Hiya!
You guys are still on the whole "edition war rhetoric he-said-she-said" thing? ... *shrug* ... Anyway...
I'm not in favor of the 4e 'version' of a 'Warlord'. I never thought the term "warlord" was correct anyway; 5 PC's fighting a dozen goblins in a dungeon room isn't a "war" by any means. Even doubling or tripling the goblins numbers...naaaa. To me it just doesn't seem like the right term.
Meh. You could mount a pedantic attack like that on the name of any D&D class.
The general idea behind the Warlord class isn't horrible, I can see why some people would like it. I could even get behind something akin to what it is/was. The biggest hang-ups I personally had with it was it didn't fit what it wanted to fit into (the role of battle-field commander), in that it seemed to..."non-magically magical". Everyone seems on about the Damage on a Miss and the "shout healing" thing. This, again, IMHO, is the sticking point for me and some others; it just seems... out of place somehow.
Well, of course they seem out of place, they are misrepresentations of the actual concept. I'd object to any attempt to model the Warlord as a Bard or Cleric, for instance, for the same reason. Warlords don't just speak a (Healing) Word and cause wounds to magically close up. That's not the concept, and it wasn't - edition war rhetoric notwithstanding - the implementation in 4e. DoaM, OTOH, not exactly a feature of the Warlord - the 4e Wizard probably had more DoaM than any other class, if I had to guess.
Anyway. What I would rather see is the class renamed to something like "Strategist", and reduce it to a Fighter Archtype
The key word there is 'reduced.' A fighter archetype couldn't come close to modeling a conceptually-narrower class concept like 'Strategist,' let alone a broader concept like the Warlord.
(or possibly even Wizard... hear me out...).
Because actually magical is somehow OK?
In this "strategist" class, I'd like to see a lot of it's "abilities" based on preparation and training, not just "yelling out commands" where those commands affect who you want, regardless of if you have any clue to who that person is.
Generally, they affect /allies/, with all that entails.
That prep/training idea was part of the Warlord concept, though yes. You saw it in the names and fluff of some exploits, certainly. It's the kind of off-screen thing that D&D prior to 5e hasn't really put a lot of mechanics behind, but I'm sure something could be done leveraging the Downtime rules.
I'd see the Strategist's abilities being sort of like a Bards "Inspirational Word" thing; the Strategist can 'give' "maneuver/inspiration dice" (call it "strategy dice") to those he has trained with for X amount of time (have to determine what X is in play testing...).
Bards are full casters and J-o-T skillmonkies in addition to that feature, y'know. It sounds like a pretty small thing to try to base a whole class on....
On, one BIG thing I'd place in...these strategy dice could ONLY be used during battle/conflict.
With such a narrow concept, that'd make some sense. 'Strategy' can come into other tasks, wherever planning, conflict or competition is involved, a negotiation for instance. But, it would make sense to not have inspiring words or commander's strikes going off at the peace talks.
It's like a Mary Sue NPC standing near the PC's and the DM saying "Oh, add +2 to your roll because Mary Sue whispers to you about the trees in this particular area having distinctly blue-ish tinged leaves", or saying "Roll at advantage because Mary Sue helps you", or "You would have failed, but Mary Sue smiles and gives you a helping hand...so you succeed".
Wouldn't that be an issue with bardic inspiration dice and, heck, even the 'Help' action?
not try and "recreate it" in 5e...which is mostly doomed to failure, IMHO, because game play is a LOT different than it is in 4e. Work with what *5e* has...don't try and implement 4e stuff (like "Shifting" and all that).
5e does have a more limited range than 4e did in some ways, sure. It plays a lot like 2e, but it also has modules to open up other play styles. But, if you have a cool ability, you can generally find or create some way of handling it. 5e doesn't have forced movement rules, per se, for instance, but that didn't prevent it from including the Thunderwave spell, which still pushes, just with it's own self-contained rules. A 5e version of Wolf Pack Tactics, for instance, needn't 'shift' the ally away from an enemy or into flanking - it could allow him to disengage on the Warlords turn or gain Advantage on his next melee attack, instead. Slightly more abstract, still functional.
One question that complicates the design of the Warlord is whether to design it as a stand-alone option, or as part of a module. The latter could be used to design a 4e-style Warlord as part of a 4e-izing-5e module - and, really, if you did that, why not just play 4e? The former, OTOH, would open up the design to interacting with any aspect of the Advanced game. Class design in 5e is pretty wide-open, there's no grid to fill or balancing formulas or anything, and relatively little unassailable niche protection. It's be perfectly feasible to have a 5e Warlord that covered at least as broad a set of concepts as the 4e, could potentially do anything a 4e Warlord could, and, no longer restricted to a defined 'Role,' a lot more as well.
Really, there is so much 'design space' available in 5e, and it's utilized so little of it for martial characters (5 builds, at most, out of 38). The Warlord could be an opportunity not just to carry through on delivering each class from the prior-edition PH1s, but to really expand the design approaches to martial characters, and the range of concepts and styles they could support.
