D&D 5E What the warlord needs in 5e and how to make it happen.

[Corwin]

I don't have anything to add to the discussion, but every time I see the subject line of this thread, I hear musically in my head, "What the Warlord needs now, is love sweet love."

I'm not the only one! That damn song has danced through my head every day since this thread came into existence. Curses!!!

 

[Krachek]

There is still a small trend about: martial and non magical == at-will.
The Fighter battlemaster is accepted with ressources managing, but there still hope for a pure at-will Warlord.

There are requests for martial manœuvres for everyone.
There are also complaints about at-will cantrip.

At least the debate about mechanics like the lucky feat being dissonant seem to be closed.

 

[Tony Vargas]

What astounds me in all of this is that you think you are on the moral high ground.

Heh. I could say that you wouldn't be trying so hard to establish the moral equivalency of your position if you didn't know for a fact that you're arguing against the stronger more position.

But that would be silly, because it's just a game.

Even so, the language of some of 5e's goals does just drip with kumbaya touchie-feelieness, doesn't it? That doesn't make them bad goals, but it doesn't make those of use who have taken our insulin and choked down that syrupy kool-aid saints, either. I'm not pretending it does, just pointing out that inclusiveness and uniting the fanbase, moralizing as they might seem, is a 5e thing, and that even symbolic support for them is important.

Yeah, we keep circling around on this one and I disagree. Adding options changes the game. It's perfectly valid to be opposed to options that change the game in a way you don't like.

I hate Drow, and if WotC had asked my opinion I would have said, "Don't make that a player character option." It lessens the game for me to get stuck in parties with Drow (pretty much every AL table I sit at, really) in a variety of ways that have nothing to do with mechanics.

XOMG, I'm so with you on that one, the Drow are horrid on so many levels. And not good horrid like a terrible villain you love to hate, just 'blech.' I mean, seriously, black skin + matriarchy = evil? Gah.

That said, D&D is seriously stuck with 'em. I blame Salvatore. If 5e had excluded Drow PCs, it'd be tossing it's uniting-the-fanbase credentials further away than it has in excluding the Warlord, or would have by continuing to exclude psionics.

Just like it would lessen the game if one of the other characters had a laser pistol, even if it did exactly the same damage as EB.

Nod. This time I blame Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. (I'd blame Gamma World, but I love Gamma World.)

Actually, no. I'm most definitely not saying it's "OK for someone to completely screw over your character and wreck his concept". Ever. Even if it's magical.

OK, that's good. So screwing over a character by making his concept untenable in the first place is also not something you'd expect anyone to accept quietly, I should hope.

I stop at "it's ok for your character's actions to have a beneficial effect on my character as long as it doesn't dictate how my character thinks."

So when a bard inspires you with magic, that changes how your character feels, but not how he thinks, and that's OK? Because even IRL, we can have emotional reactions in spite of ourselves.

I see in that some room for you and some hypothetical player - that you might run into who might want to play a warlord at the same table when it might not be possible to move either of you to a different table at some hypothetical AL event - to work out an acceptable backstory or relationship to your PC (friend, side-kick, rival, whatever).

Well, that's kind of the rub, right? The power of various abilities doesn't really correlate to action types. (Rogues have the best single attack, but a Fighter or Paladin has the best Attack Action, but a Warlock might be better if they can cast a cantrip, but a Wizard would be even better if they can cast any spell).

They /do/ correlate to actions, a fighter's attack action consisting of several attacks is not particularly behind the rogue's single-attack-roll sneak attack, or a Warlock's enhanced eldritch blast. Spells, of course, also include resource, not just action expenditure.

Warlords worked in 4e because you could assume that a basic attack from one class was roughly comparable to the basic attack from another class.

That wildly overstates it, and paints the warlord as a one-trick pony. Basic attack granting was trivially balanced by the nature of the basic attack, until Essentials broke basic attacks by heaping class features on them, anyway. Broader action granting worked because the action economy was tight, and classes were reasonably balanced.

If the goal of 5e were the same level of robust balance as 4e, those would be serious problems, two among many serious balance problems. But, 5e's class-design goals are different. A well-done Warlord would have to be fairly powerful in theory, like any class capable of (but not limited to) making significant support contributions, and, like any flexible class meant to synergize with others, could be part of some exploits (likely able to contribute to the abuse of GWM/SS like the Cleric, for instance, though presumably in a different way).

I think the upshot is that action-granting will probably be fine, but 'limited' single-attack granting will have to be carefully written.

I'd be comfortable with the assumption that a Warlord would have high at-will damage (comparable to a Rogue) and building the Warlord around the Rogue chassis.

