D&D 5E How many fans want a 5E Warlord?

[FormerlyHemlock]

If HP are all 'meat' and only magic can instantaneously heal, then are you allowing short rest HD healing? If you got an arrow in the knee in the last fight and the Cleric can't cast Cure Wounds does a Healing Kit make that hobble all better in an hour? Seems... incoherent... to me.

You've just discovered why the DMG has options for eliminating Short Rest Healing.

Me, I've just come to terms with the fact that D&D biology is as different from Earth biology as D&D astrophysics is from Earth astrophysics. D&D creatures all have incredible recuperative powers by our standards, and getting stabbed in the kidney (or kidney-equivalent) is often fixed by grabbing a bite to eat and taking it easy for an hour or two. There's an in-game reason for that in my campaign.

 

[Aldarc]

Because magic in and of itself has - or can very easily be made to have - a certain internal coherence with itself and with the rest of the game world.

A large part of that coherence, however, comes from a reasonably clear deliniation between what can be done mundanely and what requires magic to accomplish.

Instant healing of physical injuries requires magic, pure and simple. If we accept that someone who's gone to 0 h.p. is almost certainly in some way physically injured enough to force them to collapse, non-magical healing should simply not be able to patch them up. But if you allow that it can then you either have to somehow redefine the coherence of magic in the game world (I wish you luck with that) or abandon it entirely.

Lanefan

That's nice. Now why can't 'warlord healing' be considered as internally consistent as magic? Why are you giving magic this suspension of healing consistence but not warlord healing? As you imply, making the delineation is arbitrary. If someone has gone to 0 HP and collapsed, then why is it an issue to have a warlord provide a stirring motivational command that provides a morale boost that causes the character to draw upon unknown reserves of energy? We see this in fantasy all the time. People picking themselves back up from inevitable defeat. Is the warlord "healing" in a conventional sense of magic? Perhaps not*, but it's still entirely coherent with dramatic fantasy play.

* Though perhaps it causes the wounded character's psyche to be more sensitive or receptive to the touch of the positive plane. Is it any more far-fetched than "a wizard did it"?

 

[pemerton]

-If I am attacked by a Purple Worm and a 20 is rolled, I am swallowed, so I must have been physically hit.
-While I am swallowed I am exposed to Hydrochloric Acid, so I must be being burned.
-If my party frees me, I have now lost some of my hitpoints, and since I was hit, I will need healed.
-If there is a Cleric present, she casts Cure Wounds upon me and I am healed.
-But! If there is a Warlord present instead, then he comes over and talks to me, and my hitpoints are returned. So I cannot have been hit, nor can I have been swallowed. We now have to state something completely different happened to me that contradicts what happened in combat.

I don't understand why you say this.

If you've been swallowed by a purple worm, and then freed, and then the warlord comes over and talk to you - your are no longer debilitated by having been swallowed. Much the same as if you had taken a rest, or had a night's sleep, only quicker because your inspiring friend has pepped you up.

As I posted upthread, you might not want a game in which people can inspire one another - it is romantic and backward-looking, rather than modernist and forward-looking, in its picture of human nature and relationships - but there is nothing incoherent about it. The 4e designers didn't invent the idea of inspirational combat leadership.

 

[TrippyHippy]

No. Nope. And a resounding nah.

 

[Tony Vargas]

First, your assertion that Warlord healing equating to shouting wounds closed being edition war rhetoric is true if and only if you play D&D the way Tony plays.

'Shouting wounds closed is /only/ edition war rhetoric' is absolutely true on two counts: 1) it was quite literally used as rhetoric in the edition war and never used before that, and 2) it was factually false under the highly abstract way hit points were handled in 4e (and all the way back to 1e AD&D, and still in 5e, for that matter).

Now, if you change the way hps work in D&D, you can /make/ the Warlord's form of hp-restoration 'incoherent,' as you clearly demonstrate. But, first you have to change a definition of hps that's been with the game since 1979.

It's one of the many things about the rhetoric of the edition war that was, well, incoherent.

The delineation between what we are and aren't okay with when it comes to healing confuses the bejezus out of me...

If HP are all 'meat' and only magic can instantaneously heal, then are you allowing short rest HD healing?

Reasonably, yes. Under a variant in which hps were re-defined that way, eliminating a number of things would make sense. HD would be among them. So would second wind, Vicious Mockery (and the 'psychic' damage type, in general), overnight healing, and things like Healer's Kits and the Healer feat would at least need some re-writing.

5e empowers DMs to do just those sorts of things if they want to. That's why it can afford to include things like HD, even in the Standard Game.

This opens up yet another branch of discussion/argument.

Forcing (or at least trying to force) someone you're in melee with to move is just fine - push the orc backwards against the wall, or throw it sideways into the mud, or drag it towards you and away from its allies, etc.

Don't forget forcing an enemy back or giving ground as a way of moving them around. It's not physically pushing or grabbing them, but can still get them where you want them...

Where problems arise is when you're non-magically forcing someone else, not within your physical reach, to move. Sure you can *suggest* your ally move to a better position or yell at the left-flank fighter to shove her foe into your reach, but it should be up to them-as-characters whether or not they follow those suggestions (or orders)

In 4e, that was modeled by making the granted action a free action for the targeted ally - they could always choose not to take the free action. 5e's Reaction is much more 'expensive' in the Action Economy, so any ability that required an ally to use it would have to be that much more potent to be balanced, but it's still a workable idea.

