Lets design a Warlord for 5th edition

[Hussar]

On a normal Fighter, Extra attack gives around 6 or maybe more extra DPR. Typically a battlemaster maneuver will do a little less than that with an effect.

What if there was a way to exchange the level 5 extra attack for a free superiority dice effect?

It doesn't solve every problem with the battlemaster as warlord, but I think it get's closer than many of the ideas I'm seeing here and it's something we can start using right away?

THat's... not a bad idea at all. Pretty easy to implement, I think. Something like:

When you give up an attack, you gain 1 Superiority die up to the maximum for your level.

That would let battle masters do a LOT of the things that a warlord should be able to do and do it every round, rather than about half the time now.

So the first half (ish) of a short rest period, the battle master just burns Sup Dice. The second half, he's burning an attack to gain a Sup Die that can then be used to power other stuff. Has the added bonus of, if spent on giving the rogue free attacks every time, he's burning two attacks to do it.

Should we not limit this to 1/round? Or, would it matter? If the 11th level BM burns 2 attacks to get back 2 dice, that balances out anyway.

I think I'd like to take this idea for a spin.

 

[FrogReaver]

THat's... not a bad idea at all. Pretty easy to implement, I think. Something like:

When you give up an attack, you gain 1 Superiority die up to the maximum for your level.

That would let battle masters do a LOT of the things that a warlord should be able to do and do it every round, rather than about half the time now.

So the first half (ish) of a short rest period, the battle master just burns Sup Dice. The second half, he's burning an attack to gain a Sup Die that can then be used to power other stuff. Has the added bonus of, if spent on giving the rogue free attacks every time, he's burning two attacks to do it.

Should we not limit this to 1/round? Or, would it matter? If the 11th level BM burns 2 attacks to get back 2 dice, that balances out anyway.

I think I'd like to take this idea for a spin.

Not sure. I hadn't worked out details beyond the initial idea. I'll think on them some more

 

[FrogReaver]

So I would do it as an immediate effect instead of an additional superiority dice. Something like:

You may give up an attack any time during your attack action to gain a superiority dice that must be immediately used.

A few reasons:
1. If you let the fighter gain a superiority dice permanently as [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] proposed then you risk players fighting a rat or punching another player just to get their max allotment of superiority dice. I don't want to encourage that playstyle.

2. I don't think letting 2 superiority dice apply to the same attack will be problematic, however, it would require a lot of additional rules/rulings to work. So I would try it without that initially.

3. I think we should keep the ability to save superiority dice for hard fights instead of incentivizing players to burn through them immediately. I think this proposal allows that.

4. If our general premise is right that extra attack is nearly equivalent to superiority dice then I don't see an issue with trading any number of attacks we want for dice.

 

[Tony Vargas]

. Something like:

When you give up an attack, you gain 1 Superiority die up to the maximum for your level.

That would be getting closer to the way MDDs were headed in the early Next playtest packets.

Extra attack has a lot of potential DPR upside, though, so it might be hard to make maneuvers worth it, while, at the same time, spamming maneuvers could be problematic, as well. And 5e design puts a heavy limit on what at-wills can do...

 

[FrogReaver]

That would be getting closer to the way MDDs were headed in the early Next playtest packets.

Extra attack has a lot of potential DPR upside, though, so it might be hard to make maneuvers worth it, while, at the same time, spamming maneuvers could be problematic, as well. And 5e design puts a heavy limit on what at-wills can do...

Which maneuver you worried about being spammed?

 

[Tony Vargas]

Which maneuver you worried about being spammed?

I'd be more worried that maneuvers wouldn't be used at all or would prove inferior to just flailing away, but if you did crank them up enough to be worthwhile, they might become abuseable...

...as it stands, the fighter gets problematic extra attack feature giving it high DPR, in exchange for having 0 flexibility and little beyond warm-body contributions to make out of combat. It's not a great deal, but it's a tense way to balance a class...

