Here's the puzzling thing about people clamoring for retroactive changes to 5E:
I'm not clamoring for any such thing. I want to see a great class that was in a prior-edition's PH1 added to the Advanced Game so that people who want to can use it, and those who don't need never be bothered with it.
Now, I don't think it's unreasonable to have wanted it to be in the 5e PH, every other class that got a full-class treatment in at least one PH1 was included, and that exclusion created the unfortunate appearance that 5e had failed in it's 'inclusiveness' mandate. And, while 'retroactively' adding it to the standard game might seem right or even merely prudent to head off any sort of edition-war-like nerdrage, I don't believe it's necessary. A compromise, even so one decidedly unfavorable, as waiting over a year for the Warlord, and even then seeing it only as a non-core, advanced-game, opt-in module, is perfectly acceptable to 5e fans who want one, at this point, I would think. Just in the interest of amity and re-uniting the fanbase.
Then feel free to use a homebrew. Just about every single argument used above can be applied: you're the DM so do whatever you want, you don't have to play in games or accept players who don't like it, and it's almost certain it wouldn't be in AL anyway, so no problem there.
1.) 5E is the kitbasher's edition. You can homebrew your warlord and post it on Enworld and use it in whatever games you want.
By the same token, the addition of the Warlord - even to the Standard Game - would be easily un-done by any who decided they didn't want it afterall. And, it's much, much easier to ban a class than to re-create one for a new edition. Remember that professional game designers took years and contributions of a legion of playtesters to populate the PH, and they still seem to feel they got the Ranger wrong somehow.
So you're looking at saying "no warlords," two seconds of your time, perhaps, vs hundreds of hours. I'm not surprised you value your time and convenience more than my own, but I think doing so by a factor of more than ten thousand to one is maybe being a tad inconsiderate.
2.) But for some people, that's not good enough. They appreciate homebrewed stuff but want access to 5E's designer's expertise, which means they want Mearls et al. to do some designing/playtesting and give them a class they can buy.
Not unreasonable. And, that has not been done. No warlord class has been forthcoming as yet.
3.) But then they turn right around and second-guess the design decisions made by that expert team and want to substitute their own judgment for WotC's. Here, it is WotC's design that the 4E Warlord should not be included in the 5E PHB.
Nonsense. When you want to buy a professionally-designed product, the answer "in our professional design judgement, you can't have it,' is not acceptable nor reasonable.
Not only is it implausible, but it smacks of caving to the bigotry of the edition war, which is something an edition meant to be for fans of all prior editions, not just h4ters, cannot afford to do.
If you don't trust WotC's designers and you don't want to force your preferences on others via Adventurer's League play or similar, just what is it that you want and who do you want it from?
I want to see a good rendition of the Warlord added to the Advanced Game in some future supplement. I'd like to see it previewed, playtest and in the pipeline the way Psionics is now, and sooner rather than later. That's no less 'trust' than fans of psoinics have displayed, and for less trust and second-guessing - and couched far more politely - than we've seen from those of a contrary opinion in the edition war. And it will in no way force my preferences on anyone via Adventurer's League play nor any other mechanism.
Not a very satisfying answer, is it? Yeah, we agree on something.
As for the Noble/Soldier argument, I'm not sure what wasn't understandable in my last answer.
I didn't notice anything particularly confusing. Did you not say, more or less in agreement with Lanefan, that the fact the Warlord would probably include some concepts that implied being a sort of 'boss' could be a problem?
The Soldier and Noble backgrounds carry a similar implication, the former with actual military rank, the latter with what in medieval cultures passed for legitimate authority. They have not caused any such problems, the Warlord didn't cause any such problems in it's original incarnation. It doesn't seem like much of a danger, especially as, unlike the Noble & Solider, the Warlord would most likely be part of the Advanced Game, wholly optional, while the Noble & Soldier are not only Standard Game and part of AL, but right there in the Basic Game face that D&D shows to new players.
Looking for middle ground.
Again, Hemlock, Elfcrusher, I invite you to be reasonable people, set aside your distaste for the warlord, and your fear of having to invest possibly many seconds over the subsequent run of 5e not adding the optional warlord class to your games, and maybe (possibly justly) feeling like jerk for it now and then.
Meet fans of the Warlord the half or three-quarters of the way we've already come in accepting that the Warlord not be part of the Standard Game.
Really, I'll go one further and ask you to join me in asking for the Warlord as an optional class in the Advanced Game, sooner rather than later. In the interest of uniting the fanbase around 5e, and avoiding the appearance of 5e catering to lingering edition war sentiment.
Surely that'd be a good thing for the game.
