D&D 5E How Important is it that Warlords be Healers?

AbdulAlhazred said:

I promise if someone started shooting at you, things would change in, ohhh, 500 milliseconds or so To also address [MENTION=17106]Ahnehnois[/MENTION] similar comment, I think that in fact parties are QUITE cohesive. In fact unnaturally so. How many people could meet at a bar and the next day fight as a cohesive unit in strange terrain against an aggressive foe and act in a concerted way with detailed knowledge of each other's capabilities, organized in a flexible formation with each major required skill covered? The most highly trained special forces on Earth would drool to have the coordination of your average D&D party. Having a Warlord in the group makes total sense and IMHO fits right into the 'band of heroes against darkness/evil/poverty/whatever' theme of the game perfectly.

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More likely I'd just be a casualty. If I were put in such a situation I'd either fall to the ground and start hunting for someplace I felt safe and ignore the people wanting to do anything else or glom on to the first person who remotely acted like he knows what he is doing and stick there. Shouting at me or pushing me is much more likely to get a freeze in place reaction from me as I try to process what is expected from me and if I want to provide it. I don't react well to that form of pressure.

Your examples seem to indicate you believe every field NCO is a warlord -- if that's the case I respectfully suggest that its not a class, but a common feature like a feat any combatant could take. I'd further point out that they inspiration techniques they use -- while broad strokes -- are turned to the people they are trying to affect and there are those that don't respond to them and wash out of training.

Tossing a new tactical guy into a group that has trained together and knows how each other work is likely to frustrate everyone for a while -- not make the trained group more effective. In effect the coordination bonus granted by 3.5 fits better.

"A typical man-at-arms can take about 5 hit points of damage before being Killed. Let us suppose that a 10th level fighter has 55 hit points, plus a bonus of 30 hit points for his constitution, for a total of 85 hit points. This IS the equivalent of about 18 hit dice for creatures, about what it would take to kill four huge warhorses. It is ridiculous to assume that even a fantastic fighter can take that much punishment. The some holds true to a lesser extent for clerics, thieves, and the other classes. Thus, the majority of hit points are symbolic of combat skill, luck (bestowed by supernatural powers), and magical forces." (AD&D Players Handbook 1st edition p.34) Emphasis mine, capitalization and incorrect assessment of how many hit points from con a 10th level fighter gets, not ;-).

In this entry skill is not placed below magical or supernatural forces. If I can improve your combat skill I can improve your hit points. Most wounds are in fact not "wounds" (5 hp kills a man remember) so most healing is not the physical knitting of wounds. The part of me that loves super complicated rules might like a mechanical difference between wounds and "luck et al.", palladium has it, one of the WOTC editions of star wars had it etc., where normal hits go vs luck and criticals go vs wounds and the like, I don't think in practice it is worth the added complexity.

Now I choose warlord heals or I am unhappy. That isn't explicitly true. I don't care if a class is called the warlord, or if a class called the warlord heals. But I would be unhappy with healing = cleric. And I strongly agree with the folks who say most clerics shouldn't heal (determined by faith). If calling the non-magical healer combat medic makes you feel happier I wouldn't overly care, though I think warlord properly embodies the entire spectrum of non-magical healing plus things that logically go with non-magical healing (like buffs and coordinated attacks).

Nemesis Destiny said:

This is reaching several pages back, but I was otherwise engaged when this thread continued on. I just wanted to address this though.

What I see in the poll is that most people who answered don't care enough to get upset about warlord healing and only a small number do, 17%. There are more people (23%) that would be upset if it isn't included. So with 83 percent either in favour, or not strongly opposed enough for it to be a dealbreaker, it seems that it should at least be an option.

I will agree with El Mahdi in that the rest of your arguments simply fail to hold up to any kind of scrutiny.

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Let me break it down.
The thing is, roughly 1/4 of the respondents fall into the four major camps, of those two of them (almost half the respondents) are strongly against the other. So favouring one side means disappointing the other.

