Tony Vargas
Legend
I believe we've established that it wouldn't.Yeah, there's a "typical" (default) way presented. Diverge from that, and you're diverging from the presumed narrative. Thankfully, 5e is flexible about that divergence - it doesn't stop you going basically all wound or basically all morale if that's what you want. Inspirational healing would change that.
You can narrate Inspiring Word that restores hps as helping an ally to ignore the effects of wounds, and assume those wounds receive mundane treatment at the earliest convenient opportunity.
You can narrate Inspiring Word as possibly having some subtle underlying semi-mystical component.
Inspirational healing can be as compatible with the narrative-wound model you articulated as Second Wind and death saves are. It just has to avoid going to extremes and writing fluff into rules so as to willfully block reasonable interpretations - an extreme the, well, extreme pro-Warlord position I articulated (tongue-in-cheek) upthread, would doubtless want to go to, and one that can be conceded as part of the desired compromise.
I never accepted that premise, either. It's potentially too easy to just fabricate an arbitrary narrative model that rejects some aspect of any new addition to the game and thereby stone-wall it. It just seemed to me that it would be more constructive to examine your specific wound narrative in detail, and find ways to make it available, because it did seem fairly reasonable, and very much in keeping with genre - as is the Warlord. It turns out they're compatible, if both make the effort to remain reasonable and cut eachother just a little slack.So, officially, there can be a wound narrative. That's important - it implies that future material shouldn't contradict it unless it gets more specific about the narrative. There is explicitly room for that narrative.
I don't understand why you're still saying this. We've established that a narrative wound model that can handle Second Wind and Death Saves can also handle a reasonable presentation of Inspiring World.It is not consistent with the idea that DMs can describe damage in different ways - it means that there can be only one way to describe damage. That's kind of the problem - non-mystical inspirational healing requires you use a hit point model that the game in general doesn't require you to use. Logically, you need to accept the inspirational model of hp before you accept inspirational healing, so a class that offers the latter should be selected after a table agrees to the former.
Narrative models that can't handle a reasonable Inspiring Word also can't handle HD and/or overnight healing and/or death saves and/or hit point gain with level and/or non-proportional healing and/or Second Wind - all of which are present in 5e.
To be crystal clear, Lay on Hand /is/ clearly supernatural, a matter of divine agency, but can be ruled otherwise based on some obscure technicality. Bardic Inspiration is a feature of a caster class, even if it's not explicitly stated as being magical.Happily! If inspirational healing is like lay on hands or bardic inspiration something - able to be seen through a mystical lens - its issues evaporate because it's something that doesn't require one model of hp to work. I'm totally cool with a Warlord "inspiring word" entry whose fluff is all of "Your passionate exhortation restores vitality to your comrades."
Inspiring Word would be a non-magical feature of a non-caster class that could reasonably mention in it's fluff that it's members don't usually posses magical abilities, Inspiring Word, itself, should contain /no/ language stating that or implying that it is magical or supernatural in any way, leaving a clear implication that it is strictly martial. That supports the concept of the Warlord, but also leaves open a DM ruling that it has a supernatural element, or even the possibility of a PC or player choosing to believe that there is some subtle supernatural agency at work. Which is the same level of plausible deniability that Lay on Hands has, just in the opposite direction.
I hope we've at least laid to rest your concern that no compromise was possible.If that's the compromise, I'm certainly into it!
At the risk of repeating myself, because this is a critically important, easy-to-miss point:
That is not acceptable. There is room for Inspiring world to be "much more non-magical" than Lay on Hands, while still leaving it technically open to the belief that there's something magical going on, just something too subtle to detect, counter or quash with an anti-magic field. Deniably magical enough for a narrative hp model to accept it, but not enough to wreck the concept of the Warlord entirely.And I am all about a 5e warlord that is no more non-magical than lay on hands. In fact, loot those mechanics (maybe halve the points if you can do it at range as a bonus action), and allow for a mystical interpretation of what's going on, and I am all in.
Lay on Hands is very Divine, very magical by implication, but technically has just a little wiggle room to think otherwise if you really want to (and no one really wants to, unless they're in an anti-magic shell, I'm guessing). The corresponding position for Inspiring Word (and any other Warlord ability) would be that it's very martial, in no way supernatural by implication, but technically, has just a little wiggle room to think there's something more than the completely mundane going on there if you really want to.
Last edited: