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[pemerton]

I think the Warlord mechanics would work better with a Skald class concept.

I feel like the heart of the matter is: "Is the Warlord archetype -- their story -- distinct from the Bard or the Fighter or a Bardy Fighter or a Fightery Bard?

A bard is a scholar, a musician, a poet. In D&D, also a magician. I don't find the skald that comparable either, for similar reasons. When I think of a skald I think of Odin hanging himself to learn laws and runes which he then carves on his world-ordering staff. This is cool stuff, but doesn't shout "warlord" to me.

A warlord is either a warrior of some form, or (in the Princess build) a device for redirecting metagame benefits.

(I'd add on a side note - rather than merging warlord and bard, I would find merging wizard and bard less thematically wrenching.)

Debatable. And academic, especially coming from 4e where the difference between "it's magic" and "it's not" is a keyword or two.

I don't follow this. I don't think 4e bards play much like 4e warlords, partly because the former are magicians (and speak evil charms, use rituals etc) whereas the latter don't use magic. It's not just about "a keyword or two" - it's about the whole slew of effects (which, yes, are built using keywords - but the difference between a cathedral and a castle isn't just "a stone or two".)

Can you name some Warlords from fantasy fiction, rather than real world military leaders?

I think Aragorn and King Arthur are candidates (this also shows that in some ways the warlord and paladin overlap).

I think Odysseus is another good candidate. And Faramir (especially as portrayed in the movie). And these guys don't have the paladin overlap going on.

I think the problem with these discussions is that they are just about all subject to so much subjective interpretation. Even the most prominent characters in fiction rarely give us enough material with which to clearly judge their class in the modern era with large numbers of classes.

<snip>

Particularly amusing in your list is Aragorn, who is so much the model for the old-school Ranger that the class is derogatorily referred to as "the Aragorn".

Sure. But what does the AD&D ranger add to the fighter? Stealth, tracking, an awesome hit point bonus, an awesome damage bonus, and Palantir use. Let's treat the latter as a feat, the stealth and tracking as skills/background, and the hit point and damage bonus as broken. What's left? (The spells, I guess, once you get to 8th level. And the copper dragon once you reach 10th. They're hardly class-defining, though the dragon is pretty broken too.)

But in Tolkien, as opposed to Gygax, what is in fact key to Aragorn is his ability to inspire, to lead, to bring hope (and victory) where there was none. In D&D terms that's leveraging CHA. Which is to say, is squarely in warlord territory.

looking at your list, before the 4e-Warlord was around, what would you have labelled each of those characters? For how many of them would you have been thinking: "Oh gosh, he's a <whatever>, but really there's so much more! If only there was a Warlord class! Fie upon these Fighters, Rangers, and Paladins! None of them express the demonstrated leadership abilities of this character adequately!" ? I submit that the realistic answer is very near 0.

I didn't have a class for Odysseus or Faramir. As I noted, Aragorn or King Arthur would be a paladin. Mechanically, the 4e warlord is a better fit, I think, at least for Aragorn.

(I also gather Tanis Half-Elven probably works better as a warlord than a ranger or fighter, but I don't know that character as well.)

I think the reason they're not going this way is because they're committing to a list of distinct kinds of character.

The archetypal fantasy barbarian is Conan. Who is also the archetypal sword and sorcery warrior. I find the notion that the barbarian is "a distinct kind of character" but the warlord is not pretty stretched.

Your device for proving that these character - monks, rangers, paladins etc - aren't fighter variants seems to turn on finding a phrase to describe them that doesn't involve combat (which for paladins is frankly bizarre, by the way - I'll put up five bucks here and now that the Next class info on paladins will describe them as "holy warriors" and/or "knights", both of which are combatant descriptors). But anyway, for warlords their non-combat-worded "schtick" would be "Bringing hope to the hearts of their allies through wit, guile and empathy."

To play devil's advocate here (Mearls's side), that might be the best reason it shouldn't be a class. It goes back to the "story not rules" thing. That warlord build is purely a mechanical novelty: "isn't it cool how I have these mechanics that let me do stuff, even though my character isn't technically doing anything?"

Mike's argument is that the character has to have a place in the imagined world, and then the mechanics should be built to represent that (and remember, tactical grid combat is not assumed in D&DN, so it can't be super-precise forced movement and whatnot). When your lazylord is standing 30 feet from the battle and using powers that give his allies extra attacks, what is the character actually doing?

I'm sure that this is pretty accurate as to their reasoning process. It's pretty clear that they're not that keen on the metagame mechanics that characterise 4e, and especially many 4e warlords.

 

[pemerton]

Honestly with no out of turn actions or movement, no inspiration mechanics, no healing, and assuming no ability for a 4e PC to affect mental influence without magic I'm not seeing a lot for the Next fighter to pilfer.