Either option is unacceptable in my eyes. There must be some effort to satisfy both or the attempt to set-up 5e as a bridge building edition fails.
This is just one of many divisive issues and is likely one of the more esoteric ones the majority of the fanbase does not care about. But picking fractions of the fanbase erodes your numbers and potential buyers. Once you start saying “it’s acceptable to upset these people because they’re the minority” it doesn’t end.

Which means there must be one option as a baseline and the other as an optional module.

So the question is not “which option is right?” but “which is easier to add?”.
The current baseline is somewhere in the middle. Hitpoints are an abstraction that represent both health and non-health so DMs can choose which to emphasise during any given round/ encounter/ session/ campaign. Currently it can be flavoured as either which satisfies both camps. Inspirational healing removes that choice.

Again, it’s always easier to add than subtract. Yes, this isn’t logical but humans aren’t logical. We’re creatures of emotion! Passion! (I’m fighting the urge to throw a “pointed-eared Vulcan hobgobin” shot in here.)
Adding is simply easier because the factors are known. You’re adding something. But when subtracting something from the game it’s less obvious what the effects will be or if you’re forgetting anything.
Hitpoints are a good example. Warlords are not the only example of inspirational healing in 4e. Once it made the decision that hitpoints would not be health there was second wind and various other non-magical healing. So taking out the warlord doesn’t solve the problem because you also need to remove second wind, which means you need to find a new dwarven racial power. And there are feats and powers tied to second wind and dwarves and warlords.
It’s complicated because everything gets interrelated.
But adding is finite. You’re taking a self-contained addition such as second wind, inspirational healing, and the like and adding it into the game.

This pleases both parties. The people who don’t want inspirational healing don’t use those modules and don’t change their game while the people who want inspirational healing can add it into their game with minimal changes and work.

Jester Canuck said:

Let me break it down.
The thing is, roughly 1/4 of the respondents fall into the four major camps, of those two of them (almost half the respondents) are strongly against the other. So favouring one side means disappointing the other.

Either option is unacceptable in my eyes. There must be some effort to satisfy both or the attempt to set-up 5e as a bridge building edition fails.
This is just one of many divisive issues and is likely one of the more esoteric ones the majority of the fanbase does not care about. But picking fractions of the fanbase erodes your numbers and potential buyers. Once you start saying “it’s acceptable to upset these people because they’re the minority” it doesn’t end.

Which means there must be one option as a baseline and the other as an optional module.

So the question is not “which option is right?” but “which is easier to add?”.
The current baseline is somewhere in the middle. Hitpoints are an abstraction that represent both health and non-health so DMs can choose which to emphasise during any given round/ encounter/ session/ campaign. Currently it can be flavoured as either which satisfies both camps. Inspirational healing removes that choice.

Again, it’s always easier to add than subtract. Yes, this isn’t logical but humans aren’t logical. We’re creatures of emotion! Passion! (I’m fighting the urge to throw a “pointed-eared Vulcan hobgobin” shot in here.)
Adding is simply easier because the factors are known. You’re adding something. But when subtracting something from the game it’s less obvious what the effects will be or if you’re forgetting anything.
Hitpoints are a good example. Warlords are not the only example of inspirational healing in 4e. Once it made the decision that hitpoints would not be health there was second wind and various other non-magical healing. So taking out the warlord doesn’t solve the problem because you also need to remove second wind, which means you need to find a new dwarven racial power. And there are feats and powers tied to second wind and dwarves and warlords.
It’s complicated because everything gets interrelated.
But adding is finite. You’re taking a self-contained addition such as second wind, inspirational healing, and the like and adding it into the game.

This pleases both parties. The people who don’t want inspirational healing don’t use those modules and don’t change their game while the people who want inspirational healing can add it into their game with minimal changes and work.

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I disagree with your analysis of the data in the poll. I don't think that your conclusions are supported by the available data and further that you are twisting the responses it in a way which supports your conclusions. Conclusions that I and several others have already and repeatedly pointed out have little logical backing. There really isn't much else to say about the issue for my part. Arguing further is pointless.

Also, your font colour shows poorly against the 'legacy' forum background.

AbdulAlhazred said:

I just reject the whole notion that 4e somehow is designed in any fundamentally different way than any other edition.

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And so arguing against that would be pointless.

