Tony Vargas said:
(Yeah, I finally got there. You thought I wasn't going to make it, didn't'ya?)
I was seriously considering it, yep.
Tony Vargas said:
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...
So, essentially, the problem that the Warlord was built to solve was CoDzilla? Given that CoDzilla doesn't exist in 5E, that makes it sound like a solution in search of a problem.
NB: I checked a wiki on 4E to look up the Warlord, and good god that's a hot mess. And, ultimately, nothing but a lot of minor variations in mechanics. Not the design space for new subclasses.
FrogReaver said:
I think 4e summed it up pretty well:
A warrior can learn much from history, for war stains its pages. Every conflict that has erupted between peoples, every battle that forged an empire, and every failure that led to that empire’s fall prove instructive to those who study them. The warlord is a military leader, a skilled commander gifted with tactical genius, keen insight, an inspiring personality, or some other asset that convinces others to follow him or her into danger. Warlords draw from their experiences and the maneuvers and tactics used by their predecessors to dictate a battle’s terms. Their commands compel others to action. Their plans can shatter an enemy’s offensive. Even their mere words can stir hearts and ease wounds. With a warlord in charge, there’s little an adventuring group cannot do. Each warlord earns the right to command because he or she has a special talent. Tactical genius is enough for most. Others have personalities so strong they can convince others to adopt their cause. Some warlords favor brash action, while others have a knack for finding more subtle solutions to problems. Whatever form a warlord’s leadership ability takes, it improves and emboldens those who fight at his or her side
OK, we have something to start with.
First, what does this imply about our character? Well, he's a warrior. A fighter. Trained in battle and military history. The remaining half describes the specific abilities the Warlord might have. They describe the 'how' to the first half's 'what'.
This is starting to look problematic, because these are qualities that just about any class could have. This description on its own very much sounds like a Fighter archetype, but could just as easily be a Paladin archetype, a Ranger archetype, or even a Wizard archetype. Everything there is something that
any character could put on their sheet and roleplay. So what is it that drives it to be a
class?
The first problem is that the Warlord
isn't a warrior. He's a "leader". He has the personality, or insight, or genius, to get others to follow him. He delegates.
The next problem is: He's passive. He can literally do nothing but stand there, and the other party members get bonuses. (That seems to be what the Lazylord aspires to.)
What those two problems add up to is: He's not a character class; he's a walking buff. He is a patch for a mechanics problem, to fill the "martial leader" role, when 'roles' don't exist in 5E.
Now, using aspects of this to form an archetype is easy. In fact, it's been done multiple times, even aside from Mike's current Happy Fun Hour version. In general, the class/subclass dichotomy is "What does it do?" vs "How or why does it do it?", and the archetype as a whole is an overall character concept that is broad enough to cover several ideas. It's hardly a surprise that many aspects of the above description find themselves into various archetypes, because it seems purpose built to
be an archetype.
Still, you want to make this into a class. Further, you want it to incorporate three mechanics. And you don't seem to grasp that "what" and "how" are separate issues, or the distinction between requirement and implementation.
Let's break down this requirement list:
FrogReaver said:
We want 3 things in a warlord class.
1. Warlords need to be able to heal
2. Warlords need to be able to grant an extensive amount of attacks
3. Warlords need to buff allies
1. To heal is to restore hit points. To restore hit points is to limit the risk of a character dying. Curing is reactive — only doable after the damage was done. Temp hit points are proactive — providing a buffer so that no significant damage gets through. Healing can be immediate (cure spells), or heal over time (regeneration), recovered via rests (hit dice), or gained as a bonus effect from other actions (vampiric knife).
Curing is the simplest form of solution to the problem behind the requirement, but the requirement itself is, Keep people active and capable of fighting over the course of multiple combats.
2. The extensive amount of attacks is a means of generating damage in a fight, the ultimate purpose of which is to complete the fight victoriously. That
usually means killing the opponents. Increasing damage output reduces the time to complete a fight, and thus reduces resources used (including healing). Granting extra attacks is compensation for not doing much damage yourself. You're delegating the damage to other people.
So the requirement here is: Provide a means of shortening the fight commensurate with what a typical class could do, but without requiring me to actually be the one doing damage.
3. Buffing allies covers a massive range of possible things, but for the Warlord, from what I read of it on the wiki, this largely relates to boosting attack, AC, damage, or movement. Just miscellaneous ways to increase damage output or reduce damage taken, which is a superset of requirements 1 and 2. This excludes buffs such as flight, teleportation, invisibility, etc.
4. The implied/assumed final requirement: Do so without using magic.
Aside from the exclusion of magic, these requirements are easily filled by a bard or cleric, which is why the warlord is often considered a cleric replacement. By adding the "no magic" requirement, the particular sets of requirements FrogReaver lists are a convenient way to achieve those ends. However they are not sufficient to support a class that needs subclass development.
To do that, you need to look at the root requirements, and think of ways that they can be creatively fulfilled. Perhaps one significantly boosts the healing that can be gained via hit dice (á la the Durable feat). Perhaps one is capable of causing enemies to flee the battle, so as to shorten fights. Perhaps one can always lead you to the high ground, so that you can choose where you fight your battles, and gain advantage from that.
A wizard will not look at a battle the same way a fighter will, and will use different techniques to achieve the objectives of a warlord. That's where you can actually create divergences in implementation, and thus archetypes. Although that wraps all the way back around to the issue that it's much easier to create this type of character as a subclass to the other classes, than it is to create this as an entire class on its own.
Mike's version hits points 1, 3, and 4, while skipping 2 because the Fighter isn't going to delegate all the hitting to someone else.