That would be a stark departure from the original class.

 

[Gradine]

So, my personal thinking is that the Order of the Avatar Mystic makes the need for Warlord much lower, rather than much greater, which takes me back to my original point waaaay up-thread that I'd rather, again personally, that if WotC is going spend their resources on creating 5e versions of older classes, that they spend those resources on classes that present new mechanics within 5e, rather than mechanics that already exist but with a slightly different coat of paint slapped on. I don't even think the case can be made anymore that the original mechanics of the Warlord exist in 5e but could stand to be expanded on (which is the argument I'd make in requesting, say a real 5e Spellthief or possibly even an Archivist, which I think could be handled as a Wizard archetype); the Order of the Avatar's mantles certainly take care on that front. There are 5e martial characters that have resource management, so "if it's martial it has to be at-will" argument simply holds no water.

The best argument for a dedicated 5e Warlord class, at this point, are anti-magic fields. Which amounts to requesting that martial characters be even more versatile and powerful in a rare corner case of the game where every other type of character is effectively already neutered (which is why anti-magic fields are an awful game mechanic 99% of the time and best used extremely sparingly for best effect and therefore are really not worth designing an entire class of character around).

Again, I am not anti-Warlord by any stretch (my longest-played 4e character was a Warlord); but I had few problems converting that character to 5e before Order of the Avatar and definitely have no problems doing so now. I wouldn't be upset to seeing a new, fully formed Warlord class show up anytime, but I'd be disappointed that my admittedly more niche pre-5e, more mechanically unique classes weren't getting more love first. Because 5e is has already given so much love to the mechanical underpinnings of the Warlord already, if not to the specific class itself.

 

[TwoSix]

That would be a stark departure from the original class.

I'm OK with that. I'm more interested in figuring out how to balance a theoretical action granting class, personally. There's more than enough "close enough" third party warlords already.

 

[Tony Vargas]

So, my personal thinking is that the Order of the Avatar Mystic makes the need for Warlord much lower, rather than much greater, which takes me back to my original point waaaay up-thread that I'd rather, again personally, that if WotC is going spend their resources on creating 5e versions of older classes, that they spend those resources on classes that present new mechanics within 5e, rather than mechanics that already exist but with a slightly different coat of paint slapped on.

I strongly disagree with the reasoning, but I'm OK with the conclusion. 5e classes do re-cycle a lot of mechanics, when those mechanics are spells, but they also put a new mechanical spin on each class. Psionics in D&D have mostly been a magic-alternative, they're supernatural, have an aura of the fantastic (sci-fi rather than traditional fantasy fantastic, but D&D has never been shy about mixing the two), but were not technically magic for quite a while.

I think 3.5 had the right idea in making them distinct from magic, as an option. 4e took it the other way and made each 'Source' distinct, and 'magic' while clearly most strongly associated with the 'Arcane' source, almost moot. Arcanists were definitely magic in 4e, and literally cast spells, while Martials were definitely not magical or even supernatural even though they could potentially perform superhuman feats. Every other Source was at least a little ambiguous: Divine characters used prayers, if you think of the Gods as magical, that's magic, if not, maybe it's arguably slightly different; Primal characters used the power of the Primal Spirits who were part of the Natural world, but their powers were still very often supernatural, a bit of a minor paradox; Psionics were powers of the mind, catalyzed by the influence of the Far Realm, which was so alien calling it either magical or natural would be wildly off base.

5e, OTOH, is drawing a line between magical and not-magical, and it's so far placed the Mystic on the magical side of the line. I think that's a mistake, that the 3.5 solution of leaving psionics on the fence and leaving it's true nature up to the individual DM is best.

But, even then, it'd be supernatural.

I don't even think the case can be made anymore that the original mechanics of the Warlord exist in 5e but could stand to be expanded on; the Order of the Avatar's mantles certainly take care on that front.

They don't, because they're linked to the Mystic's magical nature as a 5e psionic. They're supernatural powers, they're designed like other psionic powers to reflect that.

There are 5e martial characters that have resource management, so "if it's martial it has to be at-will" argument simply holds no water.

The best argument for a dedicated 5e Warlord class, at this point, are anti-magic fields.

Meh, it's just another example of how mechanics and fluff aren't fully separated in 5e. Meaning re-skinning isn't an adequate way of providing a significant past-edition option, like a PH1 Core class.

Which amounts to requesting that martial characters be even more versatile and powerful in a rare corner case of the game where every other type of character is effectively already neutered

That's a sad sort of spotlight balance, but it's what the very few non-magic-using sub-classes already shake down to, I'm afraid. It'd be cool if there were more to it than that.

