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

[Tony Vargas]

the answer is "by adding a new class, by adding new mechanics, and by adding class abilities that have potential synergies with other class abilities on the same or a different character." But it is incontroversial that it would make the design of 5E more complex, which I'm calling "less clean" for reasons that are partially subjective.

That is a consideration with any new material added to a game. The terms 'bloat' and 'power creep' might be more familiar to people on the forums, and get across the same ideas.

It's hard to regard it as a strong objection to any one thing, though, because it is one of those death-of-a-thousand-cuts/frog-in-the-pot-of-water-slowly-heated-to-a-boil kinds of dangers.

No, they can rest on aesthetics. You said yourself that you find the idea of actually, physically shouting wounds closed distasteful.

I said it was not what the Warlord had ever done, and not part of the concept. The idea isn't distasteful in itself, just wildly unrealistic and silly (and there have been much more wildly unrealistic and sillier things in D&D over the decades).
I find the claim distasteful because it was so heavily abused during the edition war.

Anyone who dislikes the idea of "shout healing" and/or doesn't find it cool can object to it, without regard to whether or not it is "realistic."

But they cannot object to the Warlord on those grounds, because it never did so.

"Realism" is a red herring.

But one that comes up all too often.

Huh. Would you find it acceptable in a game where it was implied to be magic but non-supernatural? I.e. powered by mana, just like a spell?

That's a paradox - magic, but not supernatural. Magic is supernatural. Supernatural, but not 'magic' has precedent in D&D in the form of psionics, and our Banana friend has one off (in another thread) on a dizzying flight of logic and close parsing of anti-magic shell, and determined that a lot of supernatural powers in the PH, including Law on Hands among many, many others, are only 'magic' if the DM rules them to be so. So, if it helps him to think of Warlords as supernatural-but-not-magical, more power to him. As long as they're presented as martial, not magical, and merely not-supernatural with only that stunningly narrow margin of ambiguity that leaves it open to 'interpretation' that they might be, in the same sense that Lay on Hands might not be 'magic,' I can't see a reason to object. I'd much rather have I Am a Banana rationalizing reasons to accept a viable Warlord, than reasons to block or nerf it into un-playability.

 

[I'm A Banana]

There also aren't any examples of peoples wounds vanishing with an hour's rest without some other agency at work beyond ordinary natural healing. But you are able to credit natural healing with that. So it's not just a narrative thing, there's an additional factor here...

It's totally narrative. "Vanishing with an hour's rest" isn't specifically required by the narrative tropes typically in use with wound-based HP. With a bit of downtime, all of the below tropes become narratively plausible:

• The Only A Flesh Wound trope: "On television, as well as in movies, there seems to be this general idea that if someone is shot in the shoulder, or in the leg, then the worst that happens will be that the person will grimace and go on with what he was doing before he was shot....this trope is so widespread that it's caused people to assume that it's an accurate reflection of reality."
• The Hard Head trope: "In short, fictional head injuries are no worse than inconvenient, so have as many as you want."
• The Made of Iron trope: "Damage is frequently done to characters that should hurt or incapacitate them, but is easily shaken off"
• The Hollywood Healing trope: "You'd expect at least one missing tooth or broken nose in a lifetime of fighting crime. Yet Bruce Wayne's corporate headshots are perfect time and time again, and James Bond never shows up at an embassy dinner with two shiners and a wad of gauze over his nose, even if he's just been hit in the face by an iron bar. "
• The Heroic Spirit trope: "The heroes can do anything if they are driven enough. They will not surrender, they will not stay down. Death, The Virus, Wangst, they are all to be shrugged off when the chips are down."
• The Normally I Would Be Dead Now trope: "For them, that little hole where their heart was supposed to be is just another chance to show off how Badass they are."
• The I Ain't Got Time to Bleed trope: "If the hero is a true tough guy, he'll shrug the injury off as if it were nothing more than an inconvenience and drive on. "
• The How Much More Can He Take trope: "In many, characters literally show no signs of weakening (with perhaps the exception of a weakened pose when they drop to a certain number of Hit Points) but this rarely causes any decrease in power. Until you suffer a Critical Existence Failure, you're just as effective as you ever were. "
• Possibly the meta-trope of all of these, the Plot Powered Stamina trope: "someone is able to to carry on...as long as the Rule of Cool, Rule of Drama, or Rule of Funny dictates."

