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

[AbdulAlhazred]

If you want to fight and heal then you need to be a Paladin or (even better) a warpriest. I really despise the anti-cleric and anti-fighter movement. I've never even been a fan of Paladins and Rangers because they take away the fighters job. All a "paladin" should be is a fighter who is dedicated and prays (the Castles & Crusades one is the BEST I've seen bar none), and all a Ranger is is a fighter who wears lighter armor and uses a bow, choosing DEX over STR. Period.

But I'm just an old Basic player I guess.

I don't think there's one possible way to do it myself. I just think that if you want to go with "there are just 4 classes" then the game needs to make sure it has other ways to make PCs distinct, or else assume that you will play in a fairly narrow or casual way, etc. I mean Basic eventually added skills and weapon specialization of its own for these very reasons. Its different anyway. If you are going to stick to that design, then of course you wouldn't break out of it just for warlords.

true, BUT 4e does hold to "controller, defender, striker, leader" archetypes and if you do not have a cleric in that leader build you risk a Warlord who didn't choose healing powers and your party is SOL.

Not really. The assumption is generally that you have the roles covered, but it isn't THAT critical. A party with all lower damage classes will maybe be boring, possibly less effective in some situations. Some single focus parties are surprisingly effective though. The all-shaman party for instance is stupid powerful even though shamans aren't generally a class you think of as having unusual combat prowess.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I know you've been playing a long time, but I think you're misremembering things.

You are right that magic in Chainmail isn't Vancian. However, the D&D magic system was not invented in Chainmail; especially as the only similarity to Dungeons & Dragons magic is the limitation on numbers of spells (based on rank of the caster). There's no memorization. No fire and forget. Chaimail was simply a wargaming rules system that incorporated rules for using some individual combatants (rather than just units), and included some fantasy elements. It is considered a precursor to D&D, but it is not D&D. Later printings pointed one towards the OD&D books if one wanted more complicated fantasy elements.

OD&D (D&D 1974) was the beginning of the fire and forget model we call "Vancian". Although there is only a short acknowledgement of inspirational sources in OD&D, and Jack Vance's Dying Earth is not mentioned, Gary Gygax did explicitly state in The Strategic Review (1976, Volume 2, Issue 2; before Basic D&D in 1977) that D&D magic was based on Vance's books.

Also, since the Dying Earth books had been out since the 50's, I don't think it's accurate to portray them as if they just happened to come along and were then recognized as convenient fluff to explain the mechanical system.

I know you've been playing for a long time, but I still take Gary Gygax's take over yours on this subject.

This isn't a chicken vs. the egg kind of thing. Gygax used a narrativist idea from a book as inspiration for his gamist mechanic, a marriage of narrativist and gamist elements; and Gary himself said so.

Yes, we agree on the conclusion, essentially, but see my post right after the one I'm now responding to, I explained the Chainmail magic system in outline there. As I said there too, I have the game, I've played it, I actually have a few 100 stands of 15mm fantasy figures, we used to play all the time with them. At least in the way WE interpreted it, chainmail wizards only got to shoot each spell once. It is actually VERY similar to the magic system in OD&D, which also features fewer levels of spells and some other things that remind one more clearly of Chainmail fantasy appendix magic.

As you say, I don't dispute that D&D magic is 'based on' Vance's magic. I just stated essentially the same thing you did, that Gary took a narrative, from Vance, and used it to explain the gamist elements of his magic system which was clearly derived from Chainmail's magic system. The point is it was an existing game system BEFORE VANCE CAME INTO IT, the Vance part was an explanation for the mechanics, and possibly depending on your interpretation of Chainmail's rules, apparently, may also have inspired some changes to that system. As I said above though, CLEARLY mechanics were a heavy weight there as Gary could easily have made the system more faithful to the source material, and it probably wouldn't have hurt the result mechanically either. It just shows that he was more interested in explaining his own mechanics than in emulating someone else's fluff.

 

[Jester David]

Yes, and "aggressive proselytizer for my god" is also, so what? I can run a wizard as a drooling idiot who likes to fight with daggers, but that doesn't invalidate the wizard class...

Very true, but wouldn’t advocate making a separate class based around the “aggressive proselytizer”
(as much as I love playing fire and brimstone preachers). Likewise the “drooling dagger mage” doesn’t need to be a class either. You could make it a class, but it’s not particularly broad.

