Note: I don't claim to speak for all fans of pre-4e D&D here, I'm just going off some of the trends I've noticed on the various D&D forums when discussing 4e martial mechanics
I think part of the disconnect with nonmagical forced movement and such is that D&D (at least pre-4e) has a fairly strict mechanical "language." If you want to hit something, you roll an attack roll. If you want to light something on fire, you deal fire damage. A given action in the flavor tends to map to a given action in the mechanics--an ability that lets you attack someone by rolling an initiative check, or light something on fire by dealing force damage, seems unintuitive. For 4e to take the familiar term "saving throw" and change it from being a
throw of the dice that
saves you from something (intuitive) to a randomized duration mechanic (unintuitive) confused and turned off a lot of players.
So consider some of the proposals for making nonmagical forced movement make sense:
Kamikaze Midget said:
Forcing an action is magic. That's what gets you to move 5 feet against your will.
You've never been shoved by a bully, or intimidated, tricked, or pressured into doing something?
In 3e, those flavor effects already have mechanics attached.
"shoved by a bully" = Bull Rush
"intimidated" = Intimidate check
"tricked" = Bluff check
"pressured into doing something" = Intimidate or Diplomacy check
A Will save against a static DC, in contrast, implies a magical effect (the 3e-ified Lamb to the Slaughter example even uses the standard 3e SLA DC formula of 10 + level + Cha), while a Sense Motive check against a Bluff check implies a mundane effect. A Bluff check and a
suggestion spell do essentially the same thing (the main difference being that the spell is longer-lasting and more invasive), and the former is opposed by a Sense Motive check while the latter is opposed by a Sense Motive check.
So, taking into account that many pre-4e D&Ders associate certain mechanics with certain flavor, let's rewrite the first part of the LttS example:
Lamb to the Slaughter
The warlord chooses one creature that can see or otherwise sense him and makes a feint attempt against them. If the feint attempt succeeds, the creature must move its speed as close to the warlord as possible. This movement does not provoke attacks of opportunity.
Using the feint rules make it a lot more palatable, because (A) feinting already takes into account the opponent's combat ability, the opponent's skill at detecting deception, differences in the opponent's mindset, etc. and (B) it
feels less magical than just "make a Will save or move how I want you to."
Marking and martial healing tangent, spoilered for space:[sblock]You run into the same issue with 4e marking. Most of the objections to it (that I've seen on the forums, anyway) talk about three problems: arbitrariness, corner cases, and rule similarity. Marking seems arbitrary because marks overwrite each other for balance reasons rather than any apparent in-game reason and the rules don't explain exactly how the mark works, marking doesn't account for corner cases (e.g. how can the fighter affect the marked creature if you block LoS) and there's no given flavor to help you cover them yourself, and marks don't align with "flavored" mechanics like intimidation to help with either of the above.
As with LttS's generic "make a Will save or move" mechanic, the fighter mark's "you give this guy a penalty for a round" doesn't evoke a particular feel, but "you give this guy a penalty while he's within your threatened area" and "make an Intimidate check, you give this guy a penalty for a round" each imply a certain in-game reason for the mark (harrying the target and scaring him away from your allies, respectively) and give both a distinct feel. If you run into a situation you can't resolve, you can use the implicit flavor attached to the different versions to work out logical consequences.
And the same issue arises again with nonmagical martial healing. 3e taught its players that morale-based HP alteration came in one of three flavors: temporary hit points for an adrenaline surge (e.g. Stone Power or
vigor), a lower death threshold for being too angry to die (e.g. Diehard or Deathless Frenzy), or converting lethal to nonlethal damage for just being plain tough (e.g. Pugilist Fighter or regeneration). Tome of Battle came around with the crusader and its Devoted Spirit maneuvers that claimed to grant nonmagical "morale-based" healng while acting more like life-force draining than morale, and many players disliked this, thinking that the maneuvers should be labeled Supernatural if they were going to work like that.
Most players' problem with the 4e warlord's "shout-based healing" wasn't necessarily that it could rouse unconscious allies (again, at least as far as I've seen on forums), since the action hero-esque "I didn't
give you
permission to die, maggot!" image of the warlord is fairly well-known and well-accepted even among 4e detractors. The problem was that he could give you an adrenaline surge in the midst of combat
and then you kept going indefinitely. He didn't give you temporary HP that would go away (and possibly drop you again) at the end of the battle when you ran out of steam, he didn't stop you from bleeding out by convincing you to hang on for a few more rounds til the cleric reached you, he just flat-out healed you and you were fine after that. The expectation of a relationship between a certain mechanic and a certain flavor was broken and that's what caused the uproar.[/sblock]
So really, you can have the 5e warlord retain some 4e warlord and fighter mechanics while not upsetting the pre-4e players, as long as you couch those mechanics in acceptable mechanical "language." Give him Lamb to the Slaughter and Come and Get It...just make them use Bluff, Intimidate, Knowledge (Tactics), or similar instead of a Will save, to represent him tricking or outsmarting his enemies rather than mentally forcing them to move somehow. Give him actual HP restoration in addition to damage mitigation...just make them grant temporary HP instead of healing regular HP, to represent him inspiring allies to push their limits (and probably pay for it later) rather than fixing them up to full health somehow.
That's really all it takes to settle some of the dispute between the 3e and 4e crowds, little tweaks to make the mechanics and flavor mesh better instead of using more generic mechanics. YMMV, etc.
