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

[DMZ2112]

And what is a pillar of fire but a hail of arrows?

I suppose this might work in a very specific campaign where you've got one warlord and a whole party of rangers, but otherwise, where do the arrows come from?

No, if you're truly committed to the internally consistent vision of the warlord, then none of his abilities can rely on anyone else, because the abilities of other classes don't, in D&D5. No more of this "I use my action to give that guy an action." Uh, uh. No, sir. Do not want.

If the warlord drops a "pillar of flame" on a group of enemies, then it has to be reskinned as a demoralizing effect, because that's what he does. If his healing is "inspirational," then his damage has to be de-inspirational. His tactical and strategic aptitude become his buff and debuff spells.

 

[DMZ2112]

So then what's the problem with daily and encounter martial powers again if you're making everyone magic?

I never complained about daily and encounter martial powers, but SINCE YOU ASKED:

My problem with the powers system has always been isolated to the locked-down frequency rules. You can have five encounter powers, but you can use each of them only once per encounter. You can have three dailies, but can use each of them only once per day. Why can't I use one encounter power five times, or one daily twice and a second one once? Why can't I trade a daily for an encounter power? Why can't I trade multiple encounter powers for a daily?

It's not a matter of what they do or how they do them, it's entirely a matter of metagame shenanigans. The power system violated my sense of internal consistency and logic in D&D.

 

[Neonchameleon]

It's the easiest, sure. And masters of metagame should have no problem taking a cleric and being like, "Boom. Magic? He just has martial daily powers. Et Viola!."

The problem is that that's not how reskinning works. In order to reskin successfully you need to do something that is fully consistent with the rules as written. Reskinning works by treating the rules as an approximation of the gameworld (as they are) and seeing something else that fits exactly within the same scaffolding.

No one is saying that the Warlord needs (a) the ability to cast Turn Undead or (b) a Holy Symbol. In fact having either within the fiction is actively detrimental to the Warlord. (You can admittedly reskin a holy symbol as a battle banner to get round that little problem). And as for Martial Daily Powers, those words are meaningless within the fiction. What is meaningful is that sometimes when the chips are down our Warlord can pull out something stunning. That can't be hit by a Dispel Magic...

Reskinning works incredibly well in 4e because 4e rules are all about what you do rather than how you do it. If two things have the same outcome in 4e then they will have the same rules. Next (and most other editions of D&D) have deliberately separate rules for doing the same thing in different ways and tie in things like the source in a way 4e doesn't.

Reskinning a ranger as a fighter worked because there was literally nothing to the 4e PHB Ranger class other than the ability to use either a bow or two weapons really well, and training in either nature or dungeoneering. Absolutely none of which is incompatable with the fighter; the ranger was the single blandest class in 4e until the slayer turned up. The word "Ranger" has no game mechanical input so under the rules of reskinning it can be ignored - but to reskin properly every single part of the actual mechanics which impact on the game world need to be matched.* The phrase "Pray for one hour each day to recover spells" does have a direct impact on the game world. It's something the character needs to do - and is entirely absent from 4e.

* The damage type keywords (fire, thunder, poison, et. al.) are a slightly odd case here because their impact on the game rules is minimal. This means that in theory you can not reskin a fire attack as a poison attack (or vise-versa) - to do what you want you are actively changing a part of the game rules. In practice most DMs will call it a reskin because the impact is pretty minor on the game mechanics although technically this is where we have left reskin territory and moved into house rules.

And I used to reskin in 3e - the Bard was exceptional for it. Two of my favourites were the Son of a Preacher Man - an evangelical preacher built using bard rules (he could even cast Cure Light Wounds as well as whip a mob up into a frenzy and give them morale bonusses with the power of his preaching) and the Charlatan - this bard was a street magician and conman who was lying through his teeth when he claimed to be able to cast spells but when it comes to low level enchantment or illusion spells if you're a mundane hypnotist and can convince someone you've enchanted them you might as well have done so. Combine that with smoke bombs, flamboyance, misdirection, and a fixed spell list designed for this style of play and there was nothing he did that he couldn't have done as a mundane conjurer in a world where people expected real magic. (Unfortunately I never found out whether he really was conning everyone or whether he was working actual magic through the power of belief and the main person he was conning was himself into believing his spells weren't magic). And the point about both the Son of a Preacher Man and the Charlatan was nothing they ever did was a single milimeter outside the rules, and nothing they did used anything less than the full rules available to them. That is reskinning.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Why can't I use one encounter power five times, or one daily twice and a second one once? Why can't I trade a daily for an encounter power? Why can't I trade multiple encounter powers for a daily?

Not to put too fine a point on it... but you easily could have. If the entire table agreed and the DM was fine with adjust his encounters to suit.

That was actually one of the glorious things about 4E balance. It was balanced so well that even if you made some more "unbalanced" proposals and rules changes like you just mentioned... it would still remain fairly balanced, all things considered. You just needed a DM who could adjust. And with the addition or removal of a monster or two from any particular fight... it was fairly easy to do.

 

[DMZ2112]

AD&D had psionic attacks causing hit point loss. 4e has psychic damage. And AD&D and 3E all had the Phantasmal Killer spell, which causes hit point loss due to terror.

I honestly don't think any of this obviates my point.

This is not true of the rules of Gygax's AD&D, nor of 4e. I don't know later AD&D or 3E well enough to comment.

I'm not talking about the fluff, or about the wall of "how to play" text, I'm talking about the CORE MECHANIC. I roll to hit, I hit, I do damage. I roll to hit, I miss, I do not do damage. The fact that the fluff contradicts this just proves my point that HP are and have always been ambiguous. I don't see it as a weakness in the system.

