That's not what I saw I'm A Banana write. He said you have pick between:
1.) An inclusive HP model which supports multiple interpretations;
2.) A Warlord with verbal HP restoration.
One of these things has to be "optional" material.
What you call "logical yoga" is actually just him identifying a conflict of interest. I'm not actually sure that you and he have any fundamental disagreement, since you've been clear that your vision of the Warlord is optional material for the Advanced Game. You could just say, "Sure, the Warlord I'm envisioning is incompatible with the version of 5E that you prefer," and I suspect he'd just agree.
I think that's pretty fair. The conversation would shift from "lets try to make a warlord that doesn't presume non-mystical inspirational healing" to "lets chat about if it's smart for WotC to produce a class for a group using a particular optional rule." I could think of a few situations where WotC might, indeed, opt to do that - like if that optional rule featured prominently in a campaign or adventure. Forex, if they ever did an adventure set in a nonmagical world, or in FR on one of the three or four times every couple of years when something bad happens to the current goddess of magic (
), they might explore non-magical combat healing. Or when they do DL, they might opt to support a more explicitly narrative/inspiration model of HP to fit its strong narrative vibe a bit more closely (and, in the War of the Lance, the relative paucity of divine power), and might explore what narrative HP would look like. Hell, DL would even have the massive army battles that a strict 4e warlord flavor would
love. It would be a very comfortable fit!
Such a class would be freed from one of the main constraints currently upon it: that it be acceptable to different HP models. If you say something like, "This setting/adventure path/whatever uses THIS HP model" up front, then you can make a class that uses it, too. The only question would be: would the audience who doesn't like that HP model embrace this setting/adventure path/whatever to begin with? It's not the most inclusive model, but WotC probably has better data than I do on what portion of the audience actually finds inspirational HP to be a dealbreaker.
And, for the record, in the right context, there's no objection I have to inspirational HP, either. It's just not my preferred default mode, so forcing a game to adopt it or not based on the availability of a particular class is a little like, say, publishing an Aeronaut class and saying, "Hey, if you don't want turn-of-the-century aviation in your D&D,
just don't use the class." I can run a D&D game perfectly fine without presuming turn-of-the-century aviation, so taking space in a book otherwise about classes and character types that only rely on the assumptions of the standard game, and saying, "Also, aeronauts!" seems like an issue. Hell, maybe not though.
In fact, the objection to warlords isn't entirely different in kind from the objection to monks: the thing they assume isn't necessarily a safe assumption. Monks have the weight of
every D&D edition behind them (and 1e and 3e as core), and don't take anything away from the game when they're added (adding them expands your scope without costing you anything other than a more limited scope), so they've got a bit of an easier time of it compared to warlords, who only have one edition, and who invalidate the idea of wound-based HP if you have one at your table.