I'm not 100% sure I'm getting you right, but if you're saying (at leat in part) that D&Dnext doesn't really have the game-mechanical space in which the warlord can operate than I agree.

The warlord leverages the metagame features of 4e in various ways: eg using allies rather than bonus dice or AoEs as the "kicker" on encounter powers; martial healing; out-of-turn actions; etc. A system without these doesn't leave a lot of room for a warlord. It's not a class that's easy to build out of purely process-simulation materials.

 

[Campbell]

I'm not 100% sure I'm getting you right, but if you're saying (at leat in part) that D&Dnext doesn't really have the game-mechanical space in which the warlord can operate than I agree.

The warlord leverages the metagame features of 4e in various ways: eg using allies rather than bonus dice or AoEs as the "kicker" on encounter powers; martial healing; out-of-turn actions; etc. A system without these doesn't leave a lot of room for a warlord. It's not a class that's easy to build out of purely process-simulation materials.

You pretty much have the right of it. It's fairly difficult to model a smart and cunning warrior in a system focused on modeling physical action unless you wear a robe. It might be somewhat possible if you altered the maneuver system so that using certain maneuvers applied conditions that fighter/warlord maneuvers could tag off of. Then give monsters maneuvers. Pretty sure that won't happen though.

 

[Garthanos]

It's fairly difficult to model smart and cunning warrior in a system focused on modeling physical action unless you wear a robe.

 

[mlund]

I'm so glad we're discussing things rationally and not just using inflammatory, edition-warring rhetoric.

Sorry, but no matter how many layers of rationalization you bolt onto a position of "go stand in traffic," it's still ultimately a suggestion rooted in hostility. This boils down to a position of putting the Warlord (and his play-style, to revisit a previous tact of argument) out in front of a moving bus.

No one said it in so many words, but it was always a big part of the endgame in old-school D&D, and the Fighter was always the best at it. When I think of a "warlord" in D&D, I think of an old-school high-level Fighter.

I played AD&D and I played 4E. The Warlord Class (as opposed to the generic English word) doesn't resemble the old-school Fighter at all. Leaving aside the fact that an old school Fighter is a horrible class relegated to caddying the casters's wands by the middle-game (let alone end-game), his only leadership feature was to attract NPC soldiers and build a stronghold (though almost every character class built an appropriate stronghold or organization in the end-game: wizard's tower, abbey, guild, whatever).

He has no tactical abilities.
He has no support abilities for his allies.
He's not a "Warlord."

You pretty much have the right of it. It's fairly difficult to model a smart and cunning warrior in a system focused on modeling physical action unless you wear a robe.

Indeed. That encapsulates what is wrong with the general bent of arguments towards designing DNDNext around a "process simulation" mindset for governing the Muggles.

- Marty Lund

 

[Ratskinner]

Sure. But what does the AD&D ranger add to the fighter? Stealth, tracking, an awesome hit point bonus, an awesome damage bonus, and Palantir use. Let's treat the latter as a feat, the stealth and tracking as skills/background, and the hit point and damage bonus as broken. What's left? (The spells, I guess, once you get to 8th level. And the copper dragon once you reach 10th. They're hardly class-defining, though the dragon is pretty broken too.)

But in Tolkien, as opposed to Gygax, what is in fact key to Aragorn is his ability to inspire, to lead, to bring hope (and victory) where there was none. In D&D terms that's leveraging CHA. Which is to say, is squarely in warlord territory.

I didn't have a class for Odysseus or Faramir. As I noted, Aragorn or King Arthur would be a paladin. Mechanically, the 4e warlord is a better fit, I think, at least for Aragorn.

(I also gather Tanis Half-Elven probably works better as a warlord than a ranger or fighter, but I don't know that character as well.)

::sigh::
Kinda totally missing my point....this is what Confirmation Bias looks like up close.

More to the point there is still NOTHING in any of that to help actually decide whether Warlord needs to be separate class or not.

Maybe I can make my point another way...Imagine that there was no 4e "Warlord" class. Instead, everything about the 4e Warlord, all his powers etc. were in the Fighter class. You could still play the same character, but he would be a fighter, not a Warlord. Now, in 4e, there's a good reason not to have done this. The fighter class would be huge and diluted compared to the other classes. Plus, it would muck with the whole "roles" thing. (I'm sure there are other reasons, as well, but anyway...) In proto-5e we don't have those problems (as of yet).

Narratively, there's no way to distinguish between any edition's class-spectrum.* That is, you can "cast" the characters from most fantasy works using the class-spectrum of any edition. The choice of which edition's class-spectrum you use is arbitrary. Certainly you wouldn't make the argument "You just couldn't do LotR properly with D&D until 4e came out, because Aragon just doesn't work as anything less than a 4e Warlord." (at least I hope not.) Certainly you can't argue that Tolkien had 4e warlords in mind when he was writing the thing. 4e fans are looking at things through a 4e lens and seeing Warlords everywhere there is a reasonably charismatic figure.

