"Warlord" build for D&Dnext

This is a spin-off from [MENTION=87792]Neonchameleon[/MENTION]'s warlord thread.

The thematic ideal of a warlord that I'm interested in is the inspiring "battle captain" of Tolkien or Arthurian romance. This a staple of the romantic/heroic fantasy genre; Aragorn, Faramir, Arthur and Richard the Lionheart all fall within this archetype. In D&Dnext, the current version of the cavalier paladin gives us a magical version of this archetype. I'm interested in what a non-magical version might look like.

What does the character have to do
Lead by inspiration. There are two main points-of-entry into this, I think, both when one looks at the 4e warlord as a model, and when one looks at the current D&Dnext architecture. One is action economy - the heroic battle captain gets more "oomph" out of his/her friends and allies. The other is healing - the heroic battle captain can urge his/her friends and allies on when they would otherwise give up.

A possible worry - there seems to be less room in the action economy of D&Dnext for warlord abilities than there is in 4e. The reason for this is that there is no clear and uniform analogue to the encounter or daily power, nor to the basic attack. In 4e, granting a basic attack is an easy alternative to adding dice of damage to an encounter power - making it a basic attack puts an upper limit on the power of the extra action, and building it into an encounter power creates an expectation of a certain degree of extra heft. These maxima and minima are less clear in D&Dnext, I think.

Also(It goes almost without saying that if you are using a non-magical battle captain who can heal, you are treating hit points as a flexible gestalt of factors rather than as meat only.)

The current fighter options in Next
The current options don't strike me as going very deep. Strike Command seems somewhat weak, especially as a fighter is a pretty reliable hitter and so is likely to be better off going with Deep Wound or, if a frontline combatant, the perhaps overpowered (in comparison to the others) shield Slam.

Warning Shout looks more useful than Strike Command - permitting a buff of AC to lower-AC PCs - but doesn't on its own capture the spirit of the heroic battle captain, nor substitute for healing. Bolster Allies is comparable in this respect to Warning Shout, I think.

Oddly enough, Attack Orders looks like the best of the "warlord-y" abilities, because it lets the fighter buff attack rolls carrying heavy payloads (eg the wizard's Ray of Enfeeblement). But that's still not giving us the heroic battle captain archetype.

A new option?
If we look at the fighter for a non-magical option, we have to consider what can be traded off to create adequate room for an inspiring martial leader who will be capable of occupying something like the same mechanical space in the game as the cleric does vis a vis healing, but who can also grant bonus actions.

In 4e, the fighter has quite a lot to trade off: armour proficiency, marking and the associated combat challenge, a very meaningful +1 to hit, and better hit points and surges; in D&Dnext, I don't have enough of a sense yet of how the classes are built to know exactly what the scope is for trade offs. What follows is therefore tentative.

Let's start by comparing to a fighter's expertise dice. At 1st level, 2d6 is an average of +7 damage, 1x/enc. Suppose that a warlord can grant his/her ally a bonus attack per encounter - how much damage would that be? The damage from a bonus attack given to a fighter at 1st level looks to me like +1d10 (standard weapon die) +4 for stat +1 for something else (feat, magic, etc) or 10.5. Let's say a 2/3 chance of hitting (+4 for STR, +1 for class, +1 misc for overall +6 vs AC 13 for an Orc or 14 for a goblin or hobgoblin), then the average damage is 7, which is the same as 2d6. So maybe a 1x/enc bonus attack from the warlord is comparable in effect to a fighter's encounter damage dice.

Let's say that, at 1st level, just like a cleric or paladin has to choose which Channel Divinity to use, a warlord has to choose which "inspired action" option to use: so instead of a bonus attack 1x/enc, let's say that s/he can also grant an ally (or all allies?) a bonus movement 1x/enc.

Now let's turn to healing: if a 1st level cleric uses his/her 2x/day spells for healing the total is 4d8+4 at R:T, or 2d8+4 at R:50' and as a swift action. Given that a whole premise of D&Dnext is that we can balance daily against encounter at something like a 1:4 ratio, let's say our warlord can once per battle can heal (say) 1d8 (an alternative would be to permit use of a hit die) as a standard action at R:5'.

So our tentative 1st level warlord can inspire action (either attack or movement) 1x/enc, and can hearten an ally (+1d8 hp) 1x/enc. Two meaningful choices per encounter sits nicely in comparison to a fighter, who has two dice to spend at 1st level.

To balance these abilities against a fighter you would reduce armour proficiency to light and medium, and reduce hit die from d10 to d8. Now instead of expertise dice we have inspire action, and instead of armour, hit points and a feat we have 1x/enc healing. (I think we should say that the battle captain cannot hearten him-/herself. Therefore the battle captain doesn't pesonally have more hp available than the fighter.)

