D&D 5E [Warlords] Should D&D be tied to D&D Worlds?

[I'm A Banana]

Again, just let it go Man...

Getting personal and ascribing motives to posters isn't likely to be a productive area of conversation. It's likely to escalate into nastiness and defensiveness, and so needs to nixed. Address the point of the post, please, not the potential psychology of the poster -- the internet is a poor medium for agenda analysis.

 

[Cyberen]

My sensibilities would be very hard to offend !
I just think the OP uses a strawman argument (and call the strawman "Mearls") when it mistakenly assumes the absence of the warlord comes from :
* hate for 4e
* willingness to keep mundane characters from doing extraordinary actions
* stubborness to consider HP as meat only.
I don't share any of these opinions, yet I consider importing the warlord wholesale into Next would be a mistake, because it would take the game in a direction (namely : "you can't play without combat healing") I, and apparently many other posters, would find inapropriate for an edition meant to support many playstyles. Some of us hope for ritual-only healing being a viable option.

 

[I'm A Banana]

After all, unlike fate points, or damage reduction, or some of your other options, hit points and hit point healing have been with us since the game began. I know how, and that, hit point healing works. And 4e shows me that it can work even when the hit point restoration is non-magical. So why can't I just have that?

So we're getting to the core of this. You want non-magical spike healing, period. Which means that all this barking around the idea of genre and commanders is irrelevant.

The thing is, non-magical spike healing doesn't need to be in a unique class.

A "heroic rapid healing" module could easily contain, heck, the exact mechanics of Inspiring Word, without a warlord class.

And the problem with this is....?

 

[Ahnehnois]

Why are they apples and oranges?

Because creating a positive emotional state in a humanoid creature who you know is real and is within sight is not the same thing as performing a ritual and hoping that some extraplanar force responds in the way you would like.

Once you decide that there are a couple of classes for the ultra-faithful (cleric and paladin), and a couple of classes for the ultra-tough fighters (barbarian and fighter), what is wrong with a class (or two, if you count bards) for the ultra-inspiring? And if someone is wondering, why can't my guy be that inspiring?, the answer is - build a warlord. Just like the player of a paladin who is wondering why his/her PC can't be as skilled with weapons as a fighter gets told to build a fighter instead.

There's every reason why a character could be more inspiring. That's not the issue. There are plenty of good rules for that.

The issue is twofold. One, why make a new class for it? Two, what does that have to do with healing? As others have pointed out, leadership and inspiration are social roles, not the sort of thing that forms the basis of a class. After all, when someone says "why can't my character be a magic item crafter" we don't make a new class for it, we tell them to play a wizard and take crafting skills and feats. When someone says "why can't my character be more seductive" we tell them to play a rogue or a bard and put a good score in Cha and take some skills. When someone says "I want to be a warlord" we tell them to play a fighter or barbarian and select some abilities that support that and recruit some followers. We don't make a new class for every possible type of expertise, only those that form a strong distinct archetypes. And in all the warlord threads, I have yet to see anyone produce a single real-life or fictional example of an actual warlord outside of 4e; such characters are invariably better represented by the existing classes. And leadership abilities are better modeled by teamwork benefits, which take into account the context of a cohesive group.

If you are comfortable with the idea of training in prayer, or training in channelling the mutant powers you inherited from your draconic forebears, then I would think you might be comfortable with the idea of training at being inspirational. I mean, plenty of people think it can be done - there's a pretty lucrative market for management and leadership courses, after all.

Sure. I like feats, skills, teamwork benefits, etc. Just no need for a class for leadership.

Why shouldn't they be? I've always held, for exemple that counting the arrows your character shoot so he/she can run out is silly when a spellcaster can't run out of spell components. So, if my concept is "this guy has gear that allows this effect", and that effect is already present in another class, but flavoured differently, why is that a problem?

Handwaving inventory considerations is fine. Having a class ability that makes nonmagical items magic is not (unless it's a magic class).

No need for a new class either, make the existing ones work that way.

Okay then.