(which is why anti-magic fields are an awful game mechanic 99% of the time and best used extremely sparingly for best effect and therefore are really not worth designing an entire class of character around).

The only edition that ever got away with that was 4e, and 'got away with' is maybe not the right phrase for it, since it was edition-warred against constantly for that unforgivable sin against then (super)natural order caster dominance.

I haven't read the whole thread, so maybe. Personally, I'm find with a warlord that has a lot of short rest and long rest abilities. Although I personally like them to have at least Commander's Strike style ability at-will, but I understand I'm in the minority on that one, even among warlord fans.

I don't know what would make you think that, the only appearance of the class so far was AEDU, it wasn't re-worked for Essentials or anything.

5e's class designs tend to work from concept to mechanic, so it's not a simple matter of plugging in appropriate/classic or flavorful abilities into a common structure. A Warlord could just have bland "you cannot use this again until you take a short rest" sorts of resources, but there might be more interesting/flavorful ways of handling it. A clever strategem, for instance, might not work twice against the same set of enemies - ever - but could be used against a new set of foes whether you'd taken a nap before encountering them or not.

There is still a small trend about: martial and non magical == at-will.

That started changing as far back as 3.0, but yes, it was part of the pattern of caster dominance (LFQW, 5MWD, etc) in the classic game and through 3.x - 5e has moved back in that direction, some, but no class depends entirely upon unlimited at-will spamming (even the rogue's SA is limited, just not in uses/time-period). Casters get at-will cantrips, non-casters generally some rest-recharge trick.

Another correlation driving caster dominance prior to 4e was flexibility. Martial classes tended to be locked in to their few choices at chargen (or, in 3.x level-up), while casters had significantly more choices, some available on a daily basis, or even round to round in the case of spontaneous casting or very flexible individual spells. That was why 3.5 prepped casters were so solidly in command of Tier 1.

The Fighter battlemaster is accepted with ressources managing, but there still hope for a pure at-will Warlord.

That would be pretty awful. The traditional D&D design paradigm places a very high value on always-available abilities, to the point that they end up being very limited in scope, power, and flexibility. And, the traditional D&D playstyles, which even 4e didn't deviate from in this particular sense, heavily emphasize resource management, particularly when it comes to support contributions, which directly bear on the pacing (encounters vs rests) that 5e depends upon to impose it's brand of class & encounter balance.
An all-at-will /anything/ is frozen out of the resource-management game, a second-class class, if you will. At-will support contributions, in particular, can't help but be either trivial, or at least theoretically 'overpowered.'

There are requests for martial manœuvres for everyone.
There are also complaints about at-will cantrip.

There's also past-edition mostly-at will classes that have yet to be reprised by 5e.

Indeed, but there was a lot of opposition to 4e regarding features whose presence are marginally unopposed in 5e. That's the issue. I don't want to delve into an exhaustive speculation as to why that may be the case. One simple reason, however, may stem from the difference in writing style and tone between the two editions.

You mean the more readable natural-language of 5e vs the more technical-manual quality of 4e?

 

[Corwin]

That would be a stark departure from the original class.

You mean the Marshal?

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Here I sit, upon my lonely hill.

No matter what you say, I vote for Captain still.

 

[Tony Vargas]

You mean the Marshal?

Nobody means the Marshal.

The thread is about the Warlord, there's only been one Warlord.

 

[mellored]

Wait...is this the basis of the whole "non-magical" requirement? That if it's non-magical it also can't be X times/rest? Is this really about having at-will abilities with no limits on use?

I won't speak for other posters, but for me, yes. I don't have a problem reflavoring telepathy to hand signals. But I just doesn't work well reflavoring x/rest into a martial ability. Reflavoring ray of ice as an arrow shot to the knee works most of the time, until it suddenly does extra damage to a fire elemental.

Narrative should dictate the mechanics. That's a goal of 5e.


I realize healing shouldn't be done at-will for balance reasons. But that's about the only thing.
You can have things like "on your first turn of combat". Which is effectively 2/short rest, but makes a lot more sense narratively.

(P.S. When I came back to D&D during Next there was a prolific, animated poster named Emerikol...I seem to remember him being very into debating AEDU and "martial healing", etc. Is this what that debate was about?)

I won't comment on a specific poster, but when 4e came out, many complained about how it made no sense that a fighter had things he could do once per day. And when 5e started, very few 4e players cared about AEDU. Though a uniform class structure had some advantages, like hybrid classes, there weren't (m)any complaints about seeing it go.

"Martial healing" debate goes back to 1e and the nature of hit points.