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

[AbdulAlhazred]

Here's the link.

http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?469026-For-the-Record-Mearls-on-Warlords-(ca-2013)

It's fallen to page 2 now. But it had a little traction. I will bump it for your convenience.

I get the same feeling EVERY single time I hear Mearls talk about 4e, that he simply did not have a feel for that system at all. Its like he's read the warlord, but he's never actually seen it in play or tried it. He keeps on about 'healing', but it was never about HEALING, it was about INSPIRATION, and in 4e, and IMHO in 5e for the most part as well, hit points are the central focus of telling you whether you are mentally willing to fight or not. Like you can easily envision a 4e situation where a character is reduced to 0 hit points and has no physical wounds. I've seen this happen to NPCs in 4e games they were literally 'demoralized' to defeat, and it doesn't seem nonsequitur to have warlords restoring hit points. Maybe its a little less explicit in 5e, but it feels much the same in many cases.

Nor do I think the Bard is the same deal. Bards come from a model of the skald or celtic bard, a warrior who records and recounts the deeds of his peers, and may in various stories perform magical feats using music, etc. Inspiration is a possible function of this archetype, but it isn't anything like the warlord. They just overlap a bit in one area, potentially, like druid and cleric.

 

[Shades of Eternity]

Man the more I think about it the questions should have been the following:

Do you want a warlord or equivalent martial bonus giver int/wis/cha class in 5e
1. Yes. I wanted it in the core book.
2. Tentatively yes, but show me why.
3. Maybe, not sure.
4. No, but won't get in the way of those that do.
5. Doesn't the fighter/bard already cover it's niche?
6. I hate the concept with the power of 1,000 exploding suns and you should be ashamed for bringing it up.
7. Taco

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Works in the sense of fits into a party, anyway.

But, it's unfair to say that all 3.x classes weren't that well-designed. The 3.x fighter was a paragon of game-design elegance, and the Sorcerer wasn't far behind. The Rogue was a big improvement over the traditional versions, too. The Scout was cool and innovative. The Knight & Bo9S classes promising experiments.

That a few 'Tier 1' classes devastated game balance can't be held against the many classes that were solidly designed, imaginative and/or innovative.

Not from the designer's PoV, anyway. Some fans, and I'll cop to being one of 'em, did like the conceptual neatness of a 'complete' Source, though (and the Arcane, Divine & Primal Sources were all filled fairly early in the PH2 - Primal & Psionic both filled at their respective introductions). If there were any classes that were maybe a little forced to fill out their Source, and thus, maybe, a grid, they'd've been the ones in those quickly-completed Sources. The Barbarian had never before wielded so much magic, for instance. The Monk had never been Psionic before. That kind of thing. For classes like that you could debate 'grid filling' vs "looking at classes, thematically and niche-wise." But a class in the PH1 being conceived exclusively to 'fill a grid' that wasn't even arguably filled until HotFK (and even then, filled the 'martial' grid only by adding Primal powers)?

Yeah, that line of argument is a huge stretch and belittles the whole 4e innovation of source/role.

As for the 3e classes, I did say that they were all badly designed on at a stretch. I have played only a pretty limited amount of 3.x, maybe I'm not qualified to comment in depth on all its classes, but I think the system has some systematic flaws so deep that it really may not be possible to design a class that doesn't get wonky. I think 4e was conceived as a rejection of the mess that was 3.5, which just couldn't be fixed in a shallow way.

It's inescapable. Anyone voting who was anti-warlord would not vote for the warlord. There were 77 such votes cast at the time I posted up-thread. But it really is a very small, self-selected, and, let say 'inefficiently conceived' poll. It's about as meaningless as a poll can get. I say that even though it's showing 3:1 support for the Warlord.

(And, it seems, the 'unvote' option is making it behave /very/ strangely, to boot...)

Well, I think very little of these polls to start with, they are all statistically worthless. I was just rolling my eyes basically.

 

[Eric V]

I don't think you'll find any objection to the class in a UA or a supplement (I hope not)- I just don't think people want another core class.

This thread is full of people who are objecting to the inclusion of the warlord in UA or another supplement, sadly.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

This comes up from time to time...and it still confuses me.

What is it people think "people who get paid to do that" are going to find/do with a class that you can't, on your own, with your group?

You want it playtested? Awesome! I'd LOVE it playtested! Take it to your group. Play a few games, try a couple of different subclasses in a party with other "official" classes, fight a few monsters, get some treasure, and let us know how everything all works out..

If you must, I'll let you can give ME money for it. It'll feel just like the "people who are paid to do this" classes. I promise.

Sure, we can each write our own RPG to match our own tastes too (and in fact I wrote one in 1975 because I didn't have a copy of D&D and wanted to RPG, and another one later on for other reasons, but believe me mostly you don't want to do that).

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[steeldragons]

'Sorcerer' literally, means...

Ohhh boy. Our differences on the warlord aside, man, for all of our sakes, don't get into a "What a sorcerer is/was/should be/did/does/should do"...well, just anything Sorcerer-related with Moonsong/Kaiilurker. He...she? (I've just realized I don't actually know if MS(KL) if a guy or girl)...either way, "they" have some rather...strong...opinions on the matter.

...someone who deals with spirits, so the Sorcerer never really followed the literal meaning of it's name - much like the Warlord, Paladin, and, well, so many other D&D classes...

Yes. Yes! Excellent point. That's well said...We'll just move along, here, now...

The distinction from the wizard was mechanical: Spontaneous Casting.

No really, couldn't possible stay<shove>...Lots to do...I think I hear the laundry I left on the oven and the baby's crying on the tea kettle...<shove shove>was that the doorbell?...

