I wrote a transcription in
this post.
Which was very much appreciated, BTW. Thank you.
This, I think, is the problem with a lot of the currently promoted attempts to force the 5E Warlord to be the 4E Warlord: It tries to copy the mechanics
I'm not sure where this comes from. Porting any 4e class over to 5e directly would result in it being sadly under-powered and likely non-viable. Achieving the same things in 5e as the 4e mechanics achieved in 4e would be a more useful benchmark.
I think Mike's approach is far better: You first define the concept, and then see what mechanics you can use to support that concept.
That sounds nice. But, it is re-inventing the wheel, it's very clearly not what was done for any other class (except, perhaps the poor Sorcerer) and he just happened to pick a definition that focused on one specific build out of 8.
I attempted to start a conversation about figuring out the underlying problem being solved
That would be quite a conversation. You have to understand that 4e went ahead and solved a lot of perennial problems with D&D. It just turned out that, after decades of living with - or exploiting - those problems, they weren't problems any more, they were a status quo fans were deeply invested in.
But, I guess we can live in forlorn hope that maybe, just maybe, just very, very optionally, we might be allowed, in some home games, somewhere, very quietly, to play a game without one or two of those issues. (Ha!)
Yeah, it's hard to even know where to begin... how 'bout the very beginning. Legend has it that D&D grew out of the medieval wargame, Chainmail. Arneson started running chainmail at a 1 figure = 1 unit = 1 individual scale in a campaign called Blackmoor. Gygax started something similar in Greyhawk (under Castle Greyhawk, whatever). For legal reasons they each need to pretend it was all their doing and the other was an usurper. Whatever. Point is, D&D was shaped in these early campaign, particularly Gygax's. In what I of think as a primordial catacylsm - Cain & Able level stuff, here - was that somebody wanted to play a Vampire, Gygax let him, then someone else figured they should play Vanhelsing and stick a cross in the vampire's face. Thus are Clerics born.
So the Cleric split off from the Fighting Man or Fighter or Baronet or whatever and the advantage of heavy armor & shield was diluted, but, more importantly, at some point, the Cleric started casting healing spells to restore hps.
D&D hit the shelves with the Fight(er)/(ing Man), Cleric and the character everyone was meant to play once they'd gained some skill, the Magic-User/Wizard/Mage (something like that). A year later, if that, the first supplement brings us the next Big Mistake of D&D, the Thief. The Thief is also inexplicably broken out from the non-magic-using Fight-whatever-guy, leaving the Fighter a heavy-armored, high-hp, beatstick with absolutely nothing going for him but hitting things. Zilch. Nor is the damage limited to the fighter. Everyone is now incompetent at sneaking through dungeons, looking for traps, listening at doors, etc. Brilliant. The Thief, meanwhile, is incompetent at hitting anything, inflicting damage, avoiding being hit, making saving throws, and generally not dying in any & every way imaginable.
That's the problem (the Warlord might make a small dent in, there's a whole 'nuther problem with Wizards - in a nut-shell, by AD&D, the PC wizard had tools Gygax had originally meant for only for BBEGs). In D&D early history, it was established that you can /either/ fight pretty hard and wear heavy armor, or be vaguely competent (not really, thief special abilities sucked hard at low level) at doing mundane tasks that weren't fighting. OTOH, you could totally fight pretty good, wear heavy armor, and cast spells (and turn undead), so long as you held a mace instead of a sword and wasted most of those spells keeping the schmuck with the sword standing.
I mean, it makes perfect sense, right? Well, after having no other options for how classes are supposed 'balance' in D&D for decades, yeah, it totally does.
Then nothing at all happened to improve on that state of affairs for 25 years.
That is an entrenched problem. Legacy spaghetti-code software barely captures the fubaredness of it.
So TSR dies and WotC buys the corpse and, after D&D had lain in the tomb for 4 days, Dancey rolls the stone aside and calls it forth as 3.0, and gives it to the world as d20, saying whatsoever system as useth this OGL, shall never die. (OK, IDK where that came from. I mean, I know, I just don't understand why I went there.)
Anyway, the point is 3.0 is received with great rejoicing (like the death of Sir Robin's minstrel), and the OGL means it can, in some form, be published, by anyone, forever.