Literary characters are based off of archetypes that are far more vague and sloppy than D&D classes. There really isn't much justification from source for an archetype of Warlord that is clearly distinct from the giant fuzzy cloud which is the heroic warrior (not on the level of Wizard-Warrior, anyway.) If that justification were there, "Warlord" would be one of the Core 5. (As it is, Core 4 might be too many...)

Thus, the argument for a Warlord-as-class must happen on mechanical grounds. As of yet, I don't think there's justification for it in proto-5e. 5e, so far, is running lightweight enough that you won't need 120 maneuvers to represent them. Maneuvers aren't using abilityscores, so you don't need to worry about MAD. Maneuvers also seem like a likely mechanic for conveying the kind of thing a 4e-Warlord does. All this leads me to see the idea of Warlord as a set of Fighter maneuvers as perfectly reasonable.

Could that change? Sure. If the list of fighter maneuvers starts to get too big....start splitting them off. Some are arguing for a more rogue/cleric approach to the Warlord...that might work as well. If you want to hold off "Warlordy" characters until Standard or Advanced...there's any number of reasons.


*Some early editions don't do all of their distinguishing explicitly in the mechanics...so two 1e fighters might look mechanically identical, but be played very differently. Also in that vein, BECMI is rather limited in character types covered, unless you view things far more abstractly than is typcially done.

 

[pemerton]

Kinda totally missing my point....this is what Confirmation Bias looks like up close.

Your question was, Are there literary/fantasy figures who are warlords? I answered.

More to the point there is still NOTHING in any of that to help actually decide whether Warlord needs to be separate class or not.

<snip>

Imagine that there was no 4e "Warlord" class. Instead, everything about the 4e Warlord, all his powers etc. were in the Fighter class. You could still play the same character, but he would be a fighter, not a Warlord.

<snip>

Literary characters are based off of archetypes that are far more vague and sloppy than D&D classes. There really isn't much justification from source for an archetype of Warlord that is clearly distinct from the giant fuzzy cloud which is the heroic warrior

I take everything you say here to be obvious. By the same token, I could design a classless game in which both Aragorn and Gandalf are built from the same PC-build widgets.

But no D&D class is going to be that broad. And even if we get narrower, your argument is just as strong for the ranger, paladin or barbarian, and arguably for the monk also (although it should perhaps be a rogue variant rather than a fighter variant). Likewise, by your argument, the wizard, cleric and bard should all be the same class (in literary terms, some sort of "mentor/wise person" type).

Narratively, there's no way to distinguish between any edition's class-spectrum.

<snip>

Certainly you wouldn't make the argument "You just couldn't do LotR properly with D&D until 4e came out, because Aragon just doesn't work as anything less than a 4e Warlord."

Now this is a completely different point. I would make this argument, or something like it.

It's widely observed that Rolemaster was a poor mechanical fit for LotR/MERP. The flip side to this is that another system might be a better mechanical fit. In mainstream fantasy terms, 4e (confined to Heroic tier) is one of those systems - mostly because of inspirational healing, which I think is pretty central to Aragorn and to Tolkien more generally.

Playing classic D&D there is basically no way to generate a story with key Tolkienesque elements to it, because heroic inspiration will never matter until someone drops to low hit points at the end of the attrition-inducing "adventuring day", at which point it's time to break out the cleric (or the potions).

Thus, the argument for a Warlord-as-class must happen on mechanical grounds.

Sure. The main mechanical argument is this: the warlord needs metagame-y abilities. For a mix of legacy and 4e-aversion reasons the fighter will not have such abilities. Therefore they need to be insulated in an optional warlord class.

It's much the same reason for keeping the monk separate - namely, people don't want magic/mysticism infecting their fighter class. But for this, you could make the monk a fighter option, something along the lines of the original Oriental Adventures martial arts maneouvres, which mixed mundane and magical.

Maneuvers aren't using abilityscores, so you don't need to worry about MAD. Maneuvers also seem like a likely mechanic for conveying the kind of thing a 4e-Warlord does. All this leads me to see the idea of Warlord as a set of Fighter maneuvers as perfectly reasonable.

Besides the reasons in my earlier paragraph - ie go this route and we won't get a warlord, due to the various constraints that are operating on fighter design - there is an additional issue. As others have posted in this thread, a warlord should have at least one strong mental stat. There is nothing in the fighter to support this, and it is non-trivial to introduce it. That's another, though on its own modest, reason to have a warlord.

