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

[AbdulAlhazred]

Really?!?!

Wow.

That's correct, I've not yet seen this in almost 40 years of play. I've seen players RP their PCs not getting along, and PC clerics healing this guy instead of that guy and using RP as a reason, but I have never ever seen a player say "I refuse to be healed by you for the sake of RP" I suspect many, if not most, DMs would interpret the rules as not even allowing this choice, once the spell is cast it takes effect, tough luck!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

THP existed. Though it wasn't called THP, and only absorbed specific damage type.

Protection from lighting also absorb a certain amount of lightning damage.

Oh, I think you can find some spell or other somewhere that implemented something akin to virtually any mechanic you can find in RPGs today, for some very specific situation and a generous definition of what is similar. You could read the hit points beyond baseline from certain potions and spells (IE Potion of Super Heroism) as 'THP' also if you wish, but it wasn't any sort of formal mechanic with general rules that existed game-wide, and usually each spell had to either have its own rules about what happened after it wore off, etc, or else it was just left to the DM. I'd also note that these various kinds of effects might or might not stack in who knows what ways since there was again no real mechanical framework.

So I think it would be stretching it pretty far to say that pre-3.x there was any real 'die hard' mechanics in the game. There were examples of how you might construct such mechanics, it wasn't exactly rocket science when they finally added them, but I'd point out that most of the uses of such things in AD&D would in 4e or even 5e be best implemented as resistance, or a boost to a specific defense vs attacks with certain keywords. THP exist in 4e, but they are actually a pretty rarely used mechanic. So I don't think there's a really strong 'tradition' argument for why we should need to rely on them in 5e.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Hmmmm, I don't remember anything like THP or any 'die hard' mechanic in classic D&D at all. I don't recall the details of the UA Barbarian class really well, we never used that stuff, so POSSIBLY it has something like "keep fighting at negative hit points for a while"

You mean 1e?

"The boar will fight for 2-5 melee rounds after reaching 0 to -6 hit points but dies immediately at -7 or greater damage."

It's not a particularly complicated mechanic.

but there's no THP anywhere in D&D officially before 3.x (and I'm not really a 3.0 expert, so it may not even be in there). Officially up through the end of 1e you just fell dead at 0 hit points, with an optional "maybe you can be revived if you're above -10" that the DM could allow starting in the 1e DMG.

Protection from Fire is a spell that jumps to mind that uses a temporary HP mechanic:

"...it confers complete invulnerability to normal fires...and exposure to magical fires...until an accumulation of 12 hit points of potential damage per level of experience of the druid has been absorbed.... Otherwise the spell lasts for 1 turn per experience level of the druid."

Same basic framework, though a little more complex than temp HP would eventually become thanks to its damage-type-specific orientation.

This is certainly an argument of the excluded middle. The game would not meet its design goals without classes and races, so claiming the absurdity that we have to have all or nothing where nothing isn't even a playable game is a useless rhetorical device. Clearly some degree of complexity is required, and some degree of complexity beyond that is less desired.

Exactly - I'm trying to pin down [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] 's reasons for dubbing temp HP and "die hard" mechanics "madness." The reason he presented in the first place was that it was unnecessary complexity, and my counter to that is that "unnecessary complexity" is not a sufficient heuristic about what should be in the game, because it would lead to a game without things that are clearly a welcome part of the game. Some unnecessary complexity is desirable. Why temp hp and "die hard" mechanics are less desirable than classes and races has not been shown.

YOU find it less divisive. Clearly many of us find it MORE divisive, and since we have hit points already we don't find it a necessary complication. We just have to agree to disagree on that point.

I'm afraid you're wrong there. The ongoing conversation about warlords here is evidence for the thesis that inspirational HP as an assumption in D&D divisive. We can't agree to disagree about the fact that this continues to be a topic where people have strong opinions on all sides. Doing so would mean it is a settled issue - clearly, it isn't. The thousands of words spent on the issue since 2008 would indicate that it is not a "corner case," not something a minority of players have some strange problem with, but in fact, a very relevant bit of this conversation. If you want to insist that it isn't a real issue, we're done with the convo.

