Mike Mearls Happy Fun Hour: The Warlord

[Tony Vargas]

Oh man, I sure hope that Tesla comes with a rocket-ride to Mars!



Mars-ish.

Hope springs eternal.

Hey, it could be called the "Warlord of Mars" special edition.

 

[FlyingChihuahua]

But that's never going to happen. To date, WotC has formally released zero new classes in their books. You might as well speculate when WotC is going to give away Tesla cars with their books.

In the 3 1/2 years of 4e, they've done two test classes, the artificer and the mystic (after first attempting the artificer as a wizard subclass). But the mystic was last updated a year ago, with a prior attempt in February 2016. And the artificer was last updated in January of 2017. The earliest they could see print would be November of this year, but if they were trying for that book we'd see another test of the class. So don't expect them before April 2019, if not later. That will be 2-3 years of testing for a new class.

If, through a combination of begging, bribery, fellatio, and extortion the warlord fans here convinced Mike Mearls to greenlight a warlord class with the first playtest article in April, we'd still be looking at 2021 before the class could see print. Possibly later. Because making stuff takes time, and they don't seem to have the free hours to really devote to that content.
After all, they've known the Beastmaster Ranger was problematic pretty much since launch and they still haven't managed to "fix" that.
So if they were going to do such a class, they'd already have started work on it and Mearls wouldn't be doing the podcast to give fans the design skeleton to work with.


There's never going to be an official warlord. It's not going to happen. If you really want one, you're going to have to either make one yourself or work with the community to make one. And if you can't work up the time and energy to make one, then that's a pretty good indication your game can function without one.

The main thing I get from Yaarel and Vargas is that the way that the game is designed and the way the game designers make the game should change specifically to their tastes. They don't want to make a homebrew one because if they don't get exactly what they want then the people who disagree with them about how the game works would win.

 

[Satyrn]

Hope springs eternal.

Hey, it could be called the "Warlord of Mars" special edition.

The John Carter Special!

(I just hope that isn't the in-flight movie)

 

[Tony Vargas]

The main thing I get from Yaarel and Vargas is that the way that the game is designed and the way the game designers make the game should change specifically to their tastes.

No, not change, merely have additional options added that open up playstyles and player options that were available in past editions (3.x & 4e, in my case, personally) that 5e has yet to offer adequate (or any, in some cases) support for. I do not wish to see the standard core of the game changed in any way to accomplish that (I also don't see /how/ that would happen in a practical sense, but if people are that terrified I'm trying to 'ruin' the game for them, I hope that's some re-assurance).

 

[Satyrn]

The main thing I get from Yaarel and Vargas is that the way that the game is designed and the way the game designers make the game should change specifically to their tastes. They don't want to make a homebrew one because if they don't get exactly what they want then the people who disagree with them about how the game works would win.

Thanks for helping me figure out my next pitch.

"Yaarel and Vargas" is a buddy action flick about two rugged edition warriors fighting for what's good and just in a fantasy medieval world (like "Game of Thrones" but without the dragons . . . even though everyone thinks there should be dragons; It'll be a running joke to lighten the mood). The twist? Yaarel and Vargas are fighting to install the evil warlord on his throne!

Brilliant, right?

 

[FlyingChihuahua]

No, not change, merely have additional options added that open up playstyles and player options that were available in past editions (3.x & 4e, in my case, personally) that 5e has yet to offer adequate (or any, in some cases) support for. I do not wish to see the standard core of the game changed in any way to accomplish that (I also don't see /how/ that would happen in a practical sense, but if people are that terrified I'm trying to 'ruin' the game for them, I hope that's some re-assurance).

Well, that doesn't help.

It seems like your taking that marketing thing and saying that, because it doesn't cater specifically to you then it has failed in it's pitch.

Alert: There are 9,000,000 other people who play the game.

 

[Kinematics]

To actually have gone there, they'd've had to at least consider consolidating the Fighter, Barbarian, non-casting Ranger, and/or Rogue or even Monk for that matter, not to mention actually changing the Fighter's name to something less suggestive of single-pillar-specialization and carried through with what that implied. We probably wouldn't have gotten all three of Warlock, Sorcerer & Wizard.

Er, nope. None of that is required, or even implied.

You could've at least thrown in a "seems" there, or something, to acknowledge that you're not speaking as someone who wants the class, nor understands why anyone would want it.

And you're completely misunderstanding my objections, and throwing out strawmen to argue against.

Which is the major problem with the Warlord as Fighter sub-class. It focuses on mechanics - Extra Attack, Second Wind, Action Surge, d10 HD, etc, rather than on archetypes.

