Mike Mearls Happy Fun Hour: The Warlord

[Kinematics]

Most of us haven't been demanding a specific implementation. We have been saying:

1. Warlords need to be able to heal
2. Warlords need to be able to grant an extensive amount of attacks
3. Warlords need to buff allies

No, actually, #2 is an implementation detail (arguably an implementation detail of #3). #1 is sufficiently generic. #3 is possibly too vague and abstract.

What kind of person is a member of this class? What does he do? What methods does he use to accomplish that?

Mike defines his warlord as (paraphrased): "A master tactician. A fighter who can see advantages on the battlefield, and take advantage of them. An intelligent fighter, who wants to make sure his allies survive the battle by fighting smarter, rather than harder." You can see how what he designed falls out from that initial premise.

What is the executive summary of what you think the warlord should be described as? Even excluding it from the Fighter subclass domain. "Granting extra attacks" is an implementation detail, not a proper design description. "Buff allies" is so vague as to be meaningless.

 

[Kinematics]

Apparently this update hasn't been posted on this thread. Where can I find it?

YouTube link is here.

I wrote a transcription in this post.

 

[FrogReaver]

Apparently I missed the update. Thanks guys.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I wrote a transcription in this post.

Which was very much appreciated, BTW. Thank you.

This, I think, is the problem with a lot of the currently promoted attempts to force the 5E Warlord to be the 4E Warlord: It tries to copy the mechanics

I'm not sure where this comes from. Porting any 4e class over to 5e directly would result in it being sadly under-powered and likely non-viable. Achieving the same things in 5e as the 4e mechanics achieved in 4e would be a more useful benchmark.

I think Mike's approach is far better: You first define the concept, and then see what mechanics you can use to support that concept.

That sounds nice. But, it is re-inventing the wheel, it's very clearly not what was done for any other class (except, perhaps the poor Sorcerer) and he just happened to pick a definition that focused on one specific build out of 8.

I attempted to start a conversation about figuring out the underlying problem being solved

That would be quite a conversation. You have to understand that 4e went ahead and solved a lot of perennial problems with D&D. It just turned out that, after decades of living with - or exploiting - those problems, they weren't problems any more, they were a status quo fans were deeply invested in.

But, I guess we can live in forlorn hope that maybe, just maybe, just very, very optionally, we might be allowed, in some home games, somewhere, very quietly, to play a game without one or two of those issues. (Ha!)

Yeah, it's hard to even know where to begin... how 'bout the very beginning. Legend has it that D&D grew out of the medieval wargame, Chainmail. Arneson started running chainmail at a 1 figure = 1 unit = 1 individual scale in a campaign called Blackmoor. Gygax started something similar in Greyhawk (under Castle Greyhawk, whatever). For legal reasons they each need to pretend it was all their doing and the other was an usurper. Whatever. Point is, D&D was shaped in these early campaign, particularly Gygax's. In what I of think as a primordial catacylsm - Cain & Able level stuff, here - was that somebody wanted to play a Vampire, Gygax let him, then someone else figured they should play Vanhelsing and stick a cross in the vampire's face. Thus are Clerics born.

So the Cleric split off from the Fighting Man or Fighter or Baronet or whatever and the advantage of heavy armor & shield was diluted, but, more importantly, at some point, the Cleric started casting healing spells to restore hps.

D&D hit the shelves with the Fight(er)/(ing Man), Cleric and the character everyone was meant to play once they'd gained some skill, the Magic-User/Wizard/Mage (something like that). A year later, if that, the first supplement brings us the next Big Mistake of D&D, the Thief. The Thief is also inexplicably broken out from the non-magic-using Fight-whatever-guy, leaving the Fighter a heavy-armored, high-hp, beatstick with absolutely nothing going for him but hitting things. Zilch. Nor is the damage limited to the fighter. Everyone is now incompetent at sneaking through dungeons, looking for traps, listening at doors, etc. Brilliant. The Thief, meanwhile, is incompetent at hitting anything, inflicting damage, avoiding being hit, making saving throws, and generally not dying in any & every way imaginable.

