That spells it out perfectly: if all the abilities were exactly the same mechanically, how many Warlord fans would still want to play if it were fluffed as a Henchman to the other characters? Not many?
'Facilitator' or 'Faithful Retainer' doesn't sound as cool as Warlord, and it's only one small oddball slice of what you could do with the class, but some of the 'lazy' builds strayed into that kind of territory, and were particularly fun. The 'Princess build' Garthanos came up with, who wasn't a warrior in it's own right and didn't command, just invited rescue and showing off, for instance. Like the 'victim' in a horror movie whom the heroes always trying to save.
Besides, anyone who's been playing martial archetypes in D&D for a while is pretty accustomed to being the 'Caddy' in Casters & Caddies, anyway. ;P
And in so doing you also purposely flat-out made the Warlord/Marshal/Caddy the party boss by building in mechanical disadvantages to not doing what she says! That's awful!
Outside of action grants, the 'doing what he said' bit was fluff - "Shroedenger's Command" as someone put it up thread. Warlord uses Lead the Attack, everyone gets a bonus for 'following his lead,' and attacking the same target
however they want.
Lan-"this sort of class may or may not ever make it into the game, and that's fine; but I'd refuse to play in a party that had one"-efan
You'd be missing out, but such is absolutely your right.
Would you tell a wizard who cast haste on you to stop messing with your time?
Well, in past editions it did age you. So quite possibly.
Would you tell a cleric that you don't want the blessing of his god?
If you were of an opposed religion or aggressively atheist, perhaps.
Would you tell the bard you don't appreciate his inspiration?
If he was like Elan from OotS?
The "boss of me" issue, isn't a warlord issue.
There's always an opportunity for tension within the party if the players want to RP it.
It's a choice.
Yeah, it's a hole in heroic archetypes: the guy who is not as strong or swift as the warriors in his group but knows how best to deploy them and has great in-the-heat-of-the-moment-tactics. It would be great if there was a mechanically attractive reason to play a smart character (or wise, or charismatic) beyond spells.
The Warlord builds did eventually encompass all three mental stats, though the Insightful build never struck me as all that great.
But then, this is a very magic heavy edition.
Remarkably so. "Fighter's cast spells" was a misrepresentation of 4e, it's true of EKs in 5e. Every class has at least one sub-class that actively uses magic, the vast majority of them casters. Only 5 of 38 sub-classes don't use magic, and they're all dedicated DPR builds.
The Warlord is desperately needed just to bring some variety to that side of the game. The design space left open for non-casters doing things other than DPR is just vast.
As a quick aside. I wonder if a fitting Rogue subclass would be the good base class for a Warlord.
Also still a dedicated high-DPR class, and fails for the lead-from-the-front concepts. The Warlord, even just one as broad as the 4e Warlord, requires a full class. It's too different from the few existing non-casters, and 5e has left so much open in the martial arena that the Warlord could take up, it would just be folly to try to squeeze it into a sub-class or series of sub-classes.
Only the Battlemaster can support his allies...
Currently, if you're interested in making contributions other than DPR or expertise-based-skill-monkey, you must use magic. The Battlemaster can do a little support, but it's strictly inferior to the Bard, Cleric, Druid, Paladin, and even apparently-misbegotten Ranger in that regard.
If we were removing the Sorcerer, Warlock, and Wizard from the game permanently, and suggesting that the EK was all you needed, would that sound reasonable? No.
If Pathfinder has a Warlord class and 3.X had a Warlord(i.e. Marshall) class and 13th Age has a Warlord class and 4e has a Warlord class, then why is it suddenly not a present enough archetype in fantasy to warrant it's own class when it comes to 5e?
The 13A Commander is a narrower archetype than the Warlord, and the Marshal was in a spin-off wargame (designed to be compatible with 3.0, but releases around the time of 3.5). But, yeah, obviously.