Getting over an injury quickly is a tried and true narrative device in action media, so much so that it's often over-used. I've been watching a lot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer these last few weeks and when someone had to go to the hospital after they got knocked unconscious it was an exception to the usual rule of getting punched/chived/bludgedoned and getting over it.

So wounds needn't actually be healed to restore hps. You can be at full hps, and still have wounds, they've just been stabilized.

Broadly true - they're no longer a danger to you, though they might be painful, inconvenient, whatever.

And, wounds can be stabilized with a heal check, or you can stabilize on your own with successful death saves, so treating the wound physically isn't /strictly/ necessary.

A heal check narratively represents tending to the wound, and stabilizing represents the Hollywood Healing kicking in: you'll be fine in a while.

And even if they have been treated, they're not gone, so even under the 'narrative' you're choosing, you can be wounded, and at full hps, meaning that the restored hps are not all a matter of healing the wounds. If they were, the wounds would have to be healed completely.

The narrow use of the word "heal" to mean only "heal completely" is unnecessary. "Healed enough to not suffer its effects" is more often the case (though I've got no major issues with "healed completely" in most cases, either - descriptions of something lingering is pure color).

There are also no such examples of wounds healing in an hour without some sort of mystical force.

See above (especially Hollywood Healing). I'd be fine with a warlord that is as magical as a paladin's Lay On Hands or a cleric's Channel Divnity - not "magical" per the rules, but clearly something beyond mortal capacity. That warlord would be looking less purely martial in that case, though.

I see nothing wrong with ignoring injury as hp restoration.

The main way if fails to model the narrative is that it doesn't wear off. There's no point at which you actually need to tend to the injury, no point at which your spleen actually gets put in. It leads to absurd scenarios where you're chugging along just fine despite the grievous wounds that have been described, just because you're ignoring the pain. It turns "I'm wounded and then because it's an action-genre trope I get better fast" into Ludicrous Gibs.

With a die-hard effect, you know that there's a timer on how long you can ignore this. Make a bold last stand, and make the next few rounds count, because if some actual healing doesn't come your way, there's only so long you can fight without your spleen. You're beyond your limit, and your buddy is letting you go there, but you're under no delusion that you can ignore the wounds you've suffered and be perfectly fine. That's the perfect psychological space for an inspired last stand (leading to a Heroic RROD)

Apparently, you're OK with it as temps?

BTW, how do envision temp hps in this 'narrative' of yours? A character given a fairly big chunk of temps is wounded, but still had temps left. What's the 'narrative?'

Temp HP is good for representing a bit of "padding" or a shield or a wellspring of pluck. It's good because it makes you feel better (you're farther away from death!) without actually making you any better (it doesn't heal your wounds). Psychologically, that's perfect - you know as a player that you're not fully up, but you've got a bit of extra juice before you suffer any consequences for it anyway. The fact that it doesn't prevent unconsciousness at 0 hp helps model the fact that padding and pluck won't save you from a potentially lethal sword wound, even if they will help you out until you get there.

Agreed. OTOH, I'd have no problem with 'teleport' as a mechanic (jargon) that did not involve /actually/ teleporting, merely allowed something that could be convenient modeled with it.

I prefer it when rules language is natural language as opposed to jargon. This allows for things like "Anti-magic stops teleport" without absurd results like "I guess it also stops me from jumping over this river, since that uses the teleport mechanic."

But, if inspiration speeding up healing had a natural basis, it wouldn't be supernatural, and it'd be OK for preternatural or extraordinary or superhuman inspiration to do so. Right?

Possibly-hypothetically. The biggest difficulty is that it would have to actually heal the wounds of someone who is unconscious from a traumatic injury, and that seems...tough to apply to inspiration. The closest I can think of is maybe something like prayer for someone in a coma? But even there, the narrative way to model that in D&D is divine power (which is very supernatural), not non-magical inspiration.

Frankly, this premise that every class in the game must allow every mechanic in the game to be interpreted any way anyone might like strikes me as a bit of a stretch. Magic in D&D, for instance, little resembles the narrative of magic in any genre source, and any number of gamers might want very much to envision a very different narrative of magic than vancian memorization or neo-Vancian prep-and-slots. No accommodation is made for that.

There's prep-and-points (spell point option), and no-prep-and-points (any class with Spells Known instead of a prepared list from a pool), and even constant-effect (warlock invocatoins), not to mention ki (explicitly magical in 5e), and you could have all of those spellcasting types at the same table without incident, so I think there's actually quite a bit of accommodation for magical models outside of prep-and-slots.

