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I want to take two ranger archetypes: Guide and Urban Ranger from the APG.
How does the Favored Community and Favored Terrain work together? Can any of those bonuses, say the initiative, stack?
Let's say I'm in a pirate campaign where much of the action takes place on the ship. The GM let me take the ship as the favored community.... could I take 'urban or water' as the favored terrain and have the ship count to have the bonuses stack together?
Although the guide and urban ranger archetypes don't, at first glance, alter or replace any of the same things, these run into an obscure rule about pathfinder archetype stacking that is found here and clarified here.
The long and short of the precise rules here is that because the guide archetype's Terrain Bond ability circuitously alters how Favored Terrain works (by granting the bonus to allies when in your Favored Terrain), it arguably counts as altering it. Thus, it's not compatible with urban ranger, since urban ranger replaces Favored Terrain entirely.
If allowed to stack anyway, and run as-written, the following things happen:
Thus, when you stack the archetypes, the Terrain Bond ability outright does nothing; you are never in your Favored Terrain (as you have none), so the bonus is never granted.
Overall, the archetypes don't really seem to have a balance issue if you let them stack and adjust some things. I recommend asking your GM to implement the following houserules:
Favored Community is functionally identical in effect—albeit far smaller in scope—to Favored Terrain. The only difference is the location you get buffed in, and that Favored Community adds a bonus to Knowledge (local) instead of Knowledge (geography). It's likely to be active about as often as Favored Terrain will (if you chose the terrains well), so it stands to reason that things shouldn't break if you allow the urban guide ranger to guide their allies through a city/ship/town/etc.
When you take the Urban Ranger archetype, your favored terrain ability is replaced by Favored Comunity.
Favored Community (Ex)
...
This ability replaces favored terrain.
When an archetype replaces an ability, it is lost and no longer available to your character as long as you take that archetype (which could be retrained later).
