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

[pemerton]

If it can kill you, it's lethal, meat or no. Are we talking about healing of subdual/nonlethal damage?

There is a motif, common in what I have been calling "romantic fantasy" (pointing to Arthurian romance and Tolkien as exemplars), that a hero does not die, in the end, from phyiscal harm, but from a failure of will or spirit.

For instance, Aragorn (in Appendix A) is not described as dying of any particular infection or organ failure. Denethor only kills himself when his will fails. Attention from Faramir is what bring Eowyn back to life and health. Etc.

A certain sort of heroic fantasy - comic books, some "action" movies, etc - also embrace a version of this motif, although for them the time frame in which will/spirit operate is often more compressed - rather than minutes or days or weeks, the inspiration happens in moments (for instance, a hero sees a loved one about to be attacked, and therefore struggles to his/her feet and rejoins the fray).

This is the fiction that the warlord's inspirational healing is modelling. If you don't like it, you naturally wouldn't use the warlord class. If you want to model it by introducing a separate "morale point" track, go to town! - but you'll be taking D&D in a direction it's never really gone before.

I want a game with inspirational recovery, resulting from the presence of a Tolkien-style battle captain.

Here's the problem. You can have one of those things, but not both. That's not how things work in Tolkien-style fiction. There are no warlords and no inspirational healing, and physical and psychological wounds are treated in a grounded way in his fiction. He was a combat veteran after all. Frankly, he'd probably be offended by this assertion. I can't tell you what your preference is, but I can identify a contradiction when I see it.

No inspirational healing? What do you think happened to Eowyn? How do you think Gandalf lifted the curse from Theoden? How did Theoden turn from a tired old man into a fearless and valiant war leader?

If you want to read LotR as if its themes and motifs have no connection to the pre-modern literature that Tolkien devoted his academic life to studying and defending from modernist criticism, that's your prerogative. For me, the connection between pre-modern romances and LotR is extremely obvious. One of the key and recurring motifs is that the presence of a leader - Aragorn, Gandalf, Theoden, Faramir - makes a greater difference to the outcome of a conflict than any question of materiel or numbers (and in that sense the treatment of war in LotR can be seen as a massive rejection of the First World War, which was very much a "materiel war").

As I've posted multiple times upthread, the question then becomes - how does one implement the idea that the moral factor in combat is more important than the material factor - into D&D. The most immediate and powerful way is to have inspiration produce hit point recovery.

The claim was "Within the context of D&D, that is pretty easily achieved, as 4e has shown". I'm not the one who brought it up. To make that point convincing, someone would have to do similar sourcing to show that it worked. Saying "4e did it, ergo it works" is a pretty ludicrous statement.

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The warlord is a nexus point of several controversial and radical shifts in direction, and it also is a somewhat bizarre island in the world of rpgs; there's really no precedent for it in fiction or in other games (i.e. no built-in fanbase). Who would miss it if was gone? A few posters in this thread, but is there anyone else?

[If 4e has shown is anything, it's that attempting to cram martial healing and a token class based on it into a game with D&D on the cover causes mass dissatisfaction, kills people's enjoyment and game sales, and causes innumerable threads like this one. It's quite ironic that the character class for "guy who inspires people" inspires so much discontent in the real world.

No one is forcing you to read, or to post in, this thread. And maybe 4e killed your enjoyment of RPGing, but it had a positive effect on mine. And as to the warlord being a "token" class, I don't know what that claim is based on at all. It's a robust class that a lot of people seem to like and to play, as best I have a sense of the 4e fanbase.

Your argument basically seems to be that, because you don't like 4e, 4e didn't work and anyone who did like it is foolish and/or ignorant. The argument only has to be stated for its absurdity to be apparent.

