same Talent the Barbarian gets, and boosts outdoorsy survival skills.

They have a further 40 points to distribute among the usual stat boosts and combat-enhancing advantages, many of which are focused on ranged combat. Among then is Weapon Master (Bow), which further enhances their damage and rate of fire with bows.

Disadvantages

The Scout’s disadvantages mostly involve traits that make them antisocial loners, though a subset here makes them devoted guardians of the wild instead. None are mandatory - build your own dysfunctional personality.

Skills

Scout melee skill packages give you an option to use a sword or a spear with or without a shield, or a staff. Very Robin-Hoody. Your ranged combat skill, which is the one you’re using most of the time, is Bow at a starting level of 18.

A lot of the mobility and perception skills that are optional for everyone else are part of the basic Scout package. Unarmed combat gets moved to the optional section, which also contains a bunch of niche exploration skills no one else gets, except perhaps for the Barbarian.

Special Scout Traits

Scouts can raise their Perception to 25, and their Basic Move by up to 6 above its base value. They also get access to these special advantages listed below. Like the Knight’s special traits, these aren’t magic: the Scout is just that good.

  • Heroic Archer (20 points): A normal archer can shoot one arrow every three seconds or so, if they don’t stop to aim. An Heroic one can shoot every turn if they make the skill rolls listed in this advantage’s description, and those rolls are much easier for Heroic Archers who are also Weapon Masters of the bow. They also get the benefits of aiming for a turn without having to do so, and can ignore penalties from crazy positions or acrobatics while shooting.

    This is so necessary for being a badass archer in GURPS that every Scout gets it automatically.

  • Multi-Aim (6 points/level): Every level lets you aim at an extra target simultaneously, both for the purposes of gaining accuracy bonuses and for setting up “overwatch” with Wait maneuvers.

  • Silence (5 points/level): You can move and breathe noiselessly. Each level gives +1 to stealth while moving, and +2 while standing still.

  • Strongbow (1 point): Every bow has a “rated ST” - you need to be at least that strong to use it, but you don’t get benefits from being any stronger. This perk raises your ST by up to 2 for the purposes of shooting bows, letting you use “stronger” weapons and deal more damage than your muscle mass would indicate. It does stack with other similar enhancements - for example, if you have ST 11 plus this perk and an elven bow, you shoot as if your ST was 15.

  • Telescopic Vision (5 points/level): You can “zoom in” with your naked eyes! Each level increase magnification, helping observe distant targets and also shoot them.

Customization

The book offers three sample skill and disadvantage sets here: a bounty hunter loads up on antisocial disads, tracking skills, and even a bit more melee prowess because not every hunt ends with a bow shot. A ranger has Combat Reflexes and focuses heavily on the ability to travel and protect the wilderness, with disadvantages reflecting this devotion. And the sharpshooter is an assassin who min-maxes their shooting capabilities.

The “This Ain’t D&D” section

People familiar with D&D rangers will notice that there is no “dual-wielding scout” build here - that’s very much a D&D-ism. The Scout is first and foremost an archer. This and the absence of magic in their templates makes them a close conceptual match to the Archer Ranger from D&D 4e.

If you want nature magic, you play a Druid. If you want to dual-wield in melee, you take one of the melee specialist archetypes and buy the Ambidexterity advantage. But if what you want is to turn enemies into pincushions anywhere from near-melee range out to the horizon, no one’s going to do it better than the Scout.