D&D 5E How Important is it that Warlords be Healers?

[Ahnehnois]

I think any thinking person will quickly realize that hit points are an abstraction.

Yes. But the health of your character is not abstract. Thus, the inadequacy.

I think the Army would disagree. Not all sergeants may be made equal, but you don't need to be on a first-name basis with them to have them light a fire under your arse!

But you do need to be a member of the Army. That form of interaction generally does not translate to civilians, or across cultures.

As a civilian who works with the military, I can attest to this. Interactions between people who are part of that social structure are a distinct entity. An adventuring group is not necessarily that cohesive (and indeed, probably isn't).

Of course, there are other kinds of leadership. And many military officers are excellent leaders outside of military contexts as well.

The problem with the notion that there are "many ways to do it" is that any way that doesn't allow the PCs to endure and continue the adventure and doesn't work relatively efficiently like healing does, won't fill the niche that the warlord is desired to fill, which is the party support role. Thus you are still left with the necessity for any really effective party to contain a cleric or pack some form of easily renewable healing magic. THAT is the problem with your line of reasoning. Its not flawed, it just doesn't arrive at the desired conclusion.

My desired conclusion, as stated a while ago, is that healing should not be a built in assumption at all.

And it's entirely possible to have health systems that render it unnecessary for a variety of game styles.

I also don't believe that there is a niche for "leaders" as such. An archmage is a wizard leader (who may even inspire his allies). A high priest is a cleric leader (but most clerics are not leaders, nor are they focused on creating benefits for small adventuring parties). A warlord is a fighter (or more likely a barbarian) leader.

 

[Nagol]

<snip>


I think the Army would disagree. Not all sergeants may be made equal, but you don't need to be on a first-name basis with them to have them light a fire under your arse! There is quite a bit of specialized training that goes into that too, as I'm sure many posters here can attest to. The problem with the notion that there are "many ways to do it" is that any way that doesn't allow the PCs to endure and continue the adventure and doesn't work relatively efficiently like healing does, won't fill the niche that the warlord is desired to fill, which is the party support role. Thus you are still left with the necessity for any really effective party to contain a cleric or pack some form of easily renewable healing magic. THAT is the problem with your line of reasoning. Its not flawed, it just doesn't arrive at the desired conclusion.

I don't like being yelled at or bluster. The last time a former NCO tried to inspire/bluster me (a civilian) into doing something, I rolled my eyes, took him aside and explained in frank gutteral language that I understood he could easily snap me into a thousand pieces but I instead could merely destroy any chance of his project succeeding and the employer wanting to keep him around. Whereas if he were to work congenially with me his project would go much more smoothly and avoid all those nasty technical hurdles. We got along much better after that.

 

[Nemesis Destiny]

As you can see in the poll though, there's a pretty dramatic split, likely far larger than Vancian casting.
And if you don't like Vancan spellcasting you don't play a wizard. Simple. And it doesn't affect you if someone else at the table does it still doesn't affect you and certainly doesn't affect the DM.

However, if you have warlord healing it affects the game. It's a player choice that changes how the DM narrates the game. They're different animals.

This is reaching several pages back, but I was otherwise engaged when this thread continued on. I just wanted to address this though.

What I see in the poll is that most people who answered don't care enough to get upset about warlord healing and only a small number do, 17%. There are more people (23%) that would be upset if it isn't included. So with 83 percent either in favour, or not strongly opposed enough for it to be a dealbreaker, it seems that it should at least be an option.

I will agree with El Mahdi in that the rest of your arguments simply fail to hold up to any kind of scrutiny.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I'm not 100% sure but I believe he means the mechanics-first design of 4e versus much of the story-based design of earlier editions.

4e designed around the basis of the mechanic. As always, there are exceptions and there was quite often a story-kernel at the basis of the design, but it was often much narrower than the role of the class in the larger world.
The warlord is one example of this, being designed first and foremost around the concept of the martial leader that can grant attacks, damage, and movement while also healing. When you describe a warlord first and foremost you describe what he does in combat and his mechanics.
Ditto the avenger which was based around the oath mechanic, the idea of a Batman character that fights alone while being part of a team, and the visual of a lightly armoured sword wielder.

5e is starting with the story first, describing what the class is in the world, what its role is, how it is unique and then looking at mechanics. Or so we've been told.

When you start with the story, you'll always get a good world hook. And there's nothing preventing you from making equally unique mechanics and designing an awesome class.
When you start with the mechanics first, sometimes you're going to get a good world hook and sometimes you're not. Few of the 4e classes really stand out for their flavour. The battlemind is a mass of story contradictions completely divorced from its flavour. The seeker and runepriest overlap with the ranger and the cleric. The battlerager fighter should have been a defender barbarian.

But I disagree with GX.Sigma that mechanics first cannot lead to good story and classes. I thought the swordmage worked fine, and the warlord does still deserve to be it's own class.