I've already made my primary argument above. They aren't SUFFICIENT. Once the fight is over the inspired characters, using your mechanic are still at a grave disadvantage, and every time the fight is resumed the 'warlord' will perforce have to reinstate his 'battle cry' (or whatever) and maintain it, simply to restore the PCs to roughly their normal power level. Meanwhile clerical healing is instant, doesn't require ongoing actions, and lasts forever. Truthfully what is LIKELY to happen is that with this design BOTH the cleric AND the warlord will become mandatory (at least until someone invents the guy that combines both features in one PC). IMHO the simplicity and relative elegance of the 'martial healing' paradigm outweighs the corner cases where you might not like the resulting narrative, and you can ALWAYS demur for the sake of narrative, yet I have NEVER seen a player complain "I don't want that magical healing from Bane, he's the enemy of my god Moradin!" so how big a deal is this really?

There's a lot bundled up in this paragraph, but for the purposes of "die hard" mechanics, it's a shifting of the goalposts. There are many mechanics that allow one to soldier on from the brink of death that a warlord might use that would allow a character to soldier on past the brink of death and which would still be compatible with the idea of hp loss representing some kind of wound. If you can agree with that statement, we can move on to whatever else you want to talk about.

 

[mellored]

but it wasn't any sort of formal mechanic with general rules that existed game-wide

True, but the game was also much smaller. You didn't need to make game wide rules about something that happened in 1 or 2 places. You could simply put the rules in those 1 or 2 places.

When you have the same rule in 10 or 20 places, it makes sense factor it out into a general rule rather then repeat it that many times.

That said, i still don't see a "die hard" mechanic in 1e. Maybe in 2e.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

You mean 1e?

It's not a particularly complicated mechanic.

Protection from Fire is a spell that jumps to mind that uses a temporary HP mechanic:

Same basic framework, though a little more complex than temp HP would eventually become thanks to its damage-type-specific orientation.

And none of this was needed to describe the functions of classes in classic D&D. It is peripheral trivia, and I'd argue not necessary at all. You could simply give boars 9 more hit points, and it would change NOTHING. You could have Protection from Fire do any number of other things. The fact is that they do what they do for no particular reason of game design, and I'd argue that they're examples of 'messiness' that ideally should be removed (but I'm certainly not that nit-picky that I insist, since most of those things won't come up even once in a given campaign).

Exactly - I'm trying to pin down [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] 's reasons for dubbing temp HP and "die hard" mechanics "madness." The reason he presented in the first place was that it was unnecessary complexity, and my counter to that is that "unnecessary complexity" is not a sufficient heuristic about what should be in the game, because it would lead to a game without things that are clearly a welcome part of the game. Some unnecessary complexity is desirable. Why temp hp and "die hard" mechanics are less desirable than classes and races has not been shown.

Where we differ here is that you are arguing that classes and races are 'unnecessary complexity', which I find to be a highly dubious idea. In D&D race and class are NECESSARY parts of the game, they aren't something you can remove. THP OTOH is utterly forgettable and didn't even exist except in some fringe way on a few monsters and potions until 26 years after the game was released.

I'm afraid you're wrong there. The ongoing conversation about warlords here is evidence for the thesis that inspirational HP as an assumption in D&D divisive. We can't agree to disagree about the fact that this continues to be a topic where people have strong opinions on all sides. Doing so would mean it is a settled issue - clearly, it isn't. The thousands of words spent on the issue since 2008 would indicate that it is not a "corner case," not something a minority of players have some strange problem with, but in fact, a very relevant bit of this conversation. If you want to insist that it isn't a real issue, we're done with the convo.

We have no choice, I disagree with you, and AFAICT I will NEVER agree. The cases where 4e-style warlord 'healing' are an issue are a tiny corner-case of all games and situations.

