D&D 5E 5e Warlord Demand Poll

[Tony Vargas]

And to think someone just a few posts upthread was claiming no one wanted to directly port the 4e warlord into 5e whole-cloth. So much for that notion. Bummer.

By this extreme standard you, and a few others, keep touting, not a single 5e class meets the expectations of its predecessors. Not one class live up to what its trying to emulate from the past.

Actually, it did occur to me to go back and address those possible issues, in the course of my usual multi-quoting (which takes me far too long, it seems, around 45 minutes this time) I got to it at the end of my reply to sancrosanct:

BTW, to be fair, there's also the matter of what any one Warlord might be able to do. In 4e, the Warlord had hundreds of powers, for instance, so there were literally tens of thousands of possible, distinct, individual warlords, without even considering MCing, Feats, Paragon Paths, Themes, Backgrounds or Epic Destinies. In 5e, before considering the corresponding options of MCing, feats, & Backgrounds, there are exactly 3 (Any BM trying to play at being a Warlord will eventually choose all the Warlord-applicable maneuvers, the PDK & Mm have no warlord-ish choices built into them).

But IMHO, it's not actually quite as bad as it looks on the surface: the same can be said for any 5e class, to a lesser extent. Even though there are hundreds of spells in 5e, each 5e full caster has only a relatively small sub-set of them that are unique to itself, and can over 20 levels, learn most of them, meaning that they are defined mainly, as individuals, by the unique class spells they /don't/ know.
Yet, at the same time, a given 5e caster can know over a dozen spells, and cast them spontaneously from, eventually, some 20 or so low-level slots, and a handful of high-level ones. In contrast, a 4e character only ever gets 4 encounters, 4 dailies and some much-less-significant utilities, and can only use each exactly once. So, while 4e characters are theoretically differentiated from each other individually, 5e characters are, individually, much broader in capability and vastly more flexible in how they use that capability. If sleep is the best spell for the situation all day long, a high level 5e wizard can cast it a couple dozen times if he really stretches to do so, the 4e wizard, once, maybe two or three if he leverages very specific feat and magic item choices, and maybe slips a pre-errata trick past his DM.

In short, 4e traded a great deal of [individual] flexibility and effectiveness for tighter balance, greater differentiation, and role-support. Part of the huge gulf between the 4e Warlord and it's 5e nth cousins is that difference in approach. To close that gap, the 5e Warlord wouldn't have to have hundreds of unique-to-the-Warlord maneuvers, it could, instead have only a few dozen, but have the ability master a fair majority of them, and use them with much great flexibility. A warlord proponent could still whine about the smaller number of possible warlords, but he couldn't doubt their effectiveness was improved at the individual level. And, it would adapt the Warlord to the 5e design paradigm, as evinced by actual 5e designs of other formerly-leader-in-4e classes.

So, nope, not suggesting the Warlord be ported over whole cloth. In fact, as I've said on more than a few occasions, such a port would not only be mechanically problematic, it'd be decidedly lacking in effectiveness at the individual level, a real dud of a class by 5e standards.

 

[Corwin]

So, nope, not suggesting the Warlord be ported over whole cloth.

Then might I suggest you stop presenting such arguments every chance you get?

 

[The Crimson Binome]

That definately sounds, to me, like the Paladin and Championmaster are too similar. If I have to have classes in subclass form, I'd roll cleric into Magic User before I'd roll Paladin into anything. IMO, it's not going to play as a Paladin unless it's got a pretty hefty suite of its own abilities, and I see absolutely nothing in the class I'd be willing to lose in order to get Second Wind or Action Surge.

It really depends on what you think a Paladin is. For much of its existence, the Paladin has been a Fighter with better saves and a little bit of healing, just like the Warlord is a Fighter with a couple of inspiring or tactical abilities. The main thing that a Paladin does, or that a Warlord does, is to swing a sword. And given that these are just two slightly different additions to the same primary power set, it would be silly to give them entirely new classes just to cover those minor variations.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

It really depends on what you think a Paladin is. For much of its existence, the Paladin has been a Fighter with better saves and a little bit of healing, just like the Warlord is a Fighter with a couple of inspiring or tactical abilities. The main thing that a Paladin does, or that a Warlord does, is to swing a sword. And given that these are just two slightly different additions to the same primary power set, it would be silly to give them entirely new classes just to cover those minor variations.

I disagree with 97% of that, but at this point we're just going to go in circles.

But, for three and a half editions, at least, the Paladin has been its own class, and a good bit more that a fighter with better saves a dash of healing.

And when it was "just a fighter", it shouldnt have been.

The idea that anything that uses weapons should be a fighter is, IMO, the height of gaming discussion absurdity.

 

[Benji]

.....so that the druid would be justified as its own class, but they didn't do that and now our spellcasters are over-differentiated.