I thought over the weekend about my resistance to the Warlord, which honestly have been as much emotional as logical, and think I can enumerate my objections:
1) The big one is that many of the abilities associated with the warlord, and the fluff that goes with them, takes agency away from other players.
I never saw it work out like that in play in 4e, and I played and ran 4e for it's entire run (and still am doing both). I've played every one of the official Warlord builds.
The fear you express was never realized. It's easy to see how you could form that impression, since the 'fluff' of some warlord concepts is leadership, at leas, in-combat leadership & direction. Functionally, however, no Warlord power obliges an ally to take an action nor removes agency from them. Far from it, since they're mostly support functions, they empower and enable other players to have /more/ agency. To act when being dropped, or under an effect, or running afoul of the cyclical initiative rules would otherwise prevent them.
This is also a problem with most descriptions I've seen of Martial Healing. I'm not opposed to Martial Healing on principle (I'm totally fine with Second Wind, for example) but I object to being told that my character's morale was flagging, for instance, and that listening to my teammate changed my attitude. That seems like it should be my decision, not another player's.
Technically, it was in 4e. Inspiring Word allowed, not force, the ally to spend a healing surge. If you were so intent on RPing your character as being inconsolable and beyond help from anything short of divine intervention, you could have. Your fellow players might have looked at you funny, but you could've done it. The same applied to Healing Word, it allowed, not forced, you to spend a surge, so if your character was having a crisis of faith or was a committed atheist and you didn't want to RP being dependent on or beholden to some deity or it's agent, you could do so. (I can't recall if that's technically the case in 5e or not, I can only assume that such spells require a willing or unresisting subject).
2) Similarly, abilities that have the Warlord telling me how to do my job ("Tells you when to strike" "points out a flaw in the defenses", etc.) suggest that the Warlord is better at fighting than my character is.
Does it really? Any character can give you advantage with the help action, and that could very well be RP'd as giving advice or pointing out something you missed.
To take an extreme case to illustrate the problem: can a 1st level Warlord provide this benefit to a 20th level Champion?
In 4e, he could, yes. But, in 4e, it was a moot point since adventures tended to happen in a very fairly narrow PC-level range.
In 5e, it'd be perfectly reasonable to have upper limits on how much lower level support abilities or options like Help could assist much higher level characters. So Help or Guidance or Inspiration or Lead the Attack
It's very easy to re-fluff these abilities as "...distracts the monster, giving an ally of his choice an opportunity", thereby affecting the monster, not the other PC, so I don't see the need for the language that diminishes other players relative to the warlord.
It's very easy to leave fluff open so that one could go with either sort of justification. For some maneuvers, though, a command may just make a lot more sense, and that's no reason not to include it, just a reason for some players not to choose it (or DM to ban it, if he is at all inclined to include the warlord in the first place - and most how have issues like this probably wouldn't be).
3) My preference is to get "Leadership" out of the class completely.
Since it existed only in the fluff, and the range of concepts a warlord /could/ be used for, that is a trivially easy matter of not choosing to use it for those sorts of concepts.
But if Leadership-based skills must be added to the game, they should be Class-agnostic.
The Warlord's abilities are based on inspiration, tactics, strategy, leadership and the like. While anyone can lead, just as anyone can swing a sword or recite arcane syllables, the Warlord can accomplish more than most when leading, inspiring by word or example, planning strategy or using tactical acumen, just as a fighter can accomplish more by swinging a sword or a wizard vastly more by muttering arcane syllables.
You shouldn't have to pick a specific class to be a "Leader".
You wouldn't have to. You could still play the highest-ranking Soldier in a party of Soldiers, or the Noble to other players' common-born characters, or simply have the party elect a leader in-character, or designate an old-school 'caller' out of character. The existence of an optional class that covers concepts like exceptionally gifted leaders, tacticians, caddies, and iconic victims-in-constant-need-of-rescue, among other things, wouldn't force you to do so.
4) Finally, I really loathe the term "Warlord" as a class name. (I never played 4e, so this is not leftover bitterness at any OP-ness the class might have had.)
I'm sure there's some left-over bitterness from the edition war mostly restricted to those who never played 4e, or at least, never gave it a chance.
And the Warlord was not overpowered, like most 4e classes, it was neatly balanced. The few 4e classes who failed in terms of balanced were under-supported late-4e or post-Essentials classes that 'broke low,' being a trifle underpowered.
"Warlord" is an earned title, not a profession. 1st level Rogues are not called "Godfathers", 1st level Wizards are not called "Archmages", and 1st level Clerics are not called "High Priests."
Names really aren't that important. Wizard /is/ a title denoting great, even super-human accomplishment, and performing divine miracles and even greater claim to some lofty status. Every caster, just by using magic, is exceptional to a degree that beggars the imagination compared to a mere military rank. And, Warlord is not nearly so precise, dictionary definitions not withstanding. A leader of a small band of mercenaries could call himself a 'warlord' - or be called one.