There's a lot bundled up in this paragraph, but for the purposes of "die hard" mechanics, it's a shifting of the goalposts. There are many mechanics that allow one to soldier on from the brink of death that a warlord might use that would allow a character to soldier on past the brink of death and which would still be compatible with the idea of hp loss representing some kind of wound. If you can agree with that statement, we can move on to whatever else you want to talk about.

Hit point loss IMHO does not represent 'some kind of wound'. As I've stated previously the idea that hit points are meat is ludicrous, unless you accept that the game isn't even remotely producing any character that has ordinary characteristics of any sort at all. If THAT is the case just call it all magic and let us all have our preferred flavors. If not then hit points MUST represent (as Gygax stated many times) a host of different things, and then there's nothing wrong with inspirational 4e-warlord-style healing, is there? Aside from ElfCrusher's objection, which I have already addressed, its a corner-case. The chances that your character wants to NOT be healed/inspired/lead by the warlord is virtually nil in any actual game of D&D.

This brings me back to my very first point, which is that the anti-healing-warlord arguments are all pitting one single corner case of one aspect of the game for one group of people against a whole style of play for another group. I can only appeal to WotC here and ask "Do you really want to relegate 1000's of players to lacking an enjoyable component of their game for the dubious 'benefit' of giving some tiny minority that can't abide the very existence of a corner-case its satisfaction?" When I say "tiny minority" I mean the people that will ACTUALLY EXPERIENCE this situation in real games in the real world, not people who can't abide it just because it exists. Frankly the only person I need an answer to this from is Mike Mearls, since it is essentially his choice and preference we have to live with. What about it Mike?

 

[I'm A Banana]

And none of this was needed to describe the functions of classes in classic D&D.

That was never the intent. The intent was to show that the mechanics existed. If you agree that the mechanics did exist, we can move on to whatever else you might want to talk about.

Where we differ here is that you are arguing that classes and races are 'unnecessary complexity', which I find to be a highly dubious idea.

I feel that this displays a lack of understanding of how I am using the word "necessary." You can play a perfectly viable D&D game where you have no race or class options, no? Then having an option is an unnecessary complexity.

It is a desirable complexity nonetheless.

I will NEVER agree. The cases where 4e-style warlord 'healing' are an issue are a tiny corner-case of all games and situations.


Hit point loss IMHO does not represent 'some kind of wound'.

If you're unwilling to listen to opposing viewpoints and be open to change and have a dialog, there's no further point in responding to you. It's not a conversation, it's just you soapboxing.

 

[Edwin Suijkerbuijk]

I wouldn't have a problem with warlords borrowing the bard's "In the worlds of D&D, words are not just vibrations in the air, but vocalizations with their power all their own", and letting them dip their toes into the inspiration magic fluff.

But, i'm a fluff-mutable guy, and not a hard-core warlord fan (still a fan, just not my favorite). So i'm not the one to please.

So as a first step designing a warlord along those lines maybe we should start by creating a more martial non spellcasting bard.

The simplest way to do this would be replacing spllcasting with supriority dice.
My sugestion yould be you start with 4 and gain a aditional dice at levels 3,5,7,9,11,13,15 and 17th, for a maximim of 12

at level 11 you might gain acess to some advanced manuvers these would cost more then one superiority dice to activate.

 

[Guest 6801328]

I guess 'meat vs mojo' is relevant. I can't see hit points as meat, it just doesn't work, the whole notion is beyond silly. Even a 1e level 9 fighter can literally stand in front of a bunch of orcs and laugh at them for 10 minutes while they fill him with longbow shafts. Granted, that's a little bit of a silly example, but its only the extreme. So 'mojo' is certainly a part of hit points, and I don't see that there should be a huge problem with 'mojo restoration' as being modelled using hit point restitution (IE a 'healing' mechanic).

In terms of things like healing kits, I have no issue with that kind of thing. I think there's room for clerical healing, inspirational 'healing', and mundane mechanical healing (though I would point out that if there's any degree of realism to be had that bandages are only marginally effective at getting people back to a functional level, mostly they just keep you from dying right away).