Questions
How viable is that? And can it scale up levels at all? My feeling is that, at a minimum, we would have to say that an extra attack cannot benefit from Deadly Strike dice. And given that all martial PCs (except the barbarian) get special daily abilities at 11th level, this character's ability should probably be an "inspired surge" that lets an ally take a full extra action. (Compared to Combat Surge, this would not double expertise dice - but it would be balanced by being more flexible, as non-fighter PCs could also be inspired if the warlord desired.)

Does this have to be a separate class, or can it be a fighter? The cleric builds provide a precedent for trading off proficiencies for other abilities, but we also have different hit dice from a fighter, and those seem to be defined at the class level, not the sub-class level. Plus we don't have expertise dice, nor bonus feats. So I think the answer is "yes, this is a separate class".

If the Warlord is to be a separate class, you need to propose a sensible set of distinct subclasses, so as to follow the (as yet unseen) currently proposed class model.
Personally I don't like the granting of actions by one character to another. I would focus more on enhancing allies actions and helping the party work as a team. I also wouldn't want the Warlord effectively doing nothing on their turn but helping their allies. Perhaps you could use the Reaction for this - you only get one a round, and it seems appropriate to interject at the right moment for your inspiration. I also prefer the idea of inspirational healing happening before or after the battle - giving DR for the first hit, or restoring HP in a victory speech.

Chris_Nightwing said:

I also wouldn't want the Warlord effectively doing nothing on their turn but helping their allies.

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I was envisaging the "inspired action" as being a free action in 4e terms - in D&Dnext I think that's a swift action.

I'm not conversant enough with Next to really contribute to the implementation of the warlord there. All I can do is give general musings.

I've played for some time (in my homebrew, nod DnD) with the mundane leadership ability to "give away" your actions to others - effectively you pass and for something like an immediate action (a small but not negligible action cost) the beneficiary can get an additional action. You shout an order, and the target immediately obeys - or not if the order is not to their liking. Distinctly different from similar warlord abilities in 4E, this is not a "basic attack" - because that mechanic meant only fighters could really benefit from the warlord's hand-out attacks. The target can take any action at all, as long as it confirms to the warlords "orders". The target can also refuse and do nothing. This has proven very popular with my players, and not unbalancing to me. Yes, of course the action is transferred to the character most able to help in the current situation, meaning the party gets more of the resource it needs the most. But this is a class ability - it should pack some punch or it is pointless.

Some alternatives to healing:
Large and generous amount of temporary hit points (or similar damage buffer) the warlord can parcel out in basically unlimited quantities. This could also take the form of damage reduction. But such abilities are much less predictable than healing - temporary hit points are more "costly" than healing in most cases, and DR affects many small attacks much more than it affects one large attack.

Defense buffs - or miss chance. This has to be more powerful than healing, to account for the swinginess it introduces. Say you give opponents a 50% miss chance. From a series of two attacks, this means the opponent might do 0%, 50%, or 100% of his normal damage. When he does 50% this works out, but when he does 100% you provided no defense at all. AC and save buffs work similarly, but the math is not quite as simple. So how about halving all incoming damage? Possible... Very much a supernatural effect, but possible. Maybe the warlord can double the team's hit points, and after the fight they are halved again, along with any damage taken. You still take attrition, but very slowly.

Tactics: A warlord could do things such as improve the effects of flanking, allow shield walls, or other forms of team play. See the Cavalier in Pathfinder for one implementation of this. This is certainly a path to be explored , but more equivalent to the cleric's non-healing spells than to healing. Though these tricks certainly are useful, this is what makes the warlord fun, not what makes him powerful.

Personal combat ability: The warlord needs to be a warrior, or he could not inspire warriors. How much worse than a fighter can he be, and still fulfill the warrior archetype? The 4E warlord seemed a bit puny this way - too weak a fighter himself to actually earn any respect as a heroic leader (I never saw one in action, so this is pure theory). Because of limits on the action economy, I feel a warlord can be a pretty decent fighter and still have leadership abilities. In 3E terms, I see the warlord as a full BAB class, but lacking the combat class abilities of fighters, paladins etc.

Noncombat healing: In 3E, a major role of the cleric is to be they guy with the communal wand of cure light wounds. Hopefully, this will not be so in Next. I'm not sure how Next handles healing when resting, but seems it will present several options to choose from. We may not need a class ability for this.

Again, this is my cavalier archetype meant to be warlord-like in Pathfinder: http://hastur.net/wiki/Officer_(Apath)

For 25 years, my "captain of the king's guard" types have benn paladins. I think the Next Warlord could be an alternate build of (mundane) paladin. Cha and wis are paramount for an inspiring leader, laying of hands is a potent restoration of fighting spirit at touching range.
I would tweak the "spell" list to give some suitable combat (synergistic, or opportunistic) buffs and utility (even changing the "evil radar" of the paladin to some "danger meter").
I am not fluent enough in Next to seriously flesh out the details, but my impression is the thematic ideal you're after is so much stepping on the toes of the paladin, we should call him one (and remove some of the christian flavour, but still keeping some, as I feel the self sacrificial dimension of those characters is somewhat essential).