Here’s the thing, you could easily make an awesome Proselytizer class that focused on damning individuals, inducing guilt-based penalties, and had an innate charm ability based on preaching as it sways people to their side. And it’s very different from the traditional portrayal of the martial warrior-cleric of earlier editions with scale armour and heavy mace. You could have a lot of fun with that.
But that’s not a class or even a build of the cleric so much as a character concept.

Really? They did? Where is it? lol. Were you a 4e closed playtester or something? No such class appears or was ever rumored to appear except in the wish fantasy of some crunch lovers. Notice that WotC paid them no mind at all and proceeded to make classes that were thematic, not 'filled that grid hole'.

Umm... I know because they told us on the WotC website.
I believe it was in one of the Design & Development articles for PHB3, likely the seeker. They took many of the ideas behind the theoretical martial controller and applied it to the seeker.
Reading between the lines, the seeker potentially evolved from the martial controller experiments. They couldn’t make it work as well as they wanted without magic so we got a more magical variant of the ranger.

Or they might be the Avenger class. This argument is becoming silly. In fact if you play 4e you will find that it can do a LOT of stuff that previous editions have real problems doing. Part of the reason is that they got rid of the idea of 'class as world building tool', it simply doesn't exist in 4e as it did in 3e (and to a lesser degree in AD&D). This frees up the notion of class greatly (though WotC hardly seems to have ever acknowledged the constraint you claim that is inherent in that). The other thing that 4e did was free up the concept of class from being a NARROW tool. In past editions if you used the Ranger class it meant you were a very specific type of character (albeit one which covers a lot of characters in fiction). 4e certainly built each class around an archetypal concept, but the system is broader and each class can be shaped a LOT by using common mechanics (IE taking feats, MCing, hybrid, or just taking PP/ED choices).

I did play 4e.
I ran 4e for over a year (until my game collapsed for entirely non-4e reasons) and played in two campaigns, one that lasted over a year and one that died a short death. I’ve even popped into Encounters a few times And I’ve done quite a bit of 4e writing and design for both my website and other sites.

But we’re not only talking about 4e, we’re talking about what comes next in 5e. And I don’t think we need to break-up classes into three or four subclasses based on combat role any more. Folding the concepts back into existing classes makes those more flexible, customizable, and grand. The cleric becomes more than just the healbot because, with the right build, she can also invoke the word of her god or serve as the assassin of her god.

I can make Van Helsing, Porfirio, Jackie Chan, Felsig, etc all in 4e with very little problem. 4e's rich array of classes really helps. Of course you can pick out a few experiments that didn't work out as well as others, but conceptually it was quite successful. I think 5e would do well to embrace that kind of design and perfect it. Perhaps that means making more things sub-classes, shifting some options around between being a class and being something else, but I don't think it means you should have far fewer classes. I also think that the whole concept of stacking together different classes ala AD&D MCing never worked well. I'd rather come at it from 4e's direction and just make classes with enough options to encompass what people want and enough customization to tweak it to your needs.

I’m curious how you’d make an intelligent investigator. I mean - of course- the Dracula van Helsing not the Hugh Jackman Van Helsing (who’d be a pretty straight ranger).

I think 5e would do well to embrace that kind of design and perfect it. Perhaps that means making more things sub-classes, shifting some options around between being a class and being something else, but I don't think it means you should have far fewer classes. I also think that the whole concept of stacking together different classes ala AD&D MCing never worked well. I'd rather come at it from 4e's direction and just make classes with enough options to encompass what people want and enough customization to tweak it to your needs.
Subclasses akin to the Pathfiner archetypes would be good, because they’re very space efficient. Sub-classes like the Essentials “subclasses” not so much, as those were pretty much different classes with very few shared mechanics. Space is finite in the books and full classes take-up a LOT of space. Every class you add devours enough space for two or three rules modules or a six or eight specialities.