That's the problem (the Warlord might make a small dent in, there's a whole 'nuther problem with Wizards - in a nut-shell, by AD&D, the PC wizard had tools Gygax had originally meant for only for BBEGs). In D&D early history, it was established that you can /either/ fight pretty hard and wear heavy armor, or be vaguely competent (not really, thief special abilities sucked hard at low level) at doing mundane tasks that weren't fighting. OTOH, you could totally fight pretty good, wear heavy armor, and cast spells (and turn undead), so long as you held a mace instead of a sword and wasted most of those spells keeping the schmuck with the sword standing.

I mean, it makes perfect sense, right? Well, after having no other options for how classes are supposed 'balance' in D&D for decades, yeah, it totally does.

Then nothing at all happened to improve on that state of affairs for 25 years.

That is an entrenched problem. Legacy spaghetti-code software barely captures the fubaredness of it.

So TSR dies and WotC buys the corpse and, after D&D had lain in the tomb for 4 days, Dancey rolls the stone aside and calls it forth as 3.0, and gives it to the world as d20, saying whatsoever system as useth this OGL, shall never die. (OK, IDK where that came from. I mean, I know, I just don't understand why I went there.)
Anyway, the point is 3.0 is received with great rejoicing (like the death of Sir Robin's minstrel), and the OGL means it can, in some form, be published, by anyone, forever.

3e makes some long-overdue changes. It codifies skills in a less egregiously limited way than thief-only special abilities, it carves out a few meaningful combat maneuvers besides hitting things and makes the fighter customizeable via the first real innovation in D&D in 25 years: feats. It also responds to long-standing complaints that clerics are boring because all they ever do is heal. That response is to make CoDzilla. Hey, if the Cleric is given so many spells, and such powerful spells, that if he has just one or two available to cast in a given combat, he can turn himself into a giant engine of destruction, people'll play it, right? (Yeah, what if he says "F this healing S, I'm going to stomp through Tokyo 24/7!" Oops. (and again, the Wizard is going all LFQW, too) I've barely scratch the surface really. But, bottom line, casters, already the point of the game out of the lower levels, are powered up to a freakish degree. Of course, people love it, because, well, they can play CoDzilla, or god-Wizards, or, if they're into that kinda thing, something else customized to the nth degree in their shadows. There is great rejoicing, and not a little complaining about how utterly broken the game is.

4e comes along - and we won't even get into how utterly effed it was from the moment it was pitched to Hasbro - and does the unthinkable: it tackles those complaints. Now, you have to understand, if anyone thought there was the least danger of the glorious mess they were gleefully exploiting being cleaned up, they'd've never even alluded to it. It's just that the temptation to spell out how broken everything was, and thus feel smarter than the guys that broke it, was hard for nerds to resist. It should have been impossible, but 4e successfully nearly kinda-sorta-almost balanced the classes. The margin of caster superiority was pretty thin, and the dependence on the Cleric for healing (already little more than symbolic with multiple classes - and cheap-ass wands - able to cast CLW) was gone - and, along with it, the justification for CoDzilla.

The Destroyah that starved CoDzilla of oxygen in this tortured mixed analogy was the only other leader in the 4e PH1: the Warlord. (Yeah, I finally got there. You thought I wasn't going to make it, didn't'ya?)