I know from other posts of yours that the range of non-D20 rpgs that you are familiar with is very narrow. You've never played classic games like Runequest or Pendragon, nor modern games that occupy something like the same thematic space, such as Burning Wheel. So your comments about "no precedent for it in other games" is baseless - Burning Wheel, which predates 4e by a number of years, has a PC-affecting morale mechanic (based around the Steel attribute) that creates, in effect, a parallel track on which combat can be won or lost; Marvel Heroic RP (a game that is subsequent to 4e) has 3 tracks of "damage" (physical, mental, emotional) which operate in parallel, but are mildly substitutable in the resolution mechanics, and any of which can lead to disablement or death; 1st ed AD&D had purely mental attacks (psionics, for instance) which could generate hit point damage.

What about games which treat different forms of harm and disablement on the same track, as 4e does? Two I know of are Maelstrom Storytelling (1996) and HeroWars/Quest (mulitple editions from around 2000 or so). Possibly also Over the Edge (1992), but I don't have my copy ready to hand and my memory of it is a bit more shaky.

If you don't want to play a warlord, or use inspirational healing, in your game, I don't think anyone is going to force you to. But given that a warlord class, or some similar inspirational healer build of another class, can be built into the game without affecting its suitability for doing whatever you want it to do, what is it to you that others have the option? Are you worried about the 4 or so pages of rulebook space that it might take up?

You seem to be saying that "combat as war" not only doesn't exist as a (legitimate) playstyle, but that the game has never supported it.

I'm not saying that Combat as War doesn't exist. I'm saying that that ridiculous monicker should be dropped.

There is a legitimate difference between a strategic and a tactical focus. Or between combat as a as a crucible and combat as the final resolution. However.

The dichotomy of Combat as War vs Combat as Sport is one of sneering and edition warring.

I completely agree with Neonchameleon here - the combat a war/combat as sport dichotomy is not one that I think was coined by those whose playstyle is being characterised as "combat as sport".

And I think it's interesting that the poster in this thread who has embraced both sides of the dichotomy - [MENTION=21169]Doug McCrae[/MENTION] - thinks that D&D doesn't fall under the "combat as war" label for similar reasons to those given by Neonchameleon - namely, that it is has an overly regulated metagame (eg its action economy and its hit point economy, which are prominent features even in classic D&D).

In any event, the presence or absence of a warlord with inspiration healing has little bearing on the combat as war/combat as sport dichotomy that I can see, unless the combat-as-war side of that dichotomy is also taken to entail a very gritty processs-simulation approach to action resolution.

 

[Ahnehnois]

No inspirational healing? What do you think happened to Eowyn?

Mechanically? Nothing.

How do you think Gandalf lifted the curse from Theoden?

Magic.

How did Theoden turn from a tired old man into a fearless and valiant war leader?

Magic. And possibly an internal change of heart. Again, no mechanical change on that level.

How do you think Faramir ended up in the Houses of Healing? Why do they even have Houses of Healing, let alone an entire chapter on it? How did Frodo come to be sick every year on the anniversary of his being stung?

Because Tolkien understood the effects of war, and made great efforts to dramatize the seriousness of wounds, both physical and nonphysical. You don't see characters healing instantaneously, you seem them go through prolonged suffering.

If you want to read LotR as if its themes and motifs have no connection to the pre-modern literature that Tolkien devoted his academic life to studying and defending from modernist criticism, that's your prerogative. For me, the connection between pre-modern romances and LotR is extremely obvious. One of the key and recurring motifs is that the presence of a leader - Aragorn, Gandalf, Theoden, Faramir - makes a greater difference to the outcome of a conflict than any question of materiel or numbers (and in that sense the treatment of war in LotR can be seen as a massive rejection of the First World War, which was very much a "materiel war").

Is the leader valued? Sure. Those soldiers wouldn't be fighting if not for their leader. But the leader is a symbol, not a tactician, and definitely not a healer. I don't recall their words doing anything that could be construed as a mechanical effect. For the most part, words aren't even audible in a battle of that size (which contributes to the absurdity of the warlord concept). You could maybe make a case for the symbolic value having an ongoing effect on morale, which Heroes of Battle does perfectly well without going anywhere near "spike healing" or people who focus their careers on talking inspirationally during battles to the death.