And on the manoeuvres thing, sure - you could do a warlord like that. And a barbarian - raging looks like a manoeuvre to me. And a monk - running up the side of a wall looks like a manouevre to me. And a paladin - smiting things looks like a manouevre to me. I don't see any distinctive fit for the warlord in this respect.

 

[Gadget]

There are a good points made on both sides. As for me, I'm a 4e person in that I grew very tired of the more extreme process-sim road that 3E was on; I don't mind and appreciate the more abstract and 'disassociated' mechanics of 4e for the most part and I generally scoff at the 'hit-points-as-meat' crowd. Yet even I have trouble with 'tactical' part of Warlord sometimes. This is something for a commander of armies, or at least military units of a size a bit greater than the 4-5 or so characters in the usual adventuring party. A great concept for the domain management module I've heard talk of though. The inspirational part I can see, and I don't have a problem with non-magical hit-point recovery, as I see hit points as mostly not dire wounds anyway, though there may be some overlap with the paladin there. Also, I'm going to have to agree that the Warlord is not as strong of a fantasy archetype as some the other 'sub-classes' such as paladin, monk, and barbarian. High level AD&D at least made a nod in this direction with the fighters getting a keep and attracting followers, though there was little mechanical bite in the concept. At best it is more of a prestige class ( to use 3E parlance) and I think most would have said that before 4e came out.

However, with that being said, I would have to agree that with many detractors here that it looks like we may have to kiss the robust mechanics we were used to in 4e goodbye, and accept a pale substitute. I remember in the early days of the dndn there was much speculation about whether the fighter would kill the warlord and take his stuff, and I was okay with that at a conceptual level. But as the play test has gone on, they seem to have shown an unwillingness to put in the mechanical oomph to get the job done, and I'm not sure that 'manoeuvres' is robust enough to support this concept, though I would like to be proven wrong. The real issue is: are we going to be forced to have someone play the cleric again? And this is more of a mechanical question about the system than an archetype one. It seems the answer to this is going to be: yes.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

I think we are back hard on the old (dawn of hobby old) point that running a fantasy RPG session shares a lot with reading a fantasy novel, but in other ways they are nothing alike. This is critically the difference between "simulation" and "emulation".

If you want, for example, Aragorn to be described on the character sheet in a way that makes him recognizable to a LotR fan, you'll simulate him via the system one way. OTOH, if you are more interested in having a character act in a way that makes him recognizable to a LotR fan, you'll emulate him via the system in a different way. There will be considerable overlap, of course, though much of this will be color, not mechanics.

People really far along the curve seeking immersion won't see this, I think, because for them color and description is what they hang their hat on. If you want to play someone like Aragorn, describe him appropriately and then read LotR for insights. Whereas the emulation crowd is after a different effect: we give the character to someone who has no clue about LotR, but still get play somewhat as expected.

The problem with discussion of mechanics on the simulation front is that it depends on a shared set of source material, and at least some overlap in reactions to that material. Frankly, even if mechanics were readily agreed upon, I think my take on literary fantasy would be incompatible at the table with some others, simply based on their take on literary fantasy. Never mind simulating something in play--we don't even agree sufficiently about the story as it was told in print.

In contrast, the problem with discussion of mechanics on the emulation front is that it depends on shared play experience. Until someone experiences emulative play, they are only seeing it thinly, through a fog, if at all. And unless it looks attractive, they have no particular reason to gain the experience.

If WotC couldn't resolve the difference well enough in the 4E DMG to avoid contradictory advice with a small team, I don't really see it being bridged in the larger arena of the fanbase. At best, we'd have champions of each side at WotC, with all of them playing in all modes, and those with preferences being equally protective of the other side. That's a lot to ask. So I expect Next to go back to being a fairly nifty beer and pretzels fantasy game with a few nods thrown towards the sim crowd to make them buy adventures and read them. I'll play it and have fun, because I like shallow fantasy gaming some times. If we get more than that, I'll be pleasantly surprised.

 

[Libramarian]

A bard is a scholar, a musician, a poet. In D&D, also a magician. I don't find the skald that comparable either, for similar reasons. When I think of a skald I think of Odin hanging himself to learn laws and runes which he then carves on his world-ordering staff. This is cool stuff, but doesn't shout "warlord" to me.

A warlord is either a warrior of some form, or (in the Princess build) a device for redirecting metagame benefits.

(I'd add on a side note - rather than merging warlord and bard, I would find merging wizard and bard less thematically wrenching.)

I'm not very familiar with the historical skalds; I'm thinking of the 2e Skald, which was like a Bard without spellcasting but better combat ability and a war chant that allowed them to sing and attack at the same time. The war chant had different possible effects for the the Skald player to choose, like temp HP, bonus to attack, bonus to AC, etc.