Undrave
Legend
I never called Monk players stupid.
It's not white rooming, it is my own frustrating experience with the Monk that turned me off. I even had busted rolled stats and I still felt like I was not contributing like the rest of the party.
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D&D 5E Why is There No Warlord Equivalent in 5E?
- Thread starter Hexmage-EN
- Start date
UngeheuerLich
Legend
You called people who use Ki for defense stupid. I quoted you before you changed it.
Maybe you played in a campaign with lower numbers of short rests. Or with too optimized characters.
The problem with the monk ist that they don't have room to optimize as all your ASI usually go to ASI (Dex and Wis).
And if you don't recover Ki at the expected rate, it is more difficult to make it work.
Our monks usually shined in encounters where positioning was most important. The shadow monk could approach enemy casters 100ft away easily and lock them down woth stunning strike, darkness or silence.
Undrave
Legend
Well sorry it sounded like that. I meant to say it's a stupid design if you need to spend Ki on defense. It's stupid that it is apparently the optimal way to use it.
The part was a Barbarian, a Paladin, a Warlock and my Monk, so it wasn't that short rests we rare, just that it was hard to pace myself for the expected 2 encounters. And we all had busted characters, the stat roll method was very generous.
There was that one time I felt like I did a good thing. We had an ogre shaman helping us and he got mind controlled by an Aboleth. I got him stuck in a zone of silence while he was trying to cross difficult terrain (there was water all over the place) so he was kept out of most of the fight. That was the best use of my Ki points the whole fight.
Justice and Rule
Hero
I would disagree, generally speaking, and I think part of the reason is because by making these things pay-fors, you generally see them not get used compared to something like Flurry of Blows.
I find a lot of that missing what I'm arguing about. Rogues aren't about multiple attacks, they are about getting one hit, since Sneak Attack is generally easy to setup. They already have something to mitigate not having a bunch of attacks by allowing them to do a ton of damage in one. In the playtest, as far as I could tell, it looked like they were going to gain a bunch of powers through the new Strike system (Hey, a spendable resource that never runs out! How novel!) along with a bunch of other powers that aren't tied to something you can run out of (Steady Aim is a good example of a power that has a solid limit/cost for a powerful advantage without pegging it to some resource pool). Talking about damage misses that the classes have two fine ways of doing damage and that's not really my complaint.
My point is about Monk defense: the class that is meant to be fast and dodgy has to spend part of its limited resource that all its other cool stuff is tied to. Diamond Soul is great, but that's at 14th level. Cunning Action, meanwhile, is at 2nd. Rogues also get a bunch of defense stuff (including sharing a few things with the Monk), but Monks are missing something for AC.
The point here is that some of this stuff wouldn't infringe on the gimmick of the Rogue, but give another lightly-armored character a chance to actually not get hit, while still having limits because it plays into the Bonus Action funnel. That, in itself, is already a cost for these bonus action-heavy classes, possibly even moreso for the Monk since it's way more reliant on using extra attacks to cause damage or special effects.
I find that debatable given what it looks like Rogues will be getting with their Sneak Attack strikes. Again, that's a really cool design and it's not limited by a finite and small resource pool.
Would it? Being able to Dash or Disengage for free? I might buy giving them Dodge, but honestly I think that's more of a necessity given the squishiness of the Monk and how it derives its AC. Forcing them to spend ki, which gives most subclasses access to all their special abilities, is a double-cost. Again, there's already a hard limit with the Bonus Action funnel, so you have to balance putting out more damage versus not getting hit.
Meh, I feel like this ignores the problem. Focusing on disposable resources that require hard recharges is a mistake; making them more able to push on without having to stop or allowing them to be interesting without their ki is a far better idea.
I mean, I'm not against any of this but I don't think it really helps the class as much as it just expands some build ideas. But I'm also not quite sure how the "Weapon Mastery" part of the playtest is ultimately going to shake out.
Yeah, but if you're squishy and they hit you for a serious chunk, that's enough to dissuade you. It's situational, but there are a whole bunch of benefits to disengage, not the least of which being able to maneuver around a crowded battlefield if necessary.
I mean... maybe? I dunno, it's something to think about. I know I had a friend talk to me about how they wish the Monk felt like less of a vehicle to put out Stunning Strikes as well, which I was thought was interesting.
I'm A Banana
Potassium-Rich
It's a genre limitation, sure. The genre D&D trucks in includes heroes who can sustain life-threatening injuries and then mostly sleep them off or shrug off long-term effects (even if your HP isn't meat, you can still nearly die from losing it, and then be fine after a night's sleep - there's no lingering trauma or anxiety or existential crisis). If that's too fantastic/unrealistic for your "badass normal" characters, then that character isn't a good genre match for what D&D currently supports, at least without tweaking HP a bit from the expansive official perspective.
It's legitimately hard to play a 20th-level pig farmer or a 20th-level merchant or a 20th-level captain of the town guard or a 20th-level general in D&D. And I don't think it's unfair to blame that to a large degree on spellcasters! It's fun to have a powerful spellcaster, so rather than nerf mages and clerics so that they're more down-to-earth "normal people with subtle power," D&D chooses to lift up martial characters so that they can hang with the resurrection and the wish granting and the world-hopping. If you want a game that doesn't involve that kind of high level wahoo, D&D ain't it out of the box.
These are all strategic design decisions with good support for a game that's seeking a broad appeal.