I think druid was justified as separate to a nature cleric for all sorts of reasons. Or are you worried the nature cleric suffered somehow? Why be concerned with differentiation at all?

 

[Benji]

AD&D didn't have groups of classes. They were all separate. The assassin was separate from the rogue, the druid was separate from the cleric, and the illusionist was separate from the magic user.

I know this. That was my point. That precedent for Druid as a separate class already existed and it wasn't a 3rd edition invention.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

I think druid was justified as separate to a nature cleric for all sorts of reasons. Or are you worried the nature cleric suffered somehow? Why be concerned with differentiation at all?

There's a general issue whenever you have two distinct methods of representing the same in-game reality, such as druids and nature clerics, or warlords and battlemasters, which is that the outcome of what they do within the world depends more on the meta-game choice of which method you choose to represent the character rather than anything inherent to the character itself. If druid is its own class, then nature clerics shouldn't exist, because they cover the same concept space.

 

[cbwjm]

FWIW, I still don't like that part of it, because then I feel like kind of a dick for shutting down a major part of someones character. I would much rather have an ally that simply gives bonus movement/attacks, without requiring that the player of "leader" be the one to choose all of the actual actions. OTOH, Avatar can be played like that anyway, so long as the Avatar player is willing to listen to requests, or is just cool enough to say "Move wherever you want, we will just say that is where I wanted you to go.

Yeah, my experience is that players will often discuss what they will do during the round so it shouldn't really be much of an issue for my group as target and path will be sorted before the power is used.

 

[Sacrosanct]

I know this. That was my point. That precedent for Druid as a separate class already existed and it wasn't a 3rd edition invention.

Oh, I didn't mean to come off like I was disagreeing, more that I was reinforcing your point.

 

[pemerton]

there's a fair distance between what a Warlord should look like and what a PDK gives.

Are you trying to pass off opinion as fact here? Hope not...

You can't possibly dictate "what's missing" for others.

The problem with this, as I mentioned a few times in these threads, is that there is no consensus as to what the warlord should actually do

I'm glad you two aren't in charge of publishing at WotC, or we wouldn't get anything! - after all, there's always someone who can think of a different way to do it.

The warlord is a support class. It buffs (mostly initiative, movement and attacks) and it heals (plus does related stuff like granting temp hp). It also has elements of control - mostly of enemy movement; in the fiction, this correlates to tactical insight and/or deception (feints, etc, but at the unit level rather than the individual-swing-of-the-sword level).

Not every warlord can be built to be excellent at every one of these things; but every warlord tends to be at least OK at a reasonable chunk of them.

The warlord, by default, is also a warrior roughly on a par with the more militant of the traditional clerics (there are "lazy" builds that can be an exception to this, but I don't think 5e is going to lead with a lazy-lord; a mainstream warlord is already pushing the limits of the game's design parameters and aesthetic) - OK armour, good selection of weapons, reasonable hit points. As a warrior the warlord is not on a par with a fighter, paladin, ranger or (sneak attacking) rogue.

In 5e terms, we're looking at a class which has good weapon profs, OK armour profs (maybe Medium armour, though it's a bit trickier in 5e than 4e because of the way DEX factors in), no fighting style, and probably ends up with one extra attack. That's not a fighter; nor is it a rogue. It's not wildly different, in basic framework, from some approaches to cleric and bard (hardly a surprise - like them, it's at its heart a support class, or a "leader" in 4e jargon).

In lieu of 9 levels of spells, though, the warlord needs something else to perform its support function. The 5e paradigm suggests that this would be a mix of "manoeuvres"/"inspiration dice" and always-on "auras" - though maybe a new label would be needed for the latter to reduce the implication that they are mystical, and to make it clearer that they are about command and inspiration.

The details of those is a design question I'm not qualified to answer. [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] has already noted one 4e-to-5e transition issue, namely, that in-combat healing doesn't play the same role in 5e as in 4e, and so those aspects of the warlord might need to change. I'm also not clear how the manoeuvre/inspiration dice paradigm applies to control of enemy movement outside the context of Battle Master-style weapon play. I don't think the details are insuperable, though. I think the bigger issue is finding a way to make a class ability that is not spells rich and "big" enough to fill the hole left by stripping out the full casting ability of a cleric or bard.

If that can't be done within the constraints of 5e, then it turns out a 5e warlord isn't possible. I don't think that can be ruled out a priori. On the other hand, warlock gives us one model for balancing spells-as-short-rest against spells-as-long-rest (I'm assuming here that a warlord's "dice" would be short rest recovery), although even the warlock goes for a daily spell-casting solution to fill the really high-level abilities. Perhaps because I'm not a very good 5e designer, I can't at this stage quite see how those high level abilities would be "filled in" for a 5e warlord.