While mages who worked something like Sorcerers may vastly exceed the number who worked like 'Vancian' Wizards in genre, it doesn't follow the two are that different as archetypes.

D'OW! Duuuuuuuude....we are so totally boned.

IMHO, that was the great thing about the Sorcerer: it did much better, clearer, more evocative and more genre-appropriate builds-to-concept than the Wizard.

Uh huh. Uh huh. Maybe you can talk our way right back around...keep talking...

The Elemental Sorcerer eventually came along and was a spammy Striker, very distinct from other arcane casters, even the Sorcerer.
Neo-Vancian casting (not just Wizard but Druid, Cleric, even half- & 1/3rd- casters) does obviate Spontaneous Casting, yes, giving the caster the advantages of both 3.5 Spontaneous & Prepped casters. A sort of stealth power-up (versatility-boost) in 5e, to make up for the trimming of slots and nerfing of spells, perhaps.

'K good. Good...let's go...quiet like a mouse...quiet like a mouse...


[EDIT to explain, since this is the internet] This post is just a [possibly feeble] attempt at injecting a bit of levity into a nearly 100 page thread that has been very serious and adversarial for far too many pages. Just going for a laugh. Not intended as "making fun" or "insulting" anyone's favorite class or their gaming preferences or anything. Just taking the truth (Moonsong can totally back me up. You do have really strong feelings about the sorcerer class. We've crossed swords over it more than once.) and trying to lighten a mood. [/EDIT]

 

[Eric V]

Well, that's just silly. I don't want any more core classes. But since I already house rule on core classes and core races, it's not like a *supplement* class is going to affect me.

Right? But apparently, the fear that one might sit down in an AL game and discover, to one's horror, that the player next to you is playing a warlord (even though, to the best of my knowledge, UA stuff isn't considered official for AL games) is real enough to make sure WotC never puts out an updated one for 5e through UA or other means.

 

[Aldarc]

OH! Well that's simple. It is systematically "just different" from other class ideas because it was created, quite literally, to follow/fill a systematic class grid that was completely artificial and developed for a different game.

Again, to be clear, that's not 4e bashing. That is just simple fact. Exactly what it was created for. They needed a "martial" "leader" to fit into their little boxes and said..."How 'bout this guy?"

So, yes. The warlord is "just different systematically" and, thus, does not fit/work to include in a non- class "role"/power source grid organization. 5e is not such a system.

I guess we're all done here then. That was easy. Someone shoulda just asked that on page 1.

Do you mean 3rd edition? Because that's where we first see the Marshal class, the precursor to the Warlord, even with non-THP healing abilities. (In fact, the Marshal class even appears as an entry on the D&D Warlord's Wikipedia page. Take that as you will.) The class got a rename for 4th edition, but the class, its role, and its concept existed before its imagined creation as part of a "systematic class grad that was completely artificial." And that is a fact.

 

[Remathilis]

Actually, the 4e Warlord (and a few other things) /did/ fix it. 4e could do an all-martial campaign, in a low magic world, sans magic items even, and it'd've worked fine. You wouldn't be plane-hopping, and you wouldn't be using a lot of the more overtly supernatural monsters, to fit the theme, but it would have played seamlessly. In fact, even without those other provisos, I've played in all martial parties, and they got by, even in adventures that made no allowances for the possibility.

It was at-best a serviceable patch. You still had problems with ending conditions (remove affliction), and their never was more than four options for classes. (Every other power-source got more than four, and had one per role. There never was a martial controller because even they couldn't stretch credibility enough to make a non-magical one).

That said, it worked because the same mechanics were used to make a cleric's Divine powers and a Warlord's Martial powers work. A few keywords a ribbon of italic text. There is no simple swap that turns a 5e cleric's spell list into some non-magical, non-spellcasting martial equivalent. Most of the ones I've seen end up making warlords clunky, feeble, or OP. I'm not saying its not doable, but I've yet to see anyone successfully do so.

Sometimes, I think that's the single thing that enraged edition-war-era "h4ters" more than anything else at the time. The lack of overwhelming caster supremacy in 4e.

Oh, I could give you a laundry list of things that ranked higher than "lack of caster supremacy" in my "Why I hate 4e" list, but I won't.

While balance clearly isn't the prime concern in 5e it may have been in some prior editions, it'd be nice to see a little more variety and 'agency' than is currently represented by the 5 non-magic-using builds, all of which are deeply committed to DPR as their major contribution to the party's success in combat. The Warlord could certainly be one opportunity to do so. And to help show that edition-war era animosities can be put behind us.

Well, the Extra-Life D&D page lists previews of upcoming SCAG material, and one thing on the list is a rogue-archetype called "Mastermind" and I doubt its psionic. We also know Purple Dragon Knight is coming. So we may yet see some martial subclasses for rogues and (presumably) fighters that have more social/exploration elements in it. A warlord alone will not fix that imbalance, not is it needed TO fix the imbalance.

We want a Warlord. It was a full class in a PH1 of a prior ed. 5e is meant to be for everyone.
There are lots of other good reasons, but even if that were it, it'd be enough.

We want an Illusionist. It was a full class in a PH1 of a prior ed. 5e is meant to be for everyone.
We want an Assassin. It was a full class in a PH1 of a prior ed. 5e is meant to be for everyone.
We want a Priest of Specific Mythos. It was a full class in a PH1 of a prior ed. 5e is meant to be for everyone.
We want an Elf class. It was a full class in a PH1 of a prior ed. 5e is meant to be for everyone.

I think every one of these classes has as much chance of seeing print as a warlord these days.