AbdulAlhazred said:

Do you think that Vancian casting wasn't designed as it is for gamist reasons? Of course it was. They had a mechanical concept of spell slots which was intended to limit the effectiveness of wizards and make them play a resource game, and then they found a suitable explanation for it.

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Vancian magic was based on the writing and magic system of JackVance, so no, it wasn’t entirely for gamist reasons. It may have been chosenbecause it was easy to make mechanics for, but there was always a narrativereason.

AbdulAlhazred said:

The cleric, same thing. Do you think the armor and weapon restriction rules were made up for story reasons? Of course not, fantasy is replete with sword-wielding wizards and clerics being forced to use maces makes no story sense at all.

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Thisargument is a little sillier, as most modern takes on the cleric tend to havethem lightly armoured like the wizard because they’re spellcasters.
The clerichas its armour and weapons because of its historical source as religiousknights.
Mechanically,giving it heavy armour made it a little too similar to the fighter. From agamist perspective it should have had less armour than it does.

AbdulAlhazred said:

The very existence of rules like hit points and armor class clearly are entirely gamist, and the granting of d8s to fighting men and d4s to magic users has nothing to do with 'story', it is purely a gamist device to balance the classes.

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I agree with that, but it’s harder to add story to somethinglike “the health tracking mechanic.”
But classes and races do have story. The first classesintroduced were options like the druid and rogue that were very influenced bystory and not just “here’s a new mechanic to try out”.

AbdulAlhazred said:

I am relatively confident that the 4e designers of the Avenger class had a concept in mind, you even named it right off, Batman. Maybe they used a different one, Batman is a bit outside D&D genre, but Zorro, D'Artagnon, etc could all serve as adequate models. The point is the mechanics may have been some idea that was lying around, maybe someone thought of that first and then thought AHAH! That will work great for an Avenger! Chances are the original kernel of the idea for the mechanic was itself inspired by the thought of a lone avenging combatant, and may have been quite different from the final version. Surely there were some tweaks along the way. I think this was true with all the 4e classes.

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The origins of the Avenger class come down to needing a divinestriker.
It’s unique defining mechanic is basically Advantage.
It’s flavour paints it as an offensive paladin or aggressivecleric. “Divine assassin” isn’t a class, it’s a character, a narrow archetype.

And the avenger is one of the better 4e classes. The seeker,battlemind, runepriest, ardent, and warden are all much worse.

AbdulAlhazred said:

There's another problem with this. SURELY very many of the 3e classes were designed to leverage mechanical concepts, certainly to the same degree that 4e classes were. If you are critical of 4e on this score you must be double critical of 3e.

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This was very true of late 3e, and even some early 3e classes like the sorcerer, which was created solely to have another class that used the wizard's spell list. And the sorcerer isn't exactly the best example of a unique archetype screaming for its own class.

AbdulAlhazred said:

While of course people started to do other things besides JUST dungeon crawl pretty soon, the VAST majority of the game, right up to the present, has always been focused pretty steadily on dungeon crawling.

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Yourmileage might vary GREATLY on this depending on your group.
The vastmajority of the official game hasbeen focused on this, because WotC really want to focus on dungeons at the endof 3e and during all of 4e.
Some ofthis was accidental: the Delve format was built for dungeons and made other adventuresharder to design.
But many,many DMs reject dungeons and run exploratory adventures or investigativeadventures or political adventures and the like.

AbdulAlhazred said:

Practically every module out there from TSR is mainly a crawl of some sort. Most of the WotC modules are too. Very little thought was ever given to what magic or other class features would mean in the wider world. They were designed specifically to allow for the creation of a mixed party of adventurers exploring some sort of underworld, or now and then some wilderness or town.

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And given how successful WotC’s adventures have been, theirdungeon-centric design might not be for the best.

AbdulAlhazred said:

As long as the rest of the world was mainly kept as a sort of vague backdrop and supplier of plot hooks and such it worked pretty well. As soon as you wondered who actually made magic items, why wizards didn't just open banks or betting parlors, how a town of 3000 people could support a thieve's guild, etc it worked OK. Gary even provided enough of a ready-made answer for questions like "where do orcs come from" that most people had no real trouble focusing on their character and not worrying about the rest.