I think the Disintegrate spell is a telling example. I mean, if hit points are meat, and a PC loses all but 1 or 2 of them to a Disintegrate spell, then how is that PC healing to full from resting? Is s/he a lizard or salamander that can regrow limbs? Why does the Regeneration spell not have to be used?

I've never seen Disintegrate as causing dismemberment. But that aside, healing the kind of damage Disintegrate causes through rest should and does take a long time, according to most rulesets. It's far less reasonable to me that a fighter could Healing Surge through a Disintegrate, or that a warlord could inspire a companion to walk it off, than it is to imagine someone convalescing for weeks following such an assault.

 

[Obryn]

I never complained about daily and encounter martial powers, but SINCE YOU ASKED:

My problem with the powers system has always been isolated to the locked-down frequency rules. You can have five encounter powers, but you can use each of them only once per encounter. You can have three dailies, but can use each of them only once per day. Why can't I use one encounter power five times, or one daily twice and a second one once? Why can't I trade a daily for an encounter power? Why can't I trade multiple encounter powers for a daily?

It's not a matter of what they do or how they do them, it's entirely a matter of metagame shenanigans. The power system violated my sense of internal consistency and logic in D&D.

You just said - because it's magic. Why can a wizard only cast the one fireball he has prepared?

Throw enough magic at a metagame mechanic and it's no longer metagame.

-O

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

I've never understood the cadre of D&D players that depises magic to this degree. Admittedly, the game is not called Dungeons & Dragons & Magic, but one might've thought you could infer the third from the first two.

Maybe the problem is something else.

D&D has magic. But you don't need a mage to use it. Everyone has access to some magic.

Giants cannot function in the real world. Trolls cannot function in the real world. They require magic. But they aren't arcane spellcasters.

People just have to make the leap that, maybe, just maybe, even a Fighter's superior combat skill that allows it to engage toe to toe with Giants, Trolls and Dragons is a form of magic.

D&D 3E had a term for that: "Extraordinary Ability". Which was basically saying "It's magic, but not the kind of magic you can dispel or suppress with an anti magic field.

In a world with Giants and Fighters or Rogues being able to fight Giants, you cannot really make this strict distinction "this is mundane, and this part is magic". It's a continuum. A Fireball is overtly magic, a Fighter being able to jump on a Dragon's back and cutting through his neck is.. extraordinary.

Most creatures in D&D even have a soul (which can be used via magic) - which is not something physical or real. It's magic.

In a world with magic, magic might be called supernatural, but ultimately, it's part of the laws of physics of that world.

 

[Starfox]

Three little notes, protest against what you three posters seem to see as obvious truths, and to which I strongly object. All from my perspective of course.

No more of this "I use my action to give that guy an action." Uh, uh. No, sir. Do not want.

I've used "give your action away" mechanics a lot. Well implemented, it is a really good rule for leadership/inspiration. Again, as I've said before, 4E to me was a lot of good ideas badly implemented.

I'd still rather avoid multiclassing. I kinda hate it.

I'd also prefer to have the annemic multi-classing of 3E - multiclassing was one thing that really worked better in earlier editions of the game. 3E needed prestige classes like Mystic Theurge and Arcane Trickster to make multiclassing work, and in most cases what you got from these PrCs was so pigeonholed that it was barely worthwile. 4E multiclassing was a joke (at least as long as I followed 4E, that is pre 4.5... eh... Essentials). For someone like me, who see classes not as roles but as building blocks for character creation, multiclassing is pretty much a must in a class system, tough Pathfinders Archetypes and extra semispelluser classes go a long way to make them less needed.

After all... if there's one thing we DID learn from 4E... it's that ALL the mechanical game abilities could be exactly the same and used by every class, and it was just what the little descriptive text that was added to it is what determined whether it was "magical" or "mundane". Push an enemy 1 square? A shield bash if you were mundane, a magical force push if you were magical.

To me this was one of the WORST points of 4E - it divorced the rules from the in-world action and events and made reading class abilities about as much fun as reading the telephone book. Never ever again! Reskinning a cleric to a warlord by changing a few keywords is a stillborn idea.

As I said above, this is all IMO.

 

[DMZ2112]

You just said - because it's magic. Why can a wizard only cast the one fireball he has prepared?

No. Not "because it's magic." Because the lore of the game has established that arcane magic has a limitation other than physical exhaustion. If Wizards had stipulated that the martial power source required memorization and subsequent forgetting of specific maneuvers, I would not have a leg to stand on. Fortunately, it would also have been /insane/, so they did not do that. Unfortunately, that left physical exhaustion as the only logical reason for martial daily powers, which begs the questions in my previous post.

Throw enough magic at a metagame mechanic and it's no longer metagame.

Magic is not the absence of rules or logic. It is just a different system of internal consistency.

 

[DEFCON 1]

The phrase "Pray for one hour each day to recover spells" does have a direct impact on the game world. It's something the character needs to do - and is entirely absent from 4e.

Wait, I'm confused. So you're saying that because a cleric has to pray for an hour to regain spells... our "warlord" would have to too (since to remove that rule for our "warlord" would be "house-ruling" and you don't want any house-ruling required in the process of playing 5E?) Is that the issue?

Then what about just reskinning that hour spent as the "warlord" going over his strategy guides, tactical plans, and inspiring monologues? Does that work?

To be honest... I don't think there is anything that a cleric can do (assuming you're smart about the choices you make on some of their spells) that can't be explained away mundanely. You just avoid selecting the majorly magical ones. 1st level-- Healing Word. Bless (as tactics). 2nd level-- Aid (as inspiring "pumping up" for the day). Augury (as the warlord determining for himself whether his tactical plan will work) 3rd level-- Mass Healing Word. Beacon of Hope. Past that... higher level uses of the Healing Word spells.

It can be done without that much trouble I think.