D&D 5E 5e Warlord Demand Poll

[The Crimson Binome]

Seriously, though, nope. Having multiple ways to mechanically model a given concept isn't a threat to "the model", nor is it "antithetical to role-playing". I'm sorry, I know I'm being dismissive, but...it just genuinely seems entirely preposterous and egregiously hyperbolic, to me.

It sounds like you don't actually care about the integrity of the model. There's a lot of that going around, lately. Lots of people seem to prefer treating it like some simple boardgame, where you can swap around game mechanics without regard for the inherent meaning behind anything. Or they want to treat is as an exercise in collaborative storytelling, without regard for the separation between character and author.

There are entire game systems which focus on one or the other of those concepts. There's no reason to turn 5E into one of them, though.

 

[Aldarc]

Again pemerton, you're just stating your opinion. What can be done adequately, what can't, what a warlord should look like, etc are all just your opinions. We have evidence of this because other people have different opinions on all of those things, quite literally ranging the entire gamut of "5e can already do everything I think the warlord should do" to "there's no way you can create a warlord in 5e."

No one's opinion is objective fact, and no one's opinion is more important than anyone else's (except maybe those opinions from the actual people on the design team). The sooner you, and others, realize this, THEN we can have a constructive discussion. Until then, your opinions are not more valid than mine or anyone else's. And they certainly aren't objective fact like some of you are trying to present. There are just as many, if not more, people who think you can replicate the warlord right now in 5e. Why is your opinion more valid than theirs? Were you appointed the gatekeeper of the warlord and no one else knows or something?

What you say is true, but I don't think pemerton regards his opinion as fact. From my sense of his posting, he regards the reality that his posts are opinion is assumed as an obvious given. (Whose posts aren't?) So I hope you do not mind me offering an opinion of my own. Everyone may have opinions, but not all opinions are equally valid. Or to quote Douglas Adams, "All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others." As such, it strikes me as something of a fallacy to disqualify the content of a post as an opinion just because everyone has one and that disagreement among opinions exist.

 

[pemerton]

Again pemerton, you're just stating your opinion. What can be done adequately, what can't, what a warlord should look like, etc are all just your opinions.

What else do you want me to do? I'm me, not you. If you want your opinions to be stated, then go ahead and state them!

There are just as many, if not more, people who think you can replicate the warlord right now in 5e. Why is your opinion more valid than theirs? Were you appointed the gatekeeper of the warlord and no one else knows or something?

This question doesn't even make sense.

If I want to play a warlord, and think the game doesn't give me what I want in that respect, then the fact that 1 million other people are happily playing their PDKs and BMs is neither here nor there. Their satisfaction doesn't give me the warlord that I want.

And why am I the gatekeeper of what I want from the game? Because it's a purely voluntary leisure activity. So no one else has the standing or authority to tell me what I do, or should, enjoy in respect of it.

We have evidence of this because other people have different opinions on all of those things, quite literally ranging the entire gamut of "5e can already do everything I think the warlord should do" to "there's no way you can create a warlord in 5e."

Yes. Likewise for rangers - opinions range the gamut from "5e can already do everything I think the ranger should do" to "there's no way you can create a functional ranger + pet in 5e".

Likewise (apparently) for the ninja.

Luckily I don't have to make any decision about what WotC publishes, so I don't have to work out what is the best commercial way forward. In some recent thread (maybe this one? it's been going a while now) I posted that I doubt 5e will see a warlord published outside the existing fighter examples, or minor variations on that.

But that's a fact about commerce, not a fact about design space. As far as design goes, I've stated what I think the constraints are on warlord design in 5e (namely, (i) trying to fill full casting with some manoeuvre-like system; and (ii) making that work on a short-rest economy). Within those constraints it's largely a mathematical optimisation-type problem. I haven't tried to solve it. If someone can show that it's insoluble that would be interesting. But mere assertion about brokenness in the face of 18th level wizards who cast 2nd level spells at will isn't going to cut it.

 

[pemerton]

Just in the past few pages of this thread, three different warlord fans have given three different ideas of what a warlord /should/ be. That means that anything that fits one of those will only placate, or possibly even anger, one of the other two. The question becomes A) Who do we please, or B)How do we please everyone?