And non-magically forcing enemies to move at a distance makes no sense at all.

It's not called 'forced' or 'involuntary' movement in 5e anymore, so hopefully that misunderstanding will be less of an issue.

The business equation boils down to:

who will quit over it being added versus who will finally buy in if it is...

Anyone that appalled by things like non-magical healing saw Second Wind and HD and never gave 5e a chance. Fans who want the Warlord added to 5e /are/ fans of 5e, and there's nothing wrong with 5e fans wanting something cool added to the game. There's a long list of things that haven't made it into 5e yet. Psionics and the Warlord were two of the most noticeable in their absence from the PH, and we've already got Psionics on track.

No current fan of 5e will go ballistic and rage-quit over a new class, module, or other opt-in addition to the Advanced Game. Anyone that uptight about the game not being played exactly the same way at every table has already been driven away screaming by the DMG, not to mention the level of DM empowerment inherent in the core mechanics.

Fans who feel very proprietary about the Standard Game are probably more concerned with the re-designing of the Ranger.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

'Shouting wounds closed is /only/ edition war rhetoric' is absolutely true on two counts: 1) it was quite literally used as rhetoric in the edition war and never used before that, and 2) it was factually false under the highly abstract way hit points were handled in 4e (and all the way back to 1e AD&D, and still in 5e, for that matter).

HP in 5E are not at all abstract. They are in fact concrete and fungible. Just look at Vampiric Touch and the Life Cleric's Preserve Life ability. PCs could empirically demonstrate the concept of a "Hit Point" in-game (likely by some other name, like MUVE="Minimum Unit of Vital Essence") by scientific experimentation. That was true in AD&D and it continues to be true in 5E. A HP is a concrete thing.

 

[Tony Vargas]

HP in 5E are not at all abstract.

The explanation of them is quite abstract. The mechanical reality of them is this fungible integer value, but to carry that through to the fiction literally would be meta-gamey, and result in a quite absurdist imagined world. (Not that it couldn't be some Terry-Pratchet-esque fun to run a world that absurd.)

That said, nothing stops a DM from changing the explanation of hps, and modifying the game to suit that explanation as closely as possible - certainly including declining to opt-into a hypothetical optional class that might not perfectly mesh with that change.

 

[redrick]

Is the only problem with the "battlemaster" as the 5e warlord that it doesn't have a healing ability? I imagine, if I had a group that really wanted to fit that particular aspect of that archetype, I'd just homebrew an "inspiring word" maneuver that used superiority dice to cast a healing word type spell. The battlemaster gives up some damage output in order to get some healing output. Seems reasonable to me. Might have to tweak to balance power level with the spell by looking at maths and stuff.

The whole "no martial healing" seems like a bit of an ideological line that, personally, doesn't mean that much to me. On the other hand, I disagree with the assertion that the absence of martial healing means that martial-only parties are non-starters. 5e doesn't really assume for the need of a healer, and I've DM'ed parties that had little to no healing capacity.

So, in other words, while I don't have a problem with martial characters that can restore hitpoints, I do have a problem with the approach to the game that says, we need access to good healing, no matter what kind of characters we want to play.

Oh, and I said lemon curry, because if you're asking me what I want, the Warlord isn't on that list. But I don't know that I need it not to exist.

 

[El Mahdi]

'Shouting wounds closed is /only/ edition war rhetoric' is absolutely true on two counts: 1) it was quite literally used as rhetoric in the edition war and never used before that, and 2) it was factually false under the highly abstract way hit points were handled in 4e (and all the way back to 1e AD&D, and still in 5e, for that matter).

Edition Warring requires intent; intent to attack another edition. Not liking Warlord healing in and of itself, including using the phrase yelling wounds closed, is not /absolute/ evidence of Edition Warring.

We all can see that someone saying yelling wounds closed is a trigger for you. I get that. But just because it triggers a reaction in you is also not evidence that it's Edition Warring.


But let's break down your points logically:

1) Just because people have and do use that phrase as Edition Warring, does not mean that all who use that phrase are Edition Warring. Your first point is a Hasty Generalization logical fallacy.

2) While the phrase may be factually false, making a factually false statement is not /absolutely/ evidence of Edition Warring. It could just as likely be an inability to understand the concept, a failure of imagination, or as seems most often the case, a situation of competing paradigms/definitions. As long as their are alternative reasons as to why somebody may say that phrase, there can be no absolute evidence of it being Edition Warring.


Also, IMO, automatically accusing those who use that phrase of Edition Warring, rather than simply explaining the factual mistake of the phrase (no matter how many times it takes), does significant harm to gaining acceptance for a Warlord. You'd better serve that goal by not saying anything at all, rather than turning people off or polarizing them even more with accusations.

 

[El Mahdi]

Is the only problem with the "battlemaster" as the 5e warlord that it doesn't have a healing ability?

No.

However, going into the other aspects here would take far too long and derail the thread.

I know the thread is long, but the Warlording the fighter thread goes into this really well.



Cheers.