But hit points also have some higher requirements that magic systems can get out on because magic is made up artifice from the get-go, but not dying after getting hit with a sword is something that people need explaining away to accept. The narrative of HP becomes that explanation. Because D&D defined HP as a combo of wounds and other factors historically, where the individual table emphasized was open to each individual table...until the Warlord, whose inspirational healing is incompatible with wound-based HP narratives.

And if the Warlord must have an inspirational healing mechanic or not be a "true" warlord, then it becomes a question of what you make optional.

 

[mellored]

You could presumably calculate what a class adds in terms of maximum hp extension, imagine if a cleric cast all his slots as Cure Wounds for instance.

A new class would only be problematic if it greatly exceeded the range of damage mitigation already available to others

basically i'm thinking...

if a cleric uses all his resouces (spells, action, ect...) on healing, he might heal 100 HP (as an example)
if a warlord uses all his resources (dice, actions, ect...) on healing he might heal for 30 HP, and indirectly save 70 HP via THP, DR, and bonus AC.

that way, the warlord is different both in rescources, and in play style.

 

[mellored]

also, what if we left the desctription of inspiring woed as vauge. that way some people could interprerit it as magic, and some could not.

"Your carefully chosen words are powerfu enough to bring people back from the edge of death, encouraging them to fight on. Many say your have power similar to a bard, but others think it's pure cunning insperation. 1 creatue within 30' can spend a hit die and gain X bonus"

 

[pemerton]

It's totally narrative. "Vanishing with an hour's rest" isn't specifically required by the narrative tropes typically in use with wound-based HP. With a bit of downtime, all of the below tropes become narratively plausible

<snip>

Getting over an injury quickly is a tried and true narrative device in action media, so much so that it's often over-used.

<snip>

The narrow use of the word "heal" to mean only "heal completely" is unnecessary. "Healed enough to not suffer its effects" is more often the case

It seems to me that, within this "enough to not suffer its effects" approach, 6 seconds might be enough if someone encourages you.

I'm also puzzled as to how gaining 1 hp while dying by rolling a 20 fits into this. If self-healing while unconscious is OK, why is not being healed by the encouraging words of another?

 

[Uchawi]

I believe that is due to the frequency of an effect. People are willing to shrug off a once in a blue moon situation, even if it goes against there viewpoint on hit points, versus having it occurring every battle. The same argument occurs when discussing automatic damage (damage on a miss).

 

[Aldarc]

Increasing the number of classes in the game is one design cost. It might be worth it, depending on the details of the class, but it's a cost that applies to the Warlord if it's implemented as a separate class (vs. a Bard or Fighter subclass), and it would apply as well to the Psion and Artificer.

Increasing the number of interacting mechanics is another potential cost. Whether or not this cost applied to the Warlord, or Psion, or Artificer depends on the details of that class. We saw some pushback with the Psion when one of the classes had its own special snowflake mechanic that involved attacking a creature's Int instead of its AC. Some proposed versions of the Warlord do not have this cost because they implement the Warlord entirely within the 5E idiom (e.g. bonus action to knock prone on successful melee attack, +CHA damage to allies within radius X). The more unique the mechanics, the higher the design cost.

There's a potential cost to some classes in increased complexity of tracking/maintaining game balance going forward. This cost isn't likely to show up in the Warlord, but it's one reason why AL doesn't allow you to mix-and-match story backgrounds (combinatoric complexity) and it's something that we saw with the UA Ranger 2.0 recently (Ambuscade, which was both a unique new mechanic and more powerful than the existing Thief 17 ability and increases game balance complexity by interacting with Assassinate/Paladin Smiting/Action Surge/etc.)

So if you're asking "How would the Warlord make 5E less clean?" it depends entirely on the details of what the Warlord were. If you're asking "How could the Warlord make 5E less clean," the answer is "by adding a new class, by adding new mechanics, and by adding class abilities that have potential synergies with other class abilities on the same or a different character." For those who desperately want a Warlord, no cost will be too great for them to pay, and some people may even view increased complexity as a benefit, not a cost. But it is incontroversial that it would make the design of 5E more complex, which I'm calling "less clean" for reasons that are partially subjective.