That's a general challenge for D&D designers. With the paladin they seem mostly to have succeeded. With the ranger they seem to have failed to some significant extent.

The warlord isn't any sort of special case here. WotC have copies of the 4e books to look over. You look at them, you collect data from the Character Builder (to see what patterns there are of popularity in warlord builds), and you have a go.

It seems that WotC have fairly well-developed mathematical models for the classes - the curious and non-traditional spreads of spell damage dice are enough to show that. The Battlemaster's manoeuvres are factored in, in some fashion, to that classes potency. So are its 4 attacks and action surge. Likewise the cleric's combat abilities and spell casting.

That's your starting point. As I've said, I don't know what the endpoint would be, but it seems plausible enough to me that there is one. And - as with other classes - you can build in flexibility in all sorts of ways to satisfy those who prefer inspiration to tactics to field medicine to . . . Clerics get to change their suite of abilities on a daily basis! Presumably a support class that allows choosing manoeuvres from a somewhat disparate range of options isn't going to be overpowered by comparison.

EDIT: [MENTION=996]Tony Vargas[/MENTION] in post 530 answers this better than I did. There's one class in one edition. You model it in 5e by adapting that class: healing, buffing (esp init, attacks movement), limited control (based around tactics, unit-level feints, etc). That's some tiny fraction of the scope of a class like the cleric, the bard, the warlock or the wizard. (I mean, [MENTION=7635]Remathilis[/MENTION], not far upthread, is saying it can't be done because it's too narrow!)

As far as I can see the initial design challenge is technical: how to make the manoeuvre/inspiration dice mechanic fill the space of full-casting? That's a non-trivial thing, because it's such a coarse-grained mechanic compared to all the minutiae of resource allocation and so on that are found in casting (although 5e's adopting of the Arcana Unearthed approach to "memorisation" has reduced that granularity somewhat, which makes the warlord easier to achieve).

 

[Lanliss]

I see nothing unreasonable in approaching a difficult problem with both confidence in the ability to understand the problem, and acknowledgement of one's own limitations when it comes to actually solving it. There's no contradiction there.

"cares about the integrity of the model" roughly means "treat the rules as the laws of phsysics for the imagined world, and assume the inhabitants of that world understand those laws & make decisions accordingly."

I did like the 2e 'Sphere' model, it made each priesthood more distinctive. Domains are not quite so versatile or interesting - but they are simpler and more focused.

He's always seemed very serious about believing himself the final arbiter of what is and is not really roleplaying.

Obviously, there was a way, since 4e did it, and it had very consistent rules, not in the least contorted. I think the important thing though, isn't whether they could do that again - they're professional game designers, some were even on the team that did it last time, give them a tiny bit of credit - but how they could do it /better/.

Inspiration, same as non-magical healing. defensive tactics, the warlord's maneuvers allow allies to sheild an ally and distract enemies so the subject escapes unscathed To disrupt casters? Perfectly timed missile fire. To prevent detection? Extraordinary preparation and execution of a diversion. Actually knowing the lore of the legend in question. extraordinary intuition/deduction It's hardly a support spell, anyway, is it? And blasting away with elements is no more Warlord-appropriate than grinding away with high DPR.


Again, this is a baseless assertion trivially disprove by the past success of the Warlord.

5e is not strictly inferior to 4e, just because 4e did it, doesn't mean 5e can't.


I think you're overestimating how inflexible warlord fans are. We want the option to play the class we liked in 4e. That class exists as an easy reference. What's more, it exists in only one iteration, so it is much easier to identify than any of the classes already designed for 4e.

Compare the state of the Warlord & it's fandom to that of psionics. Psionics has existed in 4 radically different forms: as a non-class random non-magical but superntural special ability steeped in Freudian and sci-fi terminology, as a single, wildly overpowered class using similar powers, to a number of classes using psionic powers that might, at the DM's option be magic or 'not magic,' to 4 classes, two similar, one somewhat different, one classic but never-before-psionic all explicitly