There’s a number of side reason for fewer classes.
First, is the aforementioned space. Second is that subclasses and new classes support new characters. This hurt 4e as almost every book supported new characters and had lesser support for existing characters. Focusing on feats and powers that build on existing classes benefit existing characters, which make the books and content more appealing to people already playing.
Third is the narrative element, which is actually two reasons in one. Classes do have a role in the world. Every new class - just like every monster or race - has a role in the world. (Or should.) Adding a new option makes work for the DM who suddenly has to fit avengers or seekers or runepriests into the paradigm of their world, but without making them seem tacked-on or superfluous. But there’s also the narrative as seen by the players. When a DM introduces a monster, it’s easy to picture it being a wizard or fighter or barbarian. Those are bigger than D&D and carry weight, which makes it easier to picture a “gnoll barbarian” than a “gnoll avenger”, especially if you haven’t read all the books.
It’s also slightly easier for new players. Everyone knows what a “wizard” and a “fighter” are, and with Warcraft and Diablo everyone knows what a druid, rogue, and paladin are. But a seeker or battlemind requires some explanation. They’re harder to gronk when you’re just trying to understand the game.

Now, none of these reasons are particularly solid in and of themselves. But together it’s a lot. This isn’t to say there should be no new classes ever, but I don’t think we need two or three every book. You can get away with a couple unique-to-D&D classes (especially if they’re world-specific) but of the 23 pre-Essentials classes 12 were unique to D&D. That’s half the classed in the game. And 3e was sooooo much worse.

Lol, I have several complete collections of Vance's work. In fact Vance is one of the very few people I would say I am an actual FAN of. Clearly Gary took that commonality and ran with it, even naming a couple of spells after ones that Vance invented, but don't overdo it. Chainmail (which I have actually played many times) has a very rudimentary magic system in which wizards of different levels have fireballs and some other spells which IIRC are divided into 4 levels of potency and there are from 1-5 spells at each level, ALL of which are D&D classics. This game had NOTHING to do with RPG, and even if Gary thought of Vance at all, which I think is not that likely, in respect to the Chainmail wizard (or priest, which is similar) the design was PURELY gamist and so simple it didn't require Vance to inspire it. Besides NOTHING in Vance corresponds to spell level. In fact if you were trying to emulate Vance you would probably assign a 'level' to each spell and the character would just have a total pool of 'magic slots' where each spell took up N of them equal to its level.

I’ll concede to your expertise as my Vance is rusty.

I have no idea where you got those statements from though it would surely be impossible to refute them. You're the first person I recall ever saying anyone at WotC worked on a martial controller. OTOH I don't see a huge reason not to think it is a natural question to ask "Is there a class concept here?" but note that the answer was, "no", even though plenty of people have dreamed up mechanics that would work in a purely gamist sense (a martial seeker-like class for instance). Note that Essentials DOES have a Scout which works a lot like this, but it isn't entirely martial.

They come from the Design & Development articles on the website or designer blogs.

I don't know anything about some other alternative Battlemind. The one they have clearly has a story, mind over matter, very succinct. I'm a little divided on how well it fills that concept, but then I'm not really a fan of psionics in D&D. I know the mechanics provoked lots of complaints until it was revised.

The mechanics suggest mind-over-matter while the fluff pains the idea of characters fueled by ego, but there’s a heck of a lot of powers that fit neither theme and there are a heck of a lot of interrupts.

I disagree, while the Invoker is a little more niche than things like Cleric and Wizard if you were to PLAY it or see character concepts built on it, you'd see quickly that it is a pretty fun and useful class that can feel quite distinct. In fact it evokes more of the wonder-worker concept that the cleric oddly has been missing for decades. You could argue for moving cleric healing over to this guy and ditching the cleric (leave the paladin as the armored holy man), but the Invoker itself, much more than a grid filler.

If you need to play a class for its uniqueness to be apparent it’s likely too tied to its mechanics.
Both the mechanics and the story need to be strong. Mechanics are great for any other game but RPGS are story-based games. Story matters. Story is what makes the games unique and different.

I can appreciate great mechanics, but if I just want solid mechanics I can play a euro-game. I buy RPGS for the story and inspiration for stories. I have spent so much money on RPGs I will never, ever use (sometimes because the mechanics are crap) because the story and world and flavour hooked me. I spent weeks reading the Eclipse Phase and am still fascinated by the world but when I get to the mechanics I feel like I've been hit in the head by a brick. I'd like to play but just cannot devote the time to reading through that much crunch.

The thing is WHAT DO YOU NEED for optional rules? Everything 'just works'. Guns are trivial. Pistol -> treat this as a hand crossbow, musket -> treat this as a heavy crossbow. There, I'm done

That will do fine for casual use. I know of NO official gun rules in any previous edition, but I'm not an expert on 3.x, they could exist. I never heard of any for AD&D personally, though if you say the Ravenloft SETTING had them, I believe you.