Like, leaning more deeply into tactical combat comes with a big barrier to entry and a higher skill floor and leaves out players who just don't have fun in tactical combat. So D&D chose to have combat that's faster, more cinematic, and without a requirement for grids or minis. D&D isn't averse to interesting tactical combat (there's plenty of interesting decisions to make in a D&D combat), it's just averse to sacrificing those things to deepen its commitment to tactical combat further.
Complexity comes with some of the same problems. Fighter's the most popular class, I'd argue, in part because it's not juggling resources like a caster has to.
Creating new classes comes with a lot of baggage, too.
So if you're requiring a warlord to be a new class with a lot of complexity who utilizes deeply tactical combat, and anything below that is insufficient, it's not surprising you're unsatisfied. It's like the woman with the dating profile who only wants a guy above 6'0", who makes at least $200k/year at a job that allows them enough free time to take long vacations, who isn't on social media, who owns their own home, who volunteers at least twice a month, and who is between the ages of 35 and 37. And then she's complaining that it's so hard to find a good man out there. Well, yeah, if you set the bar high and you are uncompromising in your requirements, you're not going to find your needs easily met!
So I can see that list of culprits and also see that one answer to why there's no warlord equivalent in 5e is because the people who want it tend to be very precise and uncompromising in what they want out of it. Which isn't to say it's invalid! Want what you want! But also, maybe don't expect the universe to just give it to you exactly the way you like it. 50+ warlord homebrews and a prominent presence in things like PF2 would indicate that at least some of the warlord fans are doing their best to put in the work.
Undrave
Legend
I dunno if its really more cinematic.
I don't think that's true.
I'm A Banana
Potassium-Rich
It's a relative perspective.
Like, using facing is more tactical, but not using facing allows for things in the description of an effect like a sudden turn, a pivot, something out of the corner of your eye. I mean, it's not true of me (someone who would be glad to see an official 5e warlord), but if what one requires of an official warlord is a new class of significant complexity who operates in a highly tactical manner, then I'd say we might not ever truly see something that satisfies that in 5e. If we're willing to go with something simpler, more abstract, and maybe embedded in existing class(es) and options, something that's more native to 5e, we could get cookin'.
Justice and Rule
Hero
In my experience, people grasp tactical combat fairly quickly and naturally. Like, "teamwork" is something people get and while it can take a little while to understand if there is some weird meta going on, people are fairly quick to get how they can help other people.
What I find is way more complicated and a drag on things is spellcasting, particularly how spells are built. There isn't consistency from spell-to-spell and the data load for newer players (or hell, even veterans sometimes) can be too much.
I mean, I typically think the "popularity" of fighters is more of a "I died and need a quick pickup character, here's a Human Fighter". Also I would wager that people honestly want more complexity, given the amount of time was put into developing things like Weapon Masteries.
At a certain point the limits of the general class structure become clear and you're kind of just trying to force things into a shape rather than letting them come about naturally. It's a very "All I have is a hammer, so all problems are nails" sort of thing. I'm not sure what "baggage" can come from making a new class when it doesn't seem like it'll fit into an archetype.
This is a real big strawman: they just want a new class because they feel no archetypes really work with it and would lack the complexity. Like, would you say the same thing if there was no Monk class and someone didn't want it to be a Rogue subclass? That's not being too choosy, those are pretty basic desires. Rather, people are trying to create this idea of "Warlord people just want too much!" because it's an easier way to write it off the argument than engage with it.
You talk about "It's not invalid", but your arguments towards these people are remarkably belittling.
It's a relative perspective.
I find it to be a very very relative perspective. Creating explanations for why something is really isn't all that "cinematic", and I really don't think most of the martials play in a "cinematic" way. When I think "cinematic", I would argue more narrative-control games are closer because they let you create things more than be bound by the rules, and for all the talk of "rulings", 5E is still very much a game of rules.
Heck, people talk about "Gridless theater-of-mind with 5E" but it's still a game with firm ranges, blast radii, etc. Just about everything is still measured in 5 foot increments. The only thing that it's lacking is using "squares". The difference is that people can just sort of wave-off things when you write about it with units of distance rather than creating your own unit.
I would largely disagree, but I feel like people are really attached to the idea that Warlords are just too complex for the 5E system and would rather handwave that as a reason than engage with it in a more in-depth manner. Again, we're at a point where D&D is adding a whole bunch of complexity to its weapons, something that they were very against when the system was first designed. I don't really see creating a class that engages with teamwork to be more complex than most spellcasters.
Moreover, I do not think 5e is really capable of supporting such a character. As I explained in an earlier post, pretty much everything that made the Warlord work in 4e (healing surges, grid with tactical significance, granular modifiers) is gone in 5e.
Justice and Rule
Hero
I mean, I think we are mistaking specific mechanics for general function.
The ability to heal in different ways could be represented through temp hitpoints, allowing people to use Hit Dice to heal, or a bunch of other things. I mean, we don't think clerics couldn't work because they used healing surges in 4E and now they're gone, do we? Did we have to get rid of Healing Word for this reason? This feels absurd on its face.
Allowing people to move around needs a grid as much as a fireball does, and if you'll fudge distance for a fireball then you can fudge it for someone switching situation; you just have to describe it. They both carry the same problems when it comes to gridless play and will live and die by how the GM works it. I don't see this as a reason that stops a 5E Warlord.
Granular modifiers might be something, but then again with a lack of them, maybe that could be the class's gimmick? But there are a bunch of ways to represent better tactics, whether it be adding or rerolling damage, putting specific limiters on enemies, etc. You can have it, you just have to engage with what the system gives you. Every class used to have different bonuses and give out bonuses: we didn't suddenly lose every buff or debuff in the system, we just found different ways to use them within the system.
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