Thank you for clarifying your position. I understand it much better now, and - believe it or not - I agree with the basic assertion: additional options interacting with prior options increases complexity. We can call this "unclean," but we can also call this "depth" depending on how those complexities interact with each other. Given the sluggish pace of 5E releases (and associated player crunch content), I'm not sure if we have to worry about bloat, power creep, or uncleanliness to the same extent as 2nd to 4th editions.

basically i'm thinking...

if a cleric uses all his resouces (spells, action, ect...) on healing, he might heal 100 HP (as an example)
if a warlord uses all his resources (dice, actions, ect...) on healing he might heal for 30 HP, and indirectly save 70 HP via THP, DR, and bonus AC.

that way, the warlord is different both in rescources, and in play style.

Basically this, though the ratio may very from person to person. I lean more towards your ratio, but I would say that 30-50 percent healing vs. the rest (THP, DR, AC, disadvantage, etc.) is a nice ballpark range. In terms of a design philosophy, the warlord should entail helping to mitigate party damage, partially because of their own lesser healing skills but also because their combat focus is tactical support.

 

[I'm A Banana]

It seems to me that, within this "enough to not suffer its effects" approach, 6 seconds might be enough if someone encourages you.

It still needs to be actual wound-healing, so we're looking at something at least as magical as lay on hands or bardic inspiration- something that can be interpreted as supernatural. If the inspiration in question comes from a true name being uttered or a particular hidden lore or some Divine Right of Kings flowing from the will of the warlord, or if raw Charisma can shape reality or something (in a way that's different from sorcerers or bards) we've got legs.

Or we're looking at die-hard mechanics: ignore the effect without healing the wound.

I'm also puzzled as to how gaining 1 hp while dying by rolling a 20 fits into this. If self-healing while unconscious is OK, why is not being healed by the encouraging words of another?

Regaining 1 hp by rolling a 20 is essentially a bit of that long-term healing kicking in early by a fluke of fate or the luck of the gods or some other heroically-supernatural response. In this respect, it's important that it is something YOU do, not something someone else does for you, because it is a moment for you to be an awesome unkillable hero. Though I could imagine some ability that enhances that a bit (say, improves the range from 19-20).

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

I said it was not what the Warlord had ever done, and not part of the concept. The idea isn't distasteful in itself, just wildly unrealistic and silly (and there have been much more wildly unrealistic and sillier things in D&D over the decades).
I find the claim distasteful because it was so heavily abused during the edition war.
But they cannot object to the Warlord on those grounds, because it never did so.

So you're fine with shout healing conceptually (as a new-to-5E concept), but you think it's been abused as a straw man in past debates, and it's those conversations and not the concept of shout healing that you find distasteful? Oh, sorry for misunderstanding your distaste.

There could be other people who find the idea distasteful though--clearly that's part of what Kamikaze means when he says it's not part of the "narrative." It's not that you couldn't have a narrative where wounds close and bones straighten when you shout at them (arguably that's what magic does)--however, he finds that unaesthetic and uncool, unless magic is involved.

The point is, it isn't true that realism is the only possible objection to shout healing. That isn't an edition wars statement--it would be equally true if 4E had never existed, and for people who never played or cared about 4E.

That's a paradox - magic, but not supernatural. Magic is supernatural. Supernatural, but not 'magic' has precedent in D&D in the form of psionics, and our Banana friend has one off (in another thread) on a dizzying flight of logic and close parsing of anti-magic shell, and determined that a lot of supernatural powers in the PH, including Law on Hands among many, many others, are only 'magic' if the DM rules them to be so. So, if it helps him to think of Warlords as supernatural-but-not-magical, more power to him. As long as they're presented as martial, not magical, and merely not-supernatural with only that stunningly narrow margin of ambiguity that leaves it open to 'interpretation' that they might be, in the same sense that Lay on Hands might not be 'magic,' I can't see a reason to object. I'd much rather have I Am a Banana rationalizing reasons to accept a viable Warlord, than reasons to block or nerf it into un-playability.

Magic isn't supernatural in my games. If "supernatural" means "suspending the rules of the universe," then D&D magic should rarely be treated as supernatural, because magic always works according to rules. They are different rules than our universe uses, but they're still rules and still part of nature. In point of fact, it's hard to imagine anything you could model in the game which would be supernatural--which I believe was your point vis-a-vis shout healing, no? That it doesn't have to be supernatural.

It sounds like you're okay with it being supernatural, but it absolutely must not be magical in order to be Cool in your eyes. If it were presented as magical (but not necessarily supernatural), would you consider that "unplayable"?

 

[JediGamemaster]

I can't believe this thread is still going... I skipped like 3/4 of the middle but I have to ask the point of all this warlord BS, I mean didn't mearls basically say never again?