There really wasn't much to the Warlord. It was a STR-based melee type with the same hps as a cleric or rogue, the same armor as the cleric, and slightly 'better' weapons (which , keep in mind, meant next to nothing, and you could always learn an even-better superior weapon for 1 feat - of the 18 or so you'd get in your career). It got some basic healing as Inspiring Word via the I-guess-revolutionary-for-D&D mecahnic of healing surges, marking the first time healing actually mapped to the ex(cuse/planation) of hps by EGG in the '79 DMG even a teeny bit (sorta, if you squint). But, for the first time, like every other class, the martial classes got limited-use toys of comparable number & power (but not versatility) to everyone else (mind you, that number had been drastically reduced). Not only did this mean someone who'd rather play a warrior than a preachy cleric in a party that desperately needed healing, could, it meant that if a DM wanted to run a game with no casters, even with little-or-no magic of any kind, he could, and the game could just about handle it (but for little problems with minions and locking things down, because no Martial Controller!).

And, that was it. The End Times. Fire rained from the heavens, the earth shook, cities were razed, demons rose from hell and feasted on the entrails of the faithful...

... and the rest you know.

I'm much more interested in exploring the boundaries of what Mike Mearls' design could do, but that seems to get ignored or drowned out.

Those boundaries are clear. On a fighter chassis, it is impossible to build anything but a quite competent DPR beatstick with a respectable degree of toughness: a classic tank. The warlord aspects will be a side-line. That's what the PDK was, that's what the BM was to the Weaponmaster fighter rather than the Warlord (though tossing in a couple of warlord-inspired maneuvers was apparently meant to make it /both/, but it doesn't hold a candle to what either actually were, let alone what they'd map to in 5e were they upscaled the way other classes were).

So, BM, PDK, now this. It's Mike's third strike trying to build a Warlord on a fighter chassis. It's an exercise in futility, the purpose of which is not entirely clear. Maybe the objective is to block the Warlord permanently, maybe to spin out it's introduction to keep a low fire of controversy simmering - not enough to re-ignite the edition war, just enough to keep folks engaged. IDK. I'm not good at that Machiavellian stuff. Looking at it practically it's just a hard fail from square 1. An interesting process, don't mis-understand me, but something that can only fail.

Now, to put that diatribe in perspective: I said something of the same level of negativity about balancing fighter types and casters when 3.5 was in it's final days, and very confidently opined that no version of D&D would ever be able to do it. So I'm quite accustomed to being wrong.
At least I am in the comfortable position of being either right, or pleasantly surprised at the end of the exercise.

 

[FrogReaver]

So I watched the video.

I like how a lot of Mearls "Warlord" is looking. I wouldn't call it a Warlord though. It's simply not. It's like looking at a rogue without sneak attack. It's like looking at a cleric that can't heal. There's a lot of interesting space there, but it's not the name he's calling it.

BattleMaster would be more apt but that's already taken.

 

[outsider]

the character everyone was meant to play once they'd gained some skill, the Magic-User/Wizard/Mage (something like that).

Of all of the things 4e fixed, this was the most important and the thing I miss the most. As you said though, at this point people consider it a feature, not a bug.

 

[Kinematics]

Doing some rewatching, and how Mike was considering whether the dice pool he was using for healing might or might not be used for the spell-like abilities, he eventually decided to separate the two concerns because they'd cause problems due to competing for the same resources (the warlord's choice of action). And he also brought up the idea that the dice could be split — that is, if you had a 2d10 pool for a given use, you could give 1d10 to heal someone, and 1d10 to boost someone else's damage.

Anyway, for all that preface — isn't he just giving an extra attack to the person whose damage he's boosting? If your 2H longsword does 2d10 instead of 1d10 (though only one +Str addition), it's sort of, but not quite the same as rolling two attacks. It does less damage than two attacks could potentially do, but it also only needs one attack roll, so you don't have to deal with misses.

So essentially he has his warlord using her healing resource as an underhanded "extra attack" as an alternate option for how to apply that resource.


This gets back to my "implementation detail" issue. The root desire is "boost damage". The implementation used before is "grant an extra attack". The implementation used here is "boost damage on an attack". In this case Mike is creating it through the same pool as the healing is coming from, since that resource pool defines how much you can draw that can still be considered approximately balanced for the class as a whole.