I just reject the whole notion that 4e somehow is designed in any fundamentally different way than any other edition. Do you think that Vancian casting wasn't designed as it is for gamist reasons? Of course it was. They had a mechanical concept of spell slots which was intended to limit the effectiveness of wizards and make them play a resource game, and then they found a suitable explanation for it. The very fact that DIFFERENT explanations were offered in each edition makes this abundantly clear. The cleric, same thing. Do you think the armor and weapon restriction rules were made up for story reasons? Of course not, fantasy is replete with sword-wielding wizards and clerics being forced to use maces makes no story sense at all. The very existence of rules like hit points and armor class clearly are entirely gamist, and the granting of d8s to fighting men and d4s to magic users has nothing to do with 'story', it is purely a gamist device to balance the classes.

Now, I'm not saying these mechanics weren't partially selected over others because of their suitability in story terms, undoubtedly they were, but only after they were found mechanically suitable. In truth game design is not a linear process and doesn't proceed from concept to mechanics or vice versa. I am relatively confident that the 4e designers of the Avenger class had a concept in mind, you even named it right off, Batman. Maybe they used a different one, Batman is a bit outside D&D genre, but Zorro, D'Artagnon, etc could all serve as adequate models. The point is the mechanics may have been some idea that was lying around, maybe someone thought of that first and then thought AHAH! That will work great for an Avenger! Chances are the original kernel of the idea for the mechanic was itself inspired by the thought of a lone avenging combatant, and may have been quite different from the final version. Surely there were some tweaks along the way. I think this was true with all the 4e classes.

I think what people mistake in all these cases is tight mechanics. There IS a desire in 4e to take account of the GAME implications of things. It isn't 'mechanics first', it is "no, we aren't going to just make up any story that steps all over the whole game just because we could". Wizards don't get to be super powerful "just because", etc. Honestly, this is very much like the way the designer of OD&D made 3 fairly balanced classes of dungeon explorers.

There's another problem with this. SURELY very many of the 3e classes were designed to leverage mechanical concepts, certainly to the same degree that 4e classes were. If you are critical of 4e on this score you must be double critical of 3e.

Chainmail was a game of dungeon exploration. D&D was that for thirty seconds and quickly evolved. It did not take long for D&D to move beyond the dungeon, for worlds to grow larger and grander. For people to start questioning how the world the mechanics were creating might actually work and interact.

Eh, just to let you know, not that it changes anything, Chainmail was purely tabletop mass combat rules, there was no exploration. It wasn't even an RPG. The 'fantasy supplement' at the back of the chainmail book had some rules for a wizard (basically a cannon), a dragon, and some other 'fantastic' (basically Tolkien) races. Presumably you were to use these to reproduce battles from LotR or similar sources. There was an optional rule in there to allow heroes and monsters to fight 1-on-1 if they happened to meet on the field of battle. A normal 10-minute Chainmail turn was divided into 10 1 minute rounds and the two figures when head-to-head using a special table. This table was later used as one of the combat options in OD&D, before Greyhawk permanently replaced it with basically the current system using d20.

While of course people started to do other things besides JUST dungeon crawl pretty soon, the VAST majority of the game, right up to the present, has always been focused pretty steadily on dungeon crawling. Practically every module out there from TSR is mainly a crawl of some sort. Most of the WotC modules are too. Very little thought was ever given to what magic or other class features would mean in the wider world. They were designed specifically to allow for the creation of a mixed party of adventurers exploring some sort of underworld, or now and then some wilderness or town. As long as the rest of the world was mainly kept as a sort of vague backdrop and supplier of plot hooks and such it worked pretty well. As soon as you wondered who actually made magic items, why wizards didn't just open banks or betting parlors, how a town of 3000 people could support a thieve's guild, etc it worked OK. Gary even provided enough of a ready-made answer for questions like "where do orcs come from" that most people had no real trouble focusing on their character and not worrying about the rest.

And while the game was simple now, you can't go back to that. The genie is long out of the bottle and people do wonder how classes interact and affect and alter the world. The world consequences of clerics with cure spells has been known for twenty-five years and was part of the basis of the original Dragonlance world. We cannot design like it was 1974 anymore.

Well, I have 2 answers to that. First of all, sure we can. I have no illusions that I or anyone else is capable of knowing what the consequences of fantastical things would be in the world, especially some other world than our own. Thus I don't really think we CAN do any other sort of design. Nor do I think some other sort of design would be that interesting. Finally, I just don't think the Warlord PC is that big a deal. He's the Sergeant Rock of his world, there's really only a few of him out there, and most are far less capable than he is. Your average sergeants and knights and whatever? They can't do Inspiring Word. Even if they get that power now and then in a scenario, that doesn't even mean they could NORMALLY do it. It means in this dramatic situation they managed to do it once, maybe.

Overall, I'm perfectly happy if there are other alternatives than healing for a warlord, but I want to see that as an option, presented along with the other options. I want to see a 4e type of play being supported. One where the party can have a variety of compositions and its possible to do some variations on the classic D&D tropes.