That was just a quick example. There are also things like fear, horror, curses, and madness. I think they did some in Dragon well after I stopped playing 4e.

But optional rules are pretty vital. Nobody plays the game the same way and not everyone feels comfortable making heavy house rules. But 4e has almost no optional rules and they tend to be very small.

Okay, I lied up above. While I buy side RPGS books for story and inspiration and hooks, I buy books for games I do plan on running for mechanics. While I feel comfortable kitbashing the living f___ out of a game system to make it fit my style, I'd rather a professional do much of that work for me.
Optional rules and variable play often mean the difference between me playing the game or just using the books for inspiration (and if the books don't even offer inspiration, then I just won't buy).

No, I disagree. Low magic 4e is trivial (either just don't worry about the missing attack bonus and tweak encounter difficulty as needed, same as you did in 1e) or use inherent bonus (which was so blindingly obvious an option it barely needed to be spelled out in DMG2). Low combat games work PERFECTLY WELL in 4e. In previous editions you had as many or few problems with them too (mostly wizard novas, much worse than full-party 4e nova). I've had games go weeks without a fight, no problem.

I think you have some preconceived notions about what you can and can't do.

The DMG2 rules were nice, if they weren't buried in some forgotten section in the back of the book. I always had to hunt for those rules and they're never where I think they'll be. Not that it did me any good, because my group relied on the character builder like a crutch and by the time the inherent bonuses were implemented I'd already given out more treasure than I had in my previous three campaigns combined.

I'm glad you've managed to have fun playing 4e and not stumbled into the troubles that made my game a morass of pain or derailed so many other people's games. It took me far, far too long to "get" 4e and start writing adventures that complimented the edition.
While I'm sure that with enough time I could have eventually figured out how to use 4e to tell the stories I wanted to tell, there were no shortage of games that did it without heavy modification.

 

[Jester David]

1) Garthanos is right, a PrC is bad because it forces you to advance a number of levels before you can have your character concept work. This is a BIG advantage of 4e class design, you match your archetype from day 1.

This struck me as odd.
Yes, people should be able to play their character concept as soon as possible. You shouldn't have to wait until halfway through the game to be adequate at something. But some concepts are just too big for first level. There are too many moving parts and the scope is too large. This is as true in 4e as in 3e, and I've seen a few characters (typically hybrids or multiclassed) that took a few levels to build up enough feats to really do what they wanted.

Prestige Classes (and to a lesser extent Paragon Paths) are a great way of having a character be specialized in something esoteric, focusing on very world-specific lore or training tied to organizations or elite forces. You're not just a fighter, you're a Knight of Solamnia or of the Round Table.

Now, PrC in 3e were iffy at best. Good idea, poor execution. The feat and skill taxes required for entry were silly. And sometimes the requirements were too high. But that's an incentive to try harder and make the mechanic work, not abandon it wholesale.

 

[Ahnehnois]

Not really. The assumption is generally that you have the roles covered, but it isn't THAT critical. A party with all lower damage classes will maybe be boring, possibly less effective in some situations. Some single focus parties are surprisingly effective though. The all-shaman party for instance is stupid powerful even though shamans aren't generally a class you think of as having unusual combat prowess.

I'm just baffled as to how you can conclude that this is true in 4e (which it may be) but not in 3e or 2e (which it definitely is).

 

[karolusb]

I'm just baffled as to how you can conclude that this is true in 4e (which it may be) but not in 3e or 2e (which it definitely is).

I can't speak for the guy you are quoting, but in 4e fight goes semi-bad, party rests for 5 minutes, everyone burns a bunch of surges and moves on, having or not having a cleric has little actual effect(you burn a few less surges). Fight goes bad in 2nd ed, party rests for 60 days without a cleric or rests 5 minutes with. Depending on the game 60 days vs 5 minutes may not actually matter, from a narrative sense flow they are very different. (The numbers vary by level of course, the rather extreme example above assumes a pretty high level 2e party.)