What? The Fighter has already been implemented. What mechanics it has are largely irrelevant. The point of using Fighter as a starting point was the whole "veteran/warrior/skilled commander" part of the Warlord description. If the Warlord was a "student of history", who'd spent his life in the library learning how wars were won and lost, maybe it would be based on the Wizard instead (ignoring the whole magic thing for the sake of the analogy).

For instance, the mechanical requirement that every warlord be a bad-ass whirlwind of destruction on the battlefield.

That's not a mechanical requirement, that's a thematic requirement. And that's not even the stated thematic requirement, as a Barbarian would fit that just as well. The quoted design element is a very strong match with the Fighter.

I would assert that a warlord as a "non-magical support character" is a failed design starting point.

Because it's a mechanical requirement? But, it references no mechanics, at all.

Then you don't appear to understand terminology. 'Non-magical' is mechanical. 'Support' is mechanical. They may be useful as identifying a conceptual space that hasn't been filled, or to describe a class in more abstract terminology, but they are not, in and of themselves, sufficient to define a desirable character class. And even if you did use them as the basis, they do not necessarily lead to the Warlord class. They could as easily lead to an Engineer or Artificer or Alchemist class (though the latter two are more commonly used in conjunction with at least some magic).

 

[Azzy]

I maintain that if people really wanted a warlord for their games there'd be far more posts on threads designing warlords (like THIS one) with design advice and playtest feedback and fewer posts in threads where people just argue about what one could theoretically look like.

Warlord fans don't really want a warlord.
They want to argue about the warlord. They want to continue the ten-year-old debate of whether or not warlords should exist.

Oh, that is so much disinegenuous BS. And that's ignoring the fact that forums are not even representative of D&D players as a whole. Or the fact that Mearls & company have been asked for a Warlord multiple times, or the reason behind the subject of the current Happy Fun Hour.

 

[Winterthorn]

It's clear to me, given the frequent long threads about the warlord, that this class was very much loved by player's of 4E, and it appears to me very missed by a significant minority*. I DMed 4E for a few months, but none of my players played a warlord, so I've never seen it in action. I cannot form a good opinion on it's details, but at this juncture it seems Mearls is finally paying attention to warlord fans. New class or subclass, I'm not sure, but there are only five levels in the fighter where an archetype feature is inserted - is that really enough space to do the warlord justice?

I find the subclass design in 5E a tad stingey for diversifying classes in general, but then I am not a fan of multiclassing and would like to see a few more classes introduced to fill in design spaces if one is not into multiclassing their PC.

* I mean significant to the degree that Mike Mearls is talking about it's design, so I wager that's more than just the number of warlord fans here at ENWorld. Just trying to put a positive perspective on things

 

[Remathilis]

The main thing I get from Yaarel and Vargas is that the way that the game is designed and the way the game designers make the game should change specifically to their tastes. They don't want to make a homebrew one because if they don't get exactly what they want then the people who disagree with them about how the game works would win.

Its called catering to the homebrew. As DMs develop their world, they fill in their own blanks and change things to fit their idea of how the game should work, and then get really upset when the rules contradict their well-rationed and extensively researched homebrewed setting. This get exasperated with edition changes and suddenly (for example) dwarves can be wizards (which contradicts 7000 years of history in my homebrewed world, including the cause of several major wars). As the rules develop (and move away from the defined lore of the homebrew) the reflexive action is then to wish the game rules were "less flavorful" or "flavored like they were previously" and turn the game towards a toolkit of generic fantasy rules that can be used to assemble their homebrew games rather than contradicting their ideas on races, magic, gods, and a host of other topics.

For example; the warlord is the opening step for a DM who doesn't like the prevalent magic "default" D&D has. Once you have a non-magical support character, you can start stripping out other magical elements (spell-less ranger, non-divine paladin). Then, I can restrict or ban those magical classes and create a world that better suits my tastes. You add in some revised rules on healing and rests, some new rules on magical weapon-resistant monsters, and pretty soon you have a low-or-no magic game system. Then, you scrub all those annoying references to specific things (like to the D&D Multiverse, Gods, or planes), get rid of some of those "new" races like dragonborn or tieflings that don't exist on my world (and should be in some supplement elsewhere) and now we have a system that works GREAT for my homebrewed setting!

For me, the above isn't D&D. Its a great d20/5e based game (and something the OGL or DM's Guild is built for). D&D is D&D. A warlord can work in the context of D&D, but not as the low/no magic alternative to the cleric. D&D should worry about its own world and settings, not your homebrew. If your game derives notions different than the standard, then you need to seek alternatives from like-minded company or build your own.