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So... aslong as you didn’t think, it worked okay?

Yeah, myplayers revel in tearing through logical holes. Nerds in general love lookingfor that stuff. Heck, musing about stuff like that is what has fueled EdGreenwood and Kieth Baker’s entire careers.

AbdulAlhazred said:

I mean really, for all people seem to have this idea that 4e is 'not as flexible' it is MUCH easier to do things like Dark Sun, or Dragonlance, using 4e than with earlier edition rules. I find it interesting right off that these 2 major setting variations BOTH zeroed in on clerics as a major aspect of the game to change too. NOTHING can be more evidence of 'not thinking about world consequences' than the CLW spell itself.

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My favourite is Ravenloft,so 4e didn’t work as well.
Monsters didn’t require any special preparation and tactics,PCs were hard to kill and even harder to scare, magic was everywhere, it washard to use just a single boss monster, long combats removed much of the horrortone, it was hard to only have a single fight per day without PCs nova-ing, no firearms, andthe like.
The game always descended into something more akin to Van Helsing than Dracula.

It’s hard to play a low-magic, fragile heroes, supernaturalhorror game with 4e, which was designed to be a high magic heroic fantasy.

(Although, for my two favourite settings, Ravenloft and FFG’s MidnightI’d possibly use inspirational healing. in the former to avoid having a clericto cut down on the magic in the world and in the latter because the onlyclerics are followers of Izrador.)

Nemesis Destiny said:

I disagree with your analysis of the data in the poll. I don't think that your conclusions are supported by the available data and further that you are twisting the responses it in a way which supports your conclusions. Conclusions that I and several others have already and repeatedly pointed out have little logical backing. There really isn't much else to say about the issue for my part. Arguing further is pointless.

Also, your font colour shows poorly against the 'legacy' forum background.

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I imagine your voice here exactly like angry Gene Wilder from the end of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, but you forgot to close it out with, "GOOD DAY SIR! I SAID GOOD DAY, SIR!"

Nemesis Destiny said:

Also, your font colour shows poorly against the 'legacy' forum background.

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Did some writing at work during my break in Google Drive. Handy but the formatting has some problems when inserting into message boards.

Nemesis Destiny said:

I disagree with your analysis of the data in the poll. I don't think that your conclusions are supported by the available data and further that you are twisting the responses it in a way which supports your conclusions. Conclusions that I and several others have already and repeatedly pointed out have little logical backing. There really isn't much else to say about the issue for my part. Arguing further is pointless.

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Let's look at the numbers again.
23% will be upset if warlords lack healing while 15% will be upset if they have healing. Neither is an insignificant percentage of the fanbase (assuming the numbers are representational).
38% are anti-warlord and 45% are pro-warlord. Again, very close. Neither side can really claim to be the majority.

But really, my point comes down to ignoring any percentage of the audience is bad.

initially based on:
http://xkcd.com/1167/
Used under the Creative Commons Licence.

Jester Canuck said:

Let's look at the numbers again.
23% will be upset if warlords lack healing while 15% will be upset if they have healing. Neither is an insignificant percentage of the fanbase (assuming the numbers are representational).
38% are anti-warlord and 45% are pro-warlord. Again, very close. Neither side can really claim to be the majority.

But really, my point comes down to ignoring any percentage of the audience is bad.

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Let's not. I told you - I'm done. I do not draw the same conclusions from the data that you do. Feel free to make the numbers do whatever cartwheels you wish, but you're grasping; nothing in the wording of this poll indicates either pro- or anti-warlord. At all. Feel free to disagree, but like I said - I'm through arguing with you.

Nemesis Destiny said:

Let's not. I told you - I'm done. I do not draw the same conclusions from the data that you do. Feel free to make the numbers do whatever cartwheels you wish, but you're grasping; nothing in the wording of this poll indicates either pro- or anti-warlord. At all. Feel free to disagree, but like I said - I'm through arguing with you.

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Wait... what?!
Pointing out neither side can claim to be the majority is "making the numbers do cartwheels"?!

How can you claim to be "With D&D... any edition" if you want to support making a fifth of the audience angry?