Actual military ranks, especially high ones like General or Marshal would be much worse. Other alternatives like Commander speak exclusively to the command-giving concepts you so dislike, and are not nearly the whole range of what the Warlord could be used to model.
And, of course, again, this is a case where a trivial, purely symbolic gesture could be made to unifying the fan base by actually using a term from 4e, without bowdlerizing or 'filing off serial numbers.'
And I'll add one more of a different tenor...I think the stridency and intransigence of the Warlord continent, insisting that it has to be a certain way and no other (e.g. non-magical healing) is so single-minded and uncompromising that it makes me skeptical.
It is, again, or still, a matter of inclusion. Inspiring Word was a corner stone of the Warlord class, it fits genre very well, and it restored hps. Calling it 'healing' may well be unnecessary, it just has to restore hps, stand up fallen allies, and generally facilitate the party rallying when in dire straights.
Unlike 4e, though, where the formal Role function made that mandatory, in 5e a Warlord class could have many maneuvers/strategies/tactics of which Inspiring Word and other hp-restoration options could be chosen, or not, just a Druid might go his whole adventuring career without once prepping Cure Wounds, for instance. A warlord might be a 10 CHA curmudgeonly tactical genius who gives his allies fantastic plans to out-maneuver the enemy, but leaves them all doubting themselves.
That's hardly single-minded and uncompromising, now is it? Give us an optional class. Give players who choose that optional class choice and customizeability. Make it easy for them to choose or eschew things like forced movement or hp-restoration vs temp hps vs both - as a consequence, make it convenient for DMs to opt-into the class, but ban a few of those things (since there's no need to home-brew up an alternative, the player just chooses from the remaining options).
I can understand liking certain classes and mechanics, but the whole Warlord thing seems completely out of proportion to its importance. There's no other class that gets this kind of evangelism, or hatred.
The Warlord became a poster-boy for 4e, for the innovative things it did that fans loved and h4ters, well, hated. That's clearly still the case, and why it's more expedient to put it in as an Advanced Game option rather than the Standard Game PH class it unequivocally deserved to be.
It's that emotional edition-war prejudice that warlord advocates are so willingly and reasonably compromising with in accepting the Warlord as a late-addition, OPTIONAL class, instead of insisting it be errata'd into the PH where it belongs, the same way the revised Ranger is apparently going to be.
Is there something else going on here? Is it (as somebody suggested) really just a proxy fight for the religious war over "HP are (not) Meat"?
There are certainly things going on in the background. The Warlord is a purely-martial class that was balanced, a viable alternative to casters, and threatens to be so again - that could outrage caster-supremacists. The Warlord was the poster boy for some 4e innovations, and that doesn't sit well with h4ters who haven't bought into 5e's professed kumbaya spirit (which, let's face it, hasn't been as easy a sell as DM empowerment). Related to that, 5e's intended inclusiveness was jeopardized by excluding the Warlord for the opposite reason: creating an appearance of having taken sides in the edition war.
And, yes, 5e's re-imagining of HD, overnight healing, and up-from-zero mechanics do lean heavily towards one interpretation of hps (primarily non-physical as opposed all-meat), but, optional modules in the DMG address that already. Adding an optional class to the Advanced Game, even if some of the choices it gives players could be interpreted as also favoring the same interpretation of hps as HD & overnight healing already do in the Standard Game, shouldn't really alter that. It means it's easy enough to add to the Standard Game, and that anyone using hp-re-defining modules would probably just skip it, or if they decided to reconcile the two, ban the specific abilities in question (one reason it'd be good for the class to be highly customizeable and choice-rich).
All those are potential debates the Warlord could become a victim of, and that would be a sad thing to see happen to the latest edition of our favorite game, and it's promise of including all of us.
I invite you to come that 1/4 or less of the way that's left of the middle-ground Warlord fans have already crossed, and not only stop opposing the idear. It's not like there's a lot of momentum, given Mr. Mearls past comments about the class, and current occupation with psionics and the ranger. If anything, it'd be reasonable of you and anyone else who genuinely is a fan of 5e, not a fan of some other edition putting up with it only so long as his favored edition is perceived over-represented and set above others in 5th, to support the addition of a worthy Warlord class, in the reasonable-compromise form of a optional addition to the advanced game in some future non-core supplement. We have more than enough people who want the Warlord asking for it, what we need is the support of people open-minded enough to say "we may not be too interested in the Warlord, but we want our favorite game to be open and complete enough to include those who are."
Let's get some more boots on the High Road, people!