I mean really, for all people seem to have this idea that 4e is 'not as flexible' it is MUCH easier to do things like Dark Sun, or Dragonlance, using 4e than with earlier edition rules. I find it interesting right off that these 2 major setting variations BOTH zeroed in on clerics as a major aspect of the game to change too. NOTHING can be more evidence of 'not thinking about world consequences' than the CLW spell itself.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I don't like being yelled at or bluster. The last time a former NCO tried to inspire/bluster me (a civilian) into doing something, I rolled my eyes, took him aside and explained in frank gutteral language that I understood he could easily snap me into a thousand pieces but I instead could merely destroy any chance of his project succeeding and the employer wanting to keep him around. Whereas if he were to work congenially with me his project would go much more smoothly and avoid all those nasty technical hurdles. We got along much better after that.

I promise if someone started shooting at you, things would change in, ohhh, 500 milliseconds or so To also address [MENTION=17106]Ahnehnois[/MENTION] similar comment, I think that in fact parties are QUITE cohesive. In fact unnaturally so. How many people could meet at a bar and the next day fight as a cohesive unit in strange terrain against an aggressive foe and act in a concerted way with detailed knowledge of each other's capabilities, organized in a flexible formation with each major required skill covered? The most highly trained special forces on Earth would drool to have the coordination of your average D&D party. Having a Warlord in the group makes total sense and IMHO fits right into the 'band of heroes against darkness/evil/poverty/whatever' theme of the game perfectly.

 

[DEFCON 1]

You know... I just take it on faith that when they release the warlord-esque "Tactician" fighting style to an upcoming playtest packet... that everyone at that point will respond via survey, email and messageboard to WotC declaring that what rules they came up with are completely serviceable and cool as a warlord-as-class replacement... or that they royally screwed the pooch and that it just won't cut it-- Warlord NEEDS to be a class.

At that point... they'll then take a long hard look at what they have and decide whether they need to make any edits or changes.

Pretty much the same thing they're going to be experiencing next week, once the "Ranger-as-spellcaster" gets released on Wednesday. It'll either go over, or lay out like a wet fart to most of the populace.

 

[CAFRedblade]

I'd like to see the Warlord be a master tactician and battlefield controller, giving out orders/commands, for buffing, co-ordinated strikes, and giving an edge for defense, (blocking damage, or giving retaliatory strikes) temp healing (during combat), perhaps some permanent healing out of combat(with use of heal packs)

 

[Ahnehnois]

The most highly trained special forces on Earth would drool to have the coordination of your average D&D party.

IME, the "average D&D party" is not very cohesive at all. D&D's default assumption (going back to the treasure as XP concept) is that the PCs are in it for the money. The parties I've DMed and played in rarely had organized tactics or strong personal relationships. They often had friendly fire incidents, bickering over treasure, thieving from each other, backstabing, and even direct PvP combat. Not that these are bad things; they're to be expected from an alliance of convenience among career mercenaries with disparate backgrounds. I certainly wouldn't say that the average D&D party is coordinated.

Even in cases where they are, it's not necessarily or usually because one guy whose shtick was tactics showed up and told them what to do; it's by mutual accord.

 

[Garthanos]

A bunch of loners and misfits playing loners and misfits... unable to acknowledge teamworks is real and it takes work and skill to make happen.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

IME, the "average D&D party" is not very cohesive at all. D&D's default assumption (going back to the treasure as XP concept) is that the PCs are in it for the money. The parties I've DMed and played in rarely had organized tactics or strong personal relationships. They often had friendly fire incidents, bickering over treasure, thieving from each other, backstabing, and even direct PvP combat. Not that these are bad things; they're to be expected from an alliance of convenience among career mercenaries with disparate backgrounds. I certainly wouldn't say that the average D&D party is coordinated.

I couldn't elicit any of that behavior in my groups by trying. In fact in my Weekday group I DID try, gave the rogue a cursed dagger and told the player about how his character was possessed by voices, etc. He still didn't go for it. I finally had to resort to the old "you can't control yourself, make a Thievery check!" lol. Finally just tossed them a Remove Curse scroll, they just weren't into it. Even in the "bad" old days it was pretty rare. Miscues? Yeah, those happen, but I hate to tell you how often that would happen in real life...

Even in cases where they are, it's not necessarily or usually because one guy whose shtick was tactics showed up and told them what to do; it's by mutual accord.

Well, it would be, if such a guy existed, lol. In fact 'Sarge' was my 'DMPC' in the 2nd game I ran of 4e. He was an NPC 'warlord' that would yank the PCs around and whatnot to teach the players tactics (they were quite hapless), which worked GREAT for explaining how these novices could actually be an effective team. The mere fact that the PCs can assume and use a sensible marching order, employ tactics like flanking, concentrating fire, etc is huge. The truth is it takes quite a bit of training to bring actual soldiers to that level, and they'll never have the easy communications and ability to assess and plan in rapid tactical time like you have in D&D.