Unlike most of you, I have owned Oblivion since it came out, but I have never gotten very far in it. I lost heart after seening my magical Morrowind experience be replaced by this imposter. I hated almost everything about it. But now It's looking purdy and everything that bugged me before I have now fixed with mods. Oblivion is now the way I always imagined it would be. I've never played an archer so I decided a ranger mod would be nice. I have found 2 ranger mods using google search: Shadow Ranger and Woodland Rangers. I'm guessing they are incompatible with each other, so I was wondering which will be the most fun to play and give me a rich experience. If there's a better one let me know and I'll look for it.

they seem perfectly compatible, one changes the ranger player class while the other adds a new faction to cyrodiil.

there's also: http://oblivion.nexusmods.com/mods/29386

I kind of recall shadow ranger being a mod with serious scripting issues, but don't quote me on it. memory not so good.

Being a ranger is kind of not hard to carve out of the game itself, but animal like powers are not. Two druid mods worth checking out if you want to get magical with the ranger thing:
http://oblivion.nexusmods.com/mods/37894
http://oblivion.nexusmods.com/mods/40125

For unique gear and weapons - you should check out Brash's http://oblivion.brashendeavors.net/bows/

I've used Shadow Ranger for years, don't recall having any serious problems with it. The animal companion is excellent, and one of the few that you can take into an Oblivion gate and not have to worry about when you leave. By and large, the best ranger mod out there, IMO.
Woodland Rangers ... not so much. I had difficulties with that one, first with missing resources, and then with its scripting.

Well one thing for certain about shadow ranger - it makes use of all sorts of OBSE commands that conflict with Duke Patrick's combat mods, so if you use DP and Shadow Ranger then expect issues.

Perhaps that is all there was to it, but I recall something about wild edits in the mod - or something along those lines. I could be totally conflating it with another mod though.

Seems I've got the old version of woodland rangers and not the revised, so I'm gonna get that and try and run it with shadow ranger. I also like the sound of the druid mod. Some good suggestions for me to look over. Thanks. I tried a druid in NWN 1 and got about 3 hours in and got my butt kicked, so I need to try and beat that game still too. Maybe I'll get all these old games beat this year finally.

Let us know how it goes. It the issues have been fixed i would like to give it a shot now.

I completely forgot to get woodland rangers revised and installed the old one. I have been messing aound with OBGE and forgot to download the other one, but I'll do that now and get back to my old save and keep going. I'm really hoping they work well together. Maybe I better start a new game, I'm not sure. I've got the wolf companion for shadow rangers but have been stalled going any further because OBGE is acting weird and I've been trying to figure out why. I quess it's my ADD kicking in but I really want to get it fixed. Seems my terrain looks really good one minute and after walking a ways it shifts to kind of a washed out texture look, like default look almost and then a ways further down the road it switches back to looking great again. Other than that, so far I haven't had any other problems except that I forgot to install the updated version of woodland rangers. I quess I better go do that.

Witchcraft, by SubRosa, allows you to summon all the natural forest predators and renders the wild ones you encounter friendly. Note that deer won't run from you and boar won't fight you, so if you are a hunter this strips any challenge from that task. This mod is excellent for a beastmaster/guardian of the forest.

Natural Wildlife, by Torag, offers a differing approach by making forest predators behave in a much more natural way. Sometimes they will attack, sometimes run, sometimes stand their ground. They will generally attack if you get to close and deer will always run from you (like vanilla). I very much like this mod because it allows you to carefully skirt around forest predators without getting into a fight with them and retains the challenge to hunting deer.

Obviously, these two mods do not work together because of the differing ways they change the behavior of forest predators. The former is superb if you want to pass unmolested among forest predators and even summon them. The latter is ideal if you want forest predators to simply act more realistic and a bit unpredictably instead of simply always attacking on sight. Both mods are excellent, but I use the latter.

There are numerous other mods that enable you to have a wolf or big cat type companion if you like. I like some of the mods by Maigrets for this.

I thought I had this fixed but it's still happening.

I just downloaded Natural Wildlife and will try it out.

careful with that, I think it's already included in OOO/MMM so it might conflict if you have those.

I actually gave up on OOO/MMM and FCOM completely. I had no real issues with OOO on it's own, but I think I'm just going to wait for a final release. Plus I find the instructions for installing everything to be a bit out dated. MMM 3.7, FCOM and OOO readme's all conflict if I remember correctly. Here's my current list of mods.

All the official mods and unofficial patches
DarNified
CM Partners
All Natural
Realistic Leveling
Creature Intensity
Natural Wildlife
Roads of Cyrodiil
Shadow Ranger
Living Economy
Streamline
Woodland Rangers Revised
Vaernlor Manor
Realistic Water
Vilja
TRN All Races
Texture packs

and a bunch of other optional esp's. I'm also using OBGE with 4-5 other mods that make the game look better. So far everything is great, except that I'm dieing a lot. The only conflict might be Creature Intensity and Natural Wildlife. But I honestly don't know at this point.

If part of your concept involves sneaking up on things, might I shamelessly plug SDR? (see link in signature). I know that when I plan to do my official "final" run, I'm planning on playing a ranger type, and SDR is key. I also recommend Duke patrick's combat and archery mods.

since you're using OBGE, definitely go with Liquid Water over Realistic Water!

also replace Living Economy with Enhanced Economy, much better

Ok. Thanks.

Those look like awesome mods. It would be cool to have water arrows to put out light sources like in Thief. Is there a mod that does this?

There is - it is called extinguish the lights by ismelda.

The problem is if you also want realistic behaving lights - those are found in the mod All Natural - and the lights in All Natural are not compatible with Extinguish the lights. All Natural lights lend to more realism with sneaking and the feel of the game, so most usually go with that and not use Extinguish the lights.

Also http://oblivion.nexusmods.com/mods/9655, but it's water arrows have the same incompatibility with All Natural.

@ Psymon & Dreamed1 Thats nuts. I blame Bethesda for the worst lighting gimmick in any game. Fake light? lol. I Looove All Natural, but I want water arrows too. Exactly what would happen if water arrows were run with All natural? Do these mods just need a patch to run with All Natural? I'd email someone in a hurry to do it if thats the case.