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[MENTION=69074]Cyberen[/MENTION], I agree that the archetype overlaps heavily with the paladin - in the current version of Next that is the cavelier sub-build.

It could be a non-magical paladin build. To fit the non-magical model for Next, at least as I understand it, that means encounter rather than daily powers (but therefore stepped down in power).

After reading the original thread, I've been thinking about this as well. I was considering an idea of having granted movement as part of the base class, then have one subclass that focuses on offense and another subclass that is defensive. It could be possible to have a third that mixes both to an extent, but I wouldn't know how to balance the mix. Something akin to the fighter's expertise dice that can only be recovered after a short or extended rest would keep the abilities from being used too often. Also, to try to keep things balanced since the character could heal more often (albeit for less), I was thinking of keeping the strongest abilities at touch range. The granted movement could be range, of course, but granting an attack (seeing the ally is well enough to perform the action) and non-magical healing (it's hard to hear in a fight, and you can only bandage up close if that's what you imagine the character is doing) make more sense as being closer range.

Here's what I was thinking:

Base class: 1d4 or 2d4 Inspiration die/dice (just to throw out a name) which would scale in size (d6 at level 5, d8 at level 10, etc), number of dice, or likely both, and can only use one die per turn unless otherwise specified (scaling number of dice would support using more than one at once). To grant movement, the character uses an action on their turn, rolls an Inspiration die, and someone/party members in range can move a distance equal to the die result times 5, with a maximum of their movement speed.

Offense subclass: As a reaction when an ally attacks an opponent, can roll an Inspiration die to grant a bonus to the attack equal to the die result (to keep it from being too strong, could make it half die result, minimum 1). As an action, can grant an ally an attack against an adjacent opponent (possibly uses the ally's reaction, maybe not); roll an Inspiration die and add it to the damage of the ally's attack. (I'm not sure on the math for how powerful an extra d6 or whatever damage would be, so it may be something more like "expend a die without rolling it to grant a bonus attack.")

Defense subclass: As a reaction when an ally is attacked, can roll an Inspiration die to grant a bonus to the ally's AC equal to (full or half) die result. As an action, can restore the HP of an adjacent ally; roll an Inspiration die, and the ally recovers HP equal to die result. (Maybe add a static bonus to the amount healed to keep it in line with Cure Wounds spell.)

This is just the first kind of thing that popped into my head. It would allow for movement, healing, extra attack, and buffs. You might also be able to add something to the base class that uses the Warlord's reaction to help with an ally's saving throw, but that's not something I've seen anyone mention in the original discussion thread, so I didn't include it in case it would put people off. All of these could (and should, aside from granting an attack since that wouldn't make sense) also be made to work on the Warlord as well as a "lead by example" thing--if you can't push yourself, your allies won't be as willing to push themselves just because you told them to.

Edit: The reason I separate the healing into a specific subclass is the same reason Cure Wounds isn't a spell every Cleric is required to take: The class should have the ability to heal, but healing shouldn't be the core of the class.

Edit 2: I switched it to d6 to d4 for the initial ability given how often the character would be able to use the bonus each day as compared to a Cleric using Cure Wounds. I also think the inspiration mechanic being linked to Charisma would make the class better at the interaction pillar, but I'm not sure how to do that and make it balanced. I was thinking adding it to the bonuses of the active uses of the inspiration dice, but I don't know if that would be too powerful. I'm thinking being required to either be in melee range of the baddies or having to run back and forth to heal different allies would be a good risk/reward balance with Cure Wounds' longer range, but as I said, I'm not sure how to balance it.

Just a side note; I'd like to see some of the warlord's inspiring mechanics take effect when they are genuinely being inspiring. e.g. The Warlord gets a critical hit, and allies seeing this regain hit points (or temp HP) or some other boon.
The Warlord leaps to protect a fallen comrade, or to interpose himself, thus suffering the wound instead of the target - this also gives the target and other allies a boon.
Those sorts of things.

In order to fit in Next Cavalier niche, I would design a specific Oath (Arthur pledges to serve and protect the Kingdom, Aragorn to serve and protect the Fellowship) at the source of the Captain's extraordinary powers. It would do a lot to spare some sensibilities about mundane/magic and the nature of HP... Also, it would justify keeping signature abilities on a "Daily" schedule, (namely : spiked healing through Laying hands) which would avoid cheapening those (in order to stay true to source material, hp restoration would rather fall under "spend a Fate point to do something awesome" rather than a routine skill) and, once again, spare some sensibilities (including mine !) expressing concern in the original thread for D&Desque healing.
Then, building a "spell" (actually, inspiration buffs) list should be easy. I would keep some room for tactical, mundane, encounter based effects.
(I think KM convinced me some time ago the taclord would be better adressed as some kind of bard)