Sure, but the rules are badly designed considering HPs are not only meat and blood.

The rules are badly designed in that hps are not meat and blood.

Magical healing used to be the sole province of the cleric (with some minor healing being awarded to the druid). The reason behind this was... sketchy at best (something about how giving wizards healing abilities would make them too strong, I think). Then, in 3.X, shock and amazement! the bard can cure.

I'm pretty sure bards got cures at least in 2e. Paladins and rangers also had healing. The mage/wizard is really the only exception, which is indeed a D&D-ism.

Clerics/Spellcasters, going by this rule, have no right to have sole control over healing. Period. And "natural healing" needs to represent that fact too. Next is the first edition in the going-on 40 years of the game redefining this central tenet.

Of course not. Who said they did? They do of course have sole control over instantaneous closing of potentially lethal wounds, because that isn't real, but long-term healing, not so much.

And with better health and healing rules, natural healing and alterations thereof could become more meaningful.

Non-magical is seen as mundane, the stuff of everyday life. A fighter is just some yokel with a piece of steel, why does he deserve narrative control when my Hogwarts alumni can rewrite reality to her whims?

That's only in your eyes though (perhaps in some others as well). Nonmagical characters aren't mudane at all. As has been well documented, the point at which d20 checks are "realistic" typically stops between 5th and 10th level. High level characters can do incredible things. Skills have open-ended and powerful applications.

If you're talking about 17th level characters casting Wish, yes that's something that only wizards/sorcerers can do (and should be). If you're talking about doing useful things in the context of a typical game, fighters remain the most popular class in all versions of D&D (except possibly 4e; that I wouldn't know), and the nonmagical classes in general are more impactful in most situations. Magic offers some fantastical, "limit-breaking" effects, but it hardly renders the other characters irrelevant.

But why can't a strong sword-arm do the same. That happens in a lot of novels and movies and video games too, right?

Not really, no.

 

[Obryn]

Warlords heal a surge and a d6. Everyone else gets a suge+d6+another small kicker. Such as shifting with the bard, or spreading out the healing with the shaman. The warlord is plain.
The feat support might make them among the best, but that’s a reflection of the option creep not the actual class itself. More options = more power. If other classes had received that support they’d be better as well. So you have to evaluate the class on its own, removed from any options.

...No? Feat support is part of the overall capability of the class, just like added power support, etc. It's like saying 3.x Wizards aren't strong if, you know, you ignore all their spells. It doesn't matter if other classes could get that support - other classes didn't get that support. In the context of the game, Warlords are the second-best healers next to clerics.

-O

 

[Neonchameleon]

So we're getting to the core of this. You want non-magical spike healing, period.

I want non-magical spike healing if the Cleric's main healing is going to follow that approach. Which is why the OP started off by being about clerics. If the notion of healing in D&D is going to be fundamentally changed from any previous edition to the point that it is removed from the cleric then all bets are off. (If Cure Wounds starts working the way Lesser Vigor used to (1hp/round for a set number of rounds), we're playing a different enough game that my comments are irrelevant).

If spike healing exists other than as a consequence of seriously high level magic (I'll drop the spike healing requirement if the only spike healing the cleric gets is Heal which they can't get for a lot of levels) then it is by far the most tactically important kind of healing, and for many reasons much more effective per hit point than pre-emptive damage mitigation.

My entire point in the OP was that the warlord must be able to trample on the cleric's ability to keep the party on thier feet and contributing usefully to combat - they must be able to take on a measure of this aspect of the cleric in games both with divine magic and without. This means (amongst other things) keeping them on their feet, and this means spike healing. Alternative models of healing are much, much less efficient at this than spike healing - and much less evocative.

So if spike combat healing is the assumed baseline (as defined by the way the Cleric does things) then yes I do want it, period. If it isn't then the stark loss of comparable efficiency goes away.

Which means that all this barking around the idea of genre and commanders is irrelevant.