 

[FrogReaver]

I'd be more worried that maneuvers wouldn't be used at all or would prove inferior to just flailing away, but if you did crank them up enough to be worthwhile, they might become abuseable...

...as it stands, the fighter gets problematic extra attack feature giving it high DPR, in exchange for having 0 flexibility and little beyond warm-body contributions to make out of combat. It's not a great deal, but it's a tense way to balance a class...

The plan is to keep the maneuvers as is. So there's not one you are worried about being abusable this way from there?

 

[Hussar]

Yeah, I like that idea. make it immediately burned. You drop one attack, which grants you an SD, but, it has to be used that round. Nice limitation.

Means that while you are going to get SD's every single round, since you only get one (well, I suppose if you had 4 attacks, you could get 2, but, meh, by that point, that's not going to break anything) and you have to burn it, you're pretty much good to go.

I think that's a major upgrade to what's, in my mind, a very lackluster fighter class.

 

[Cap'n Kobold]

On a normal Fighter, Extra attack gives around 6 or maybe more extra DPR. Typically a battlemaster maneuver will do a little less than that with an effect.

What if there was a way to exchange the level 5 extra attack for a free superiority dice effect?

It doesn't solve every problem with the battlemaster as warlord, but I think it get's closer than many of the ideas I'm seeing here and it's something we can start using right away?

This is something that I did with an initial Battlemaster/Warlord hack. Exchange attacks for temporary Superiority dice that had to be spent that round. I didn't limit to only extra attacks though: this started at 1st level, where you could burn your only attack to grant a maneuver instead.

This concept developed into the Opportunist Mindset Warlord from the class that I posted earlier, which has smaller SD but refreshes at the end of their every turn.
As far as I found, the only major balance issue that this potentially infinite SD use causes is if you have maneuvers that grant actual healing (as opposed to temp HP). Since that seemed to be a requirement for a 'real Warlord', I allowed actual healing from maneuvers only up to half the character's max HP.

So I would do it as an immediate effect instead of an additional superiority dice. Something like:

You may give up an attack any time during your attack action to gain a superiority dice that must be immediately used.

A few reasons:
1. If you let the fighter gain a superiority dice permanently as @Hussar proposed then you risk players fighting a rat or punching another player just to get their max allotment of superiority dice. I don't want to encourage that playstyle.

2. I don't think letting 2 superiority dice apply to the same attack will be problematic, however, it would require a lot of additional rules/rulings to work. So I would try it without that initially.

3. I think we should keep the ability to save superiority dice for hard fights instead of incentivizing players to burn through them immediately. I think this proposal allows that.

4. If our general premise is right that extra attack is nearly equivalent to superiority dice then I don't see an issue with trading any number of attacks we want for dice.

1. Yes. Definitely. At max, let it last until the beginning of their next turn. That will allow them to gain a SD to use for a reaction, at the risk of losing it if they don't use it. Or allow them to use them for their reaction before their turn, but they then lose those attacks that would have been required to grant those SD.

2. I allow multiple SD to be used for damage or healing/temp HP rolls, but not usually d20 rolls. Attacks, saves, ability checks could get a bit nuts is you allow more than one SD to be spent on them.
You may wish to consider about restricting temp HP generation in some fashion if you do choose to allow multiple SD to be rolled for that alongside having fast-refreshing SD. I chose to allow it because a party starting a fight fired up and inspired due to having a Warlord in their ranks seemed to be an acceptable benefit of the class.

3. Yes. I decided to allow the player to choose whether they had a small set of continuously-refreshing SD or a larger pool that only refreshed on a short rest. However burning attacks for temp SD as well as having a separate reservoir of short-rest based SD for emergencies/nova works well as an adjustment to an existing subclass.

4. I don't see an issue, assuming other rules are being adhered to: (only one reaction/round, limited SD spent on some maneuvers etc.).

 

[Tony Vargas]

The plan is to keep the maneuvers as is. So there's not one you are worried about being abusable this way from there?

Optimizers usually call out Precision Attack as the most potent maneuver and it'd hardly seem a problem if it cost you your extra attack...