 

[Ahnehnois]

I can't speak for the guy you are quoting, but in 4e fight goes semi-bad, party rests for 5 minutes, everyone burns a bunch of surges and moves on, having or not having a cleric has little actual effect(you burn a few less surges). Fight goes bad in 2nd ed, party rests for 60 days without a cleric or rests 5 minutes with. Depending on the game 60 days vs 5 minutes may not actually matter, from a narrative sense flow they are very different. (The numbers vary by level of course, the rather extreme example above assumes a pretty high level 2e party.)

As you point out, the ability to repeatedly fight in a short period of time is not a built-in assumption in D&D. Needing to rest a significant period of time can be seen as a positive; it's part of the old school playstyle, among others. The game is not broken because you have to stop and rest to get from almost dead to feeling fine; it's arguably better.

Then again, it's not like you need a cleric to heal you. You need a cleric or a druid or a bard or a paladin or a ranger (since we're talking high level here), and there are numerous other ways of getting faster healing. Healing without a cleric is even easier in 3e. So even to the extent that healing matters and clerics are generally the best at it, there are plenty of other options.

To the point I was making, it's entirely possible to play without a cleric. Without the cleric, you might have an all thief/rogue party that specialized in stealth, avoids direct combat, and doesn't need healing. Or a mage group that just casts a couple of spells and flies away if that doesn't work. Or a fighter group that just covers for each other. It works fine. IME more parties don't have a cleric than do, and even the secondary healers are more a convenience than a necessity (and many people play clerics that don't heal much).

 

[El Mahdi]

deleted

 

[karolusb]

As you point out, the ability to repeatedly fight in a short period of time is not a built-in assumption in D&D. Needing to rest a significant period of time can be seen as a positive; it's part of the old school playstyle, among others.

But, there is a massive difference between cleric and non-cleric, you don't need clerics in the way you don't need anything, you could play a game of all gardeners. And yes the ranger helps, but surprisingly little (the the ranger makes it an ~30 day delay). Now this isn't to say you can't wait 60 days after each encounter (or 30) but the fact that clerics make it instant matters (what if you get ambushed before you get to your resting site?). This is where the "somebody has to play a cleric" thing comes from, it was once upon a time a real mandatory thing, while other options nominally existed, the difference between them was certainly non-trivial. A party of 5 semi-healers would have less resilience than a party of 4 non-healers and 1 cleric at almost all levels (5 paladins would actually be better at most levels, but seriously how many 17's did your group roll). 3e of course the ranger just goes to town with a wand of cure light wounds and healing clerics are essentially superfluous.

I would prefer more real options. If you can kick butt as a fighter, paladin, ranger, barbarian, monk, and probably rogue, is it so alien that you could heal as a cleric or a something else? The barbarian may have slightly different rules for dealing damage, but they deal damage, so to make the not-cleric healer not actually heal, is hardly commensurate.

 

[Fox Lee]

Should there be mundane healing in the game? My answer would be hells yes. I resent the idea that magic makes you better than no magic - all power sources should be equally powerful IMO, because power source is a story/character/RP choice and not one that you should be rewarded or punished for. It took basically the entire life of 3e for the poor fighter to get something that compared to the power of the core wizard/druid/cleric, and I don't want to see that happen ever again.

Does this mean that D&D doesn't suit some styles of games? Yes. Is that a problem? Not in my eyes. I would MUCH rather lose (easy) access to the "magic is just plain better" settings than the "everybody can kick ass" settings, especially since D&D over time has become a) only remotely concerned with realism, b) fairly generic by default, and c) always going to be uinsuitable for some types of games, and it's just a matter of choosing which.

Should the Warlord get it? If healing is expected to be necessary, then yes. The simplest reason is that I don't care for Hit Points as meat, not for many years now.

More importantly, I will consider it a failure if there is only one class available that can perform a generic task - healing, control, AoE damage, buffs, whatever - which is why I always rather liked the idea of roles. They are an excellent shorthand for clarfying what a class is supposed to do, mechanically, and a guideline for groups to make an effective party - which can plainly be ignored by groups who think they know better. Like letting Luigi play through the stage for you, they are something that you don't have to pay any heed to if you consider yourself too good a player for that. For those who are bothered because they made class A go in role B when you thought it belonged in role C, I don't have a lot of sympathy; you can use the available tools to craft almost any build you like, so there's no need to split hairs over names.

I do think it could really benefit from renaming temporary hit points, though. That name is fiddly, and reminiscent of a time when Hit Points were meat, which has not suited D&D for several editions now.