The genre and commanders are absolutely relevant especially as "hit points are D&D's mechanic for genre emulation". If you want to redefine D&D so that hit points change from the primary (and normally only) form of attrition that is not entirely PC controlled then the context I am talking in changes. If we were playing a game in which the PCs tracked morale points as well as hit points and were more likely to break and run than actually die, things would be different.

If in the Ravenloft module the Warlord primarily prevents fear that works in Ravenloft, which has a lot of fear mechanics and in which fear is an important part of the game. And which is a much more unpleasant setting (from a PC's perspective) than the D&D baseline.

The thing is, non-magical spike healing doesn't need to be in a unique class.

The thing is a class is the single easiest thing to add to or remove from the game. Indeed I believe that every class other than the fighter and the rogue should have a paragraph discussing what its presence or absence means to the gameworld and the impact on the metagame - and on a party. For instance a game with (using 3.X examples) only wizarding arcane magic, with only sorcerous arcane magic, and with only bardic arcane magic are different worlds.

"Doesn't need to be" is not the same thing as "There is a good reason why it shouldn't".

A "heroic rapid healing" module could easily contain, heck, the exact mechanics of Inspiring Word, without a warlord class.

And the problem with this is....?

Once again you are fundamentally redefining the relationship of the game both as a game and the game with the fiction. If everyone gets Inspiring Word then we've almost ended the concept of focus fire and reduced the tactical considerations to "Squash the squishy and finish them in one turn or they'll just stand up again."

And inspiring needn't be the same as healing if you have a richer hit point model, but needs to restore hp. In 4e they were mechanically distinct (although clerics could do both) because inspiring involved allowing someone to spend their own resources (the healing surge). Only rare magic healed with no healing surge.

 

[Ahnehnois]

The solution to this issue is to swap out hit points for some other mechanic. Nothing in those books makes me think "hit points."

Yes.

 

[Jester David]

...No? Feat support is part of the overall capability of the class, just like added power support, etc. It's like saying 3.x Wizards aren't strong if, you know, you ignore all their spells. It doesn't matter if other classes could get that support - other classes didn't get that support. In the context of the game, Warlords are the second-best healers next to clerics.

-O

That feels a little like arguing that the math of 4e is fine because they implemented feat taxes.

And comparing 3e classes with 4e classes is apples to oranges. But, yeah, you can evaluate the wizard separate of its spells. You can look at the wizard and say it's more powerful than the sorcerer because the wizard gets bonus feats and the sorcerer does not. The spells are irrelevant as they *should* be equivalent.
If there is a feat or power that makes any class better than any other class of that role, then there's a problem with that feat.

 

[Jester David]

The whole idea is that if you don't like that version of hit points you don't use the class. It's an optinal module (to use the jargon).
Classes shouldn't be optional to the same extent as other rules modules.
And I like the warlord and want to include it. I just don't like martial healing.

The cleric's 2x/day healing is a total of 4d8+4 at R:T, or 2d8+4 at R:50' and as a swift action. Given that a whole premise of D&Dnext is that we can balance daily against encounter at something like a 1:4 ratio, let's say our warlord can grant one extra attack per battle or bonus movement for the whole group per battle (as an out-of-turn action in either case), and then once per battle can heal (say) 1d8 (an alternative would be to permit use of a hit die) as a standard action at R:5'.

Unfamiliar with the abbreviations "R:T" and "R:T".

 

[Obryn]

That feels a little like arguing that the math of 4e is fine because they implemented feat taxes.

Not really the same thing. One is fixing an actual bug and the other is adding options. There's nothing buggy about Inspiring Word, whereas 4e math is transparent enough, feat patches are obvious fixes.

But regardless, yes, 4e math is much better now, with the expertise and defense feats as part of the system.

If there is a feat or power that makes any class better than any other class of that role, then there's a problem with that feat.

I really don't know where you're going with this. Are you saying that because Warlord healing is boring out of the box, anything that makes it less terrible is a problem

Regardless, even outside of feat support, let's not forget that warlords also have numerous impressive healing powers. Stand the Fallen and Rousing Words are both standouts all low level. X Word isn't the sum total of their capability.

-O