I don't disagree with any of the above. I don't really care about the Meat vs. Mojo debate, but if I had to vote for a side I'd pick "it's both". It's just not important to me, though.

Nobody is suggesting that there should be no RP or that we don't have RP in our games, that's missing the point. The point is that RP in and of itself, does not carry mechanical weight. At most the GM of a game may or may not decide to grant some situational mechanical benefit (or penalty) based on RP considerations. As I have already pointed out, a warlord built on some sort of RP mechanics different from clerical healing probably just leads to a necessity of having BOTH, or perhaps the warlord remains simply a secondary option, given that hit points are the central mechanic of the game.

So, I don't disagree with you here, either. One thing I love about the system The One Ring is that there are numerous mechanics that interact with roleplaying and storytelling. D&D largely doesn't have that (Inspiration, I guess) which is too bad. But I don't see using non-magical healing on another player as something that fits into that category. "I shout encouragement" may, in its roots, be more social and interactive than "I cast a spell", but it's not really a roleplaying mechanic. It's a mechanic that represents social relationships. Two very different things.

If, on the other hand, Inspirational Healing had a greater or lesser effect, depending on the current relationship between the two characters, then I could see your argument. I'd still be leery of it because of the fluff that, to me, implies loss of agency of the recipient. But maybe the mechanic would be fun enough that I'd overlook it.

Also, bear in mind that my objections to all these micro-agency-loss instances are all based on the total picture. If the "Warlord" had a less obnoxious name, and none of the abilities that suggest giving orders and telling other people how to do their job, and fewer people compared the class to an "Officer", then I could probably overlook Inspirational Healing with no more than a twinge of dislike. Sort of like how I feel now about Paladins with halberds. But given that just about every aspect of the Warlord (that I see in homebrews) reinforces this image of "the rest of the party admires my leadership so much that when I jump they ask 'how high?'", this version of Inspirational Healing is one of many straws too many.

Did that make any sense at all?

Ban? I don't care to 'ban' anything, but the notion that you're 'forcing' me to RP a certain way by playing a warlord is no more or less true than that you 'force' me to RP a certain way by accepting your cleric's magical healing. I don't really want to drag things into a whole other side discussion about 4e's magical healing mechanics and how they radically differ in a flavor sense from other edition's version. I'd be happy to be able to play a game without the absolute necessity to have a healbot cleric though, given 5e's healing concept. As it stands it is infeasible, and the 'THP only' type of warlord wouldn't really change that.

I think you're exaggerating the importance of a healbot cleric. I've played in games where our only healing is a Bard or a Ranger and we've gotten by just fine. And if you need more, Druids and Paladins also make good healers. Heck, a Rogue with Healer feat (depending on DM interpretation) can be amazing.

Do you need some healing? Probably. Unless your DM is willing to tone things down a little bit. But this ain't 2e, there are other options.

Anyway, I can completely sympathize with the belief that there should be more options for filling critical roles, so new classes that have healing ability are fine (as long as the classes are otherwise justified conceptually and with interesting new mechanics.) That part that I honestly do not get is why some people insist on non-magical healing. The only two reasons that I can comprehend are:
1) To play in campaigns where magical classes are not allowed (and maybe 'magical' subclasses, like Shadow Monks?)
2) To prove on the Internet that HP are not meat. (Although I would think that Second Wind proves this just fine.)
Otherwise, if other people in the party are casting spells right and left, and you're carrying magic weapons and drinking magic potions, why is it so important for this one thing to be non-magical?

(I'm asking it somewhat rhetorically because I've tried to understand it numerous times and it just doesn't add up for me. So if you have an illuminating explanation I'd love to hear it, but if you want to punt because you don't think I'll get it then I won't think less of you.)

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

So do anti magic spells and zones and whatever stop bardic inspiration?

 

[I'm A Banana]

So do anti magic spells and zones and whatever stop bardic inspiration?

Nope!

TBH, I'm not convinced that a "spell-less bard" a la the spell-less ranger wouldn't fix half these issues.