3e makes some long-overdue changes. It codifies skills in a less egregiously limited way than thief-only special abilities, it carves out a few meaningful combat maneuvers besides hitting things and makes the fighter customizeable via the first real innovation in D&D in 25 years: feats. It also responds to long-standing complaints that clerics are boring because all they ever do is heal. That response is to make CoDzilla. Hey, if the Cleric is given so many spells, and such powerful spells, that if he has just one or two available to cast in a given combat, he can turn himself into a giant engine of destruction, people'll play it, right? (Yeah, what if he says "F this healing S, I'm going to stomp through Tokyo 24/7!" Oops. (and again, the Wizard is going all LFQW, too) I've barely scratch the surface really. But, bottom line, casters, already the point of the game out of the lower levels, are powered up to a freakish degree. Of course, people love it, because, well, they can play CoDzilla, or god-Wizards, or, if they're into that kinda thing, something else customized to the nth degree in their shadows. There is great rejoicing, and not a little complaining about how utterly broken the game is.
4e comes along - and we won't even get into how utterly effed it was from the moment it was pitched to Hasbro - and does the unthinkable: it tackles those complaints. Now, you have to understand, if anyone thought there was the least danger of the glorious mess they were gleefully exploiting being cleaned up, they'd've never even alluded to it. It's just that the temptation to spell out how broken everything was, and thus feel smarter than the guys that broke it, was hard for nerds to resist. It should have been impossible, but 4e successfully nearly kinda-sorta-almost balanced the classes. The margin of caster superiority was pretty thin, and the dependence on the Cleric for healing (already little more than symbolic with multiple classes - and cheap-ass wands - able to cast CLW) was gone - and, along with it, the justification for CoDzilla.
The Destroyah that starved CoDzilla of oxygen in this tortured mixed analogy was the only other leader in the 4e PH1: the Warlord. (Yeah, I finally got there. You thought I wasn't going to make it, didn't'ya?)
There really wasn't much to the Warlord. It was a STR-based melee type with the same hps as a cleric or rogue, the same armor as the cleric, and slightly 'better' weapons (which , keep in mind, meant next to nothing, and you could always learn an even-better superior weapon for 1 feat - of the 18 or so you'd get in your career). It got some basic healing as Inspiring Word via the I-guess-revolutionary-for-D&D mecahnic of healing surges, marking the first time healing actually mapped to the ex(cuse/planation) of hps by EGG in the '79 DMG even a teeny bit (sorta, if you squint). But, for the first time, like every other class, the martial classes got limited-use toys of comparable number & power (but not versatility) to everyone else (mind you, that number had been drastically reduced). Not only did this mean someone who'd rather play a warrior than a preachy cleric in a party that desperately needed healing, could, it meant that if a DM wanted to run a game with no casters, even with little-or-no magic of any kind, he could, and the game could just about handle it (but for little problems with minions and locking things down, because no Martial Controller!).
And, that was it. The End Times. Fire rained from the heavens, the earth shook, cities were razed, demons rose from hell and feasted on the entrails of the faithful...
... and the rest you know.
I'm much more interested in exploring the boundaries of what Mike Mearls' design could do, but that seems to get ignored or drowned out.
Those boundaries are clear. On a fighter chassis, it is impossible to build anything but a quite competent DPR beatstick with a respectable degree of toughness: a classic tank. The warlord aspects will be a side-line. That's what the PDK was, that's what the BM was to the Weaponmaster fighter rather than the Warlord (though tossing in a couple of warlord-inspired maneuvers was apparently meant to make it /both/, but it doesn't hold a candle to what either actually were, let alone what they'd map to in 5e were they upscaled the way other classes were).
So, BM, PDK, now this. It's Mike's third strike trying to build a Warlord on a fighter chassis. It's an exercise in futility, the purpose of which is not entirely clear. Maybe the objective is to block the Warlord permanently, maybe to spin out it's introduction to keep a low fire of controversy simmering - not enough to re-ignite the edition war, just enough to keep folks engaged. IDK. I'm not good at that Machiavellian stuff. Looking at it practically it's just a hard fail from square 1. An interesting process, don't mis-understand me, but something that can only fail.
Now, to put that diatribe in perspective: I said something of the same level of negativity about balancing fighter types and casters when 3.5 was in it's final days, and very confidently opined that no version of D&D would ever be able to do it. So I'm quite accustomed to being wrong.
At least I am in the comfortable position of being either right, or pleasantly surprised at the end of the exercise.