Your argument basically seems to be that, because you don't like 4e, 4e didn't work and anyone who did like it is foolish and/or ignorant. The argument only has to be stated for its absurdity to be apparent.

My argument boils down to: just because someone did it doesn't mean that doing it was a good idea, or that it worked.

 

[Ahnehnois]

Wow, really? No precedent? No meaning in any fantasy literature? Can you honestly look at the Warlord class and not see its antecedents?

Yes. I see plenty of fighters, barbarians, etc. who take on leadership roles. Maybe in rare instances you can find something that could be seen as a mechanical benefit.

However, there are two key things that are without precedent. One, the notion that someone would make a career out of leadership, starting as a teenager. There are many effective leaders, more in fiction than in real life, but their career is not "leader". Their prime requisite is something else, and leadership is an additional skill. Non-4e D&D handles this in a variety of ways, most of them non-class-based (feats, teamwork benefits, command auras, etc.). You could make a case for a prestige class (in 3.X terms) devoted to leadership, but not a base class.

Second, there are no examples of people who can reliably produce battlefield healing, inspirational or otherwise. There are examples of people who can temporarily ignore injuries, and (much more rarely) examples of leaders who can directly inspire people to do such things, but certainly not as something that they can reliably do on a regular basis, and certainly not as their primary focus in life.

So, no precedent.

 

[Ahnehnois]

Now, if anyone wanted a nonmagical healer with precedent, they'd go towards a quasi-magical alchemist, or a quasi-scientific physic. Heck, you could even rationalize nonmagical resurrection, if the character was only "mostly dead". Oddly enough, the alchemist is one of the first things PF tackled, but we still haven't seen it in D&D.

 

[Mike Eagling]

Aaand... it's at this point I've decided to make my grand entrance!

I've followed this thread with some interest and regard myself as being neutral on the subject. I've never played 4e and although I like Pathfinder I'm no 3e fanboy. With that in mind:

Wow, really? No precedent? No meaning in any fantasy literature? Can you honestly look at the Warlord class and not see its antecedents?

I'm not entirely sure I can, no. The only literary precedents given so far have been characters like Aragorn and King Arthur.

Aragorn isn't a war leader until the very end of his quest and never once inspires his comrades to continue fighting in the heat of battle. He definitely inspires them to continue their quest and not lose heart in the face of adversity but he doesn't do that during combat.

And as for Arthur? Well, it depends which Arthur you mean. There are so many different interpretations. The one I know best is Malory and in that he's an almost impotent politician.

Warlords may exist in fiction but so far the examples given don't chime with me and I'm left unconvinced by the pro-warlord arguments.

 

[pemerton]

Magic.

Magic.

What is Gandalf's magic? An ability to rouse the spirit. And do you also count Grima Wormtongue as a magician?

Treating what Gandalf did as analogous to casting Remove Curse in D&D seems to me to miss the underlying dynamic of the episode (although the movie version portrayed it more along these lines).

You don't see characters healing instantaneously, you seem them go through prolonged suffering.

There are a range of issues around building this sort of stuff into an RPG. For instance, suppose reading that chapter takes you 30 minutes. Then to get the same degree of narrative satisfaction in an RPG, you might want a similar arc to unfold in 30 mintues of play. How long, in the game, is that going to represent? In most versions of D&D combat, not weeks or months. Minutes at most.

Most movies also compress the time required - hence the "action movie" variant I mentioned upthread - unless they adopt a montage approach.

In my view the change of relationship between fictional time and real time for the playing out of an arc is a function primarily of medium, not underlying thematic weight.

