Mike Mearls Happy Fun Hour: The Warlord

[Gardens & Goblins]

A non-fighty/not very fighty Warlord sounds...

...really really annoying.

Akin to a back-seat driver.

Sure, in the real world we have coaches and instructors but... well maybe its just our table and we assume to roles of adventurers that typically graduated from boot camp. Having someone else telling you you're doing it wrong, the counterpart of 'do it like this its better!', is.. at best annoying. At worst, rather rude!

 

[Tony Vargas]

A non-fighty/not very fighty Warlord sounds...
...really really annoying.
Akin to a back-seat driver.

Yep, you could totally go there, in a more humorous game. The "armchair adventure," who dispenses obscurer, annoyingly useful advice while you're fighting for your life. I came up with a build like that in 3.x, a Bard: instead of music, back-seat-adventurer kibitzing, but it still gave you the bonus. ;P The only problems were not a big enough bonus to make people put up with it, and more (and CHA-based) spells than picking up a few from academic research would comfortably account for. In 4e, you could go lazylord, add McWizard if your knowledge included spells, or Hybrid Artificer for a 'Q' type, it even dovetailed with the typical LazyLord's INT-based build, since you could have high knowledge checks to back it up.

But the way I'd envision the Icon sub-class it could encompass that or the effete general in the rear, or the more CHA-based victim-in-distress, non-combatant who embodies the cause (like a mascot, really, but less silly), or the more active plucky side-kick.

So you could also go very pragmatic and 'CaW' with it, or more high-drama (or melodrama). All depends on what the table's style is like.

 

[Hussar]

I have to admit, I never considered warlords as a kind of fighter. They didn't have heavy armor, for one, and their primary schtick was not DPS, which fighters have pretty much always been (despite the shift to defender in 4e, they were still the most striker of any defender.)

It really never occurred to me, before all this "warlords should be subclasses of fighters" that anyone thought of warlords as fighters. Warlords are no more fighters than paladins or rangers are fighters. Sure, there's some shared bits - whacking things with a sword generally and not blowing stuff up with a spell - but, beyond that, there's very little connecting a warlord to a fighter.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I have to admit, I never considered warlords as a kind of fighter.

For a long time, the only 'Martial' character was the fighter. So it's easy to see 4e as having taken the fighter and 'split it up' into the Martial Source classes - with the exception of the Rogue, of course:

The fighter kept the traditional toughness and meat-shield duties, but with teeth, actual class features that gave it 'aggro' the way everyone was clamoring for throughout the epidemic of 'fighter SUX' threads on Gleemax, plus greatly expanded versatility (at the price of customizeability relative to 3.x) and more resource-management & agency in general.

The Ranger took the traditional 1e/2e Cuisinart-of-Doom TWFing build and the often-marginal archer and made them viable (but not too broken) DPR machines.

The Warlord walked off with just the classic fighter's name-level ribbon, and expanded it into a class that finally supported so many of the archetypes the fighter had always fallen so far short of (and a few more the designers never even expected).

About the only thing lost to 4e's kerf allowance was the 3.x 'battlefield control'/'tactical reach' builds, which would've likely violated the sanctity of the wizard's controller role too much.


It engendered the opposite sort of confusion, too. People were like "Fighters 'can't' use bows? WTF?" when the Ranger was that edition's non-magical archer, for instance, because the ranger's Martial status was easy to miss if you were expecting it to be casting spells as in all prior editions.


So, yeah, there's a strong bond between the martial source and the fighter, and it's created tangled expectations about what names should be used where and how the design space should be laid out.

But, 5e very clearly laid out the fighter's design space. It de-facto tanks (for want of any 'aggro' mechanics, but traditionally many DMs just have more bad-ass enemies attack the fighter for honor/glory/pick'n-on-someone-your-own-size/whatever) and solidly delivers DPR, and has precious little room for anything more. And, one of the three things they put into that precious little space was Casting Wizard Spells.
So, the fighter class can't be used as an analogue for 4e's Martial Source, instead, characters that would have simply been Martial in 4e must be defined by their lack of supernatural abilities.