At the same time, by allowing the use of this resource in multiple different ways at the same time (splitting the dice up), it's not competing for the character's action resources — one person telling you to heal, and another telling you to help him kill the mob, and only one action that you can use between them. That's not an 'interesting' choice, it's a frustrating one, and one that Mike has put efforts into avoiding in his HFH designs.

 

[FlyingChihuahua]

(I'm not doubling the page length to quote this.)

That's a lot of words to say something.

Allow me to simplify it to one sentence:

I hate casters and wish they weren't in the game.

 

[Tony Vargas]

That's a lot of words to say something.

Allow me to simplify it to one sentence:

Lol. Hey, I'm just saying casters have at times been wildly overpowered, and others, only modestly overpowered. Not that I'm such a saint I never took advantage of that fact.
I played the unholy heck out of magic-users back in the day, so, yeah, I'm a tad tired of playing them, myself. But I have dusted off a few this millennium. In 3.x, a few Sorcerers and, very briefly, a Cleric. In 4e an Eladrin Wizard McFighter just long enough to get to Wizard of the Spiral Tower, a Minotaur Artificer, a Human Cleric Radiant Servant through mid Paragon, and a couple more Wizards(Mages), and a Watershaper Druid(Sentinel), and a hybrid Ardent at Encounters, plus a Hybrid Shaman in Lair Assault. (Of course, you can guess the other half of those Hybrids). And just various one-offs at conventions and the like. A Druid in the playtest, another Wizard (actually a reprise of a 4e wizard character), and a dwarf cleric in 5e - showing how seldom I'm actually player at 5e tables instead of DMing.

But, to look at another way, when 'compromise' about allowing things into the game comes up, yeah, I'd be happy to take the position that all caster PCs need to be purged, and we could meet in the middle somewhere. That's not real compromise, of course, it's just extremism masquerading as bargaining, but since that the attitude h4ters take with the Warlord, it'd only be fair.

In the context of game design, compromise about what characters can be played and how powerful they can be comes in a rarefied form: balance.

Anyway, for all that preface — isn't he just giving an extra attack to the person whose damage he's boosting? If your 2H longsword does 2d10 instead of 1d10 (though only one +Str addition), it's sort of, but not quite the same as rolling two attacks. It does less damage than two attacks could potentially do, but it also only needs one attack roll, so you don't have to deal with misses.

In general, more attacks, even if for proportionally less damage, is better (on the PC side). The result will be more consistent, which tends to favor PCs (in any edition, but particularly in 5e's faster/easier combats)

So essentially he has his warlord using her healing resource as an underhanded "extra attack" as an alternate option for how to apply that resource.

Well the whole paradigm he's using revolves around damage, so, yeah, that flows fairly naturally...

At the same time, by allowing the use of this resource in multiple different ways at the same time (splitting the dice up), it's not competing for the character's action resources — one person telling you to heal, and another telling you to help him kill the mob, and only one action that you can use between them. That's not an 'interesting' choice, it's a frustrating one, and one that Mike has put efforts into avoiding in his HFH designs.

It's not an issue that came up a lot, IMX. But it doesn't seem a burning design issue, to me. It also sounds like exactly the kind of thing 5e uses bonus actions for - doing two things at once.
But, because he's going Fighter sub-class, he's worried about messing up TWF, is that it? Because it's more important his Fighter(Warlord) hit enemies with a dagger & sword in the same round than heal an ally and aid an attack in the same round?

 

[cbwjm]

So I watched the video.

I like how a lot of Mearls "Warlord" is looking. I wouldn't call it a Warlord though. It's simply not. It's like looking at a rogue without sneak attack. It's like looking at a cleric that can't heal. There's a lot of interesting space there, but it's not the name he's calling it.

BattleMaster would be more apt but that's already taken.

I think a large part depends on how you see the warlord. For battlefield control, something I think the warlord should excel at, I think this would excellently fill the warlord gap. I will note, however, that I may have a different view of the warlord since I played 4e briefly and before I heard of the popular builds.