As for instantaneous healing, there are multiple episodes in LotR that could play out in healing terms in 4e. For instance, Merry is paralysed by fear of the WitchKing, but then is moved to act by Eowyn's bravery - in 4e this would be psychic damage (plus dazing, perhaps) with an inspirational effect from Eowyn then restoring the hp lost to pyshic damage (and/or granting a save vs the daze).

the leader is a symbol, not a tactician, and definitely not a healer. I don't recall their words doing anything that could be construed as a mechanical effect. For the most part, words aren't even audible in a battle of that size (which contributes to the absurdity of the warlord concept). You could maybe make a case for the symbolic value having an ongoing effect on morale, which Heroes of Battle does perfectly well without going anywhere near "spike healing" or people who focus their careers on talking inspirationally during battles to the death.

All "healing" means in this context is "restoration of hit points" (it is the counterpart of "damage" which means "loss of hit points", even when that does not correlate to physical harm, as per psychic damage in 4e or psionically-deal damage in AD&D).

Restoring hit points improves, in a very noticeable mechanical fashion, the fighting spirit of a D&D PC - because the player is empowered to play his/her PC in a different way, and to take different sorts of risks.

That's not the leader as tactician (which is not an archetype I have mentioned at all in this thread, though others have). That's the leader as inspirational (whether symbollically, or by speaking words).

the notion that someone would make a career out of leadership, starting as a teenager.

The idea of classes as careers isn't the only take on them.

For instance, when I started playing D&D with Moldvay Basic I didn't assume that my elf had chosen elfishness as his career!

Other well-known D&D classes that are not careers are the paladin (you don't choose it, you are called to it a la Joan of Arc), the cleric on at least some interpretations, the monk on at least some interpretations, the barbarian and the sorcerer.

 

[Neonchameleon]

What is Gandalf's magic? An ability to rouse the spirit. And do you also count Grima Wormtongue as a magician?

Indeed. This is one of my greatest objections to non-4e versions of D&D (and Next appears to be heading right down that rabbit hole). Is it useful? Must be magic. Is it reliable? Must be magic. Is it good at anything except skewering someone? Must be magic.

Restoring hit points improves, in a very noticeable mechanical fashion, the fighting spirit of a D&D PC - because the player is empowered to play his/her PC in a different way, and to take different sorts of risks.

This. Game design is mind control to borrow a phrases from Luke Crane. If characters are encouraged to behae the way they are supposed to, and get outcomes as in the fiction then things have succeeded. If playing the way they are supposed to is very, very poor tactics, the game design hasn't.

 

[Mike Eagling]

How do you think Gandalf lifted the curse from Theoden? How did Theoden turn from a tired old man into a fearless and valiant war leader?

Given that Gandalf is a Maiar and thus a minor god: Clerical magic.

If you want to read LotR as if its themes and motifs have no connection to the pre-modern literature that Tolkien devoted his academic life to studying and defending from modernist criticism, that's your prerogative. For me, the connection between pre-modern romances and LotR is extremely obvious. One of the key and recurring motifs is that the presence of a leader - Aragorn, Gandalf, Theoden, Faramir - makes a greater difference to the outcome of a conflict than any question of materiel or numbers (and in that sense the treatment of war in LotR can be seen as a massive rejection of the First World War, which was very much a "materiel war").

You've never played classic games like Runequest or Pendragon, nor modern games that occupy something like the same thematic space, such as Burning Wheel.

This is an interesting point and passionately argued but I still don't see how it relates to the warlord class and this longing for an inspirational healing class.

It's also very interesting that you mention RuneQuest, which of course grew out of Staffords mythological studies in the same way Middle-earth stemmed from Tolkien's linguistics. Meanwhile, for better or worse, Dungeons & Dragons developed from pseudo-historical tabletop wargames and an over exposure to pulp fiction.

I totally see where you're coming from and I have a lot of respect for what you've said about themes and motifs. I imagine your campaigns are the kind of game I'd enjoy but, dare I say it: "that's not DnD". I need to explain that! I don't mean it in the usual sense it gets thrown around. I don't mean "you're not playing it the way I do so you're clearly playing it wrong". I'm really not edition warring. However, I do believe different RPGs are better at evoking a given set of themes and motifs than others. RuneQuest--specifically Gloranthan RuneQuest--is great at Campbell-esque hero questing. Pendragon really does evoke an Arthurian atmosphere like no other game I've played. Basically, Greg Stafford is really, really good at this kind of mythologising, whereas Gary Gygax wasn't. I've said in another thread I didn't really enjoy the Middle-earth Role Playing game. In part that was because Rolemaster is a monster but mostly it was because Rolemaster evokes Tolkien about as well as Leonard Nimoy! Cubicle 7's The One Ring, however, does a pretty good job.