 

[Zardnaar]

For a long time, the only 'Martial' character was the fighter. So it's easy to see 4e as having taken the fighter and 'split it up' into the Martial Source classes - with the exception of the Rogue, of course:

The fighter kept the traditional toughness and meat-shield duties, but with teeth, actual class features that gave it 'aggro' the way everyone was clamoring for throughout the epidemic of 'fighter SUX' threads on Gleemax, plus greatly expanded versatility (at the price of customizeability relative to 3.x) and more resource-management & agency in general.

The Ranger took the traditional 1e/2e Cuisinart-of-Doom TWFing build and the often-marginal archer and made them viable (but not too broken) DPR machines.

The Warlord walked off with just the classic fighter's name-level ribbon, and expanded it into a class that finally supported so many of the archetypes the fighter had always fallen so far short of (and a few more the designers never even expected).

About the only thing lost to 4e's kerf allowance was the 3.x 'battlefield control'/'tactical reach' builds, which would've likely violated the sanctity of the wizard's controller role too much.


It engendered the opposite sort of confusion, too. People were like "Fighters 'can't' use bows? WTF?" when the Ranger was that edition's non-magical archer, for instance, because the ranger's Martial status was easy to miss if you were expecting it to be casting spells as in all prior editions.


So, yeah, there's a strong bond between the martial source and the fighter, and it's created tangled expectations about what names should be used where and how the design space should be laid out.

But, 5e very clearly laid out the fighter's design space. It de-facto tanks (for want of any 'aggro' mechanics, but traditionally many DMs just have more bad-ass enemies attack the fighter for honor/glory/pick'n-on-someone-your-own-size/whatever) and solidly delivers DPR, and has precious little room for anything more. And, one of the three things they put into that precious little space was Casting Wizard Spells.
So, the fighter class can't be used as an analogue for 4e's Martial Source, instead, characters that would have simply been Martial in 4e must be defined by their lack of supernatural abilities.

I think 4Es big screw up was tying things to powers that are basic ie twf and archery. Each time you wanted a basic concept such as fighter you needed a whole build to enable it.
D&D spells more or less offer a unified powers list for class variants and new classes.

 

[Tony Vargas]

D&D spells more or less offer a unified powers list for class variants and new classes...

...that use magic...

 

[FrogReaver]

The really silly thing about arguing about this - how it ought to look - is that it simply doesn't need to look one true way. It can exist as a fighter subclass right alongside a class all its own, just like the wizard does.

Except we can't call them both Warlord...

That's kind of the issue. Mearls is making a tactical warlord and trying to say he's made us a warlord, which invariably leaves a Warlord class out of any further designs.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Except we can't call them both Warlord...
That's kind of the issue. Mearls is making a tactical warlord and trying to say he's made us a warlord.

Tactical Warlords weren't as butch as a 5e fighter, either. He's extracted some of the Bravura's DNA, and some of the Tactical's, and is making a Fighter/Warlord faux-MC that'll presumably fall short of really evoking either that well. And isn't even trying for the broader class - yet, he doesn't completely slam the door on the possibility in the future...

 

[FrogReaver]

Tactical Warlords weren't as butch as a 5e fighter, either. He's extracted some of the Bravura's DNA, and some of the Tactical's, and is making a Fighter/Warlord faux-MC that'll presumably fall short of really evoking either that well. And isn't even trying for the broader class - yet, he doesn't completely slam the door on the possibility in the future...

Might be a bit difficult to make a Warlord class if you already use the Warlord name in a fighter subclass...

 

[Kinematics]

Warlord is a horrible name, anyway. Let him make the Fighter subclass the Warlord (because being all fighter-y fits the name), and come up with a different name for the tactician class.