So your comments about "no precedent for it in other games" is baseless - Burning Wheel, which predates 4e by a number of years, has a PC-affecting morale mechanic (based around the Steel attribute) that creates, in effect, a parallel track on which combat can be won or lost; Marvel Heroic RP (a game that is subsequent to 4e) has 3 tracks of "damage" (physical, mental, emotional) which operate in parallel, but are mildly substitutable in the resolution mechanics, and any of which can lead to disablement or death; 1st ed AD&D had purely mental attacks (psionics, for instance) which could generate hit point damage.

What about games which treat different forms of harm and disablement on the same track, as 4e does? Two I know of are Maelstrom Storytelling (1996) and HeroWars/Quest (mulitple editions from around 2000 or so). Possibly also Over the Edge (1992), but I don't have my copy ready to hand and my memory of it is a bit more shaky.

This kind of illustrates my point. There are games out there that do these things, to a greater or lesser extent. DnD doesn't, necessarily, even if perhaps it could or should.

If you don't want to play a warlord, or use inspirational healing, in your game, I don't think anyone is going to force you to. But given that a warlord class, or some similar inspirational healer build of another class, can be built into the game without affecting its suitability for doing whatever you want it to do, what is it to you that others have the option? Are you worried about the 4 or so pages of rulebook space that it might take up?

You can and should play DnD however you want and if you're able to evoke the kind of themes you want in your games more power to you. I'm not saying you shouldn't do this. Ideally your vision of the game should be catered for too. However, I suspect your approach to DnD is much more highbrow than that of anyone who's ever been responsible for writing it.

 

[Alzrius]

I completely agree with Neonchameleon here - the combat a war/combat as sport dichotomy is not one that I think was coined by those whose playstyle is being characterised as "combat as sport".

Neonchameleon's statement was about him thinking that the terms are pejorative towards "combat as sport." I disagree with that; I don't think that [MENTION=55680]Daztur[/MENTION] was making any kind of value judgment about either style of play when he came up with those terms.

And I think it's interesting that the poster in this thread who has embraced both sides of the dichotomy - Doug McCrae - thinks that D&D doesn't fall under the "combat as war" label for similar reasons to those given by Neonchameleon - namely, that it is has an overly regulated metagame (eg its action economy and its hit point economy, which are prominent features even in classic D&D).

I'm not sure why you think that's interesting - people have their own opinions and ideas, after all - unless you're trying to insinuate something, in which case I think it'd be better if you stated it plainly.

In any event, the presence or absence of a warlord with inspiration healing has little bearing on the combat as war/combat as sport dichotomy that I can see, unless the combat-as-war side of that dichotomy is also taken to entail a very gritty processs-simulation approach to action resolution.

It has a lot of bearing on the discussion - talking about how to make a warlord class will involve how to balance the class, and issues of balance depend heavily on what style of game your running.

 

[Starfox]

Neonchameleon's statement was about him thinking that the terms are pejorative towards "combat as sport." I disagree with that; I don't think that [MENTION=55680]Daztur[/MENTION] was making any kind of value judgment about either style of play when he came up with those terms.

It is generally those in the group being prejudiced against who get to decide if they feel prejudiced against. Not those who invent the term.

Still, a better way to deal with prejudice is to embrace the prejudicing word and take the edge of it - like the symbols of both the main US political parties (both donkey and elephant started out as satire), or the word "gay". So personally I get and use the combat as sport vs combat as war dichotomy - even tough I consider myself mainly a combat as sport player. I still find that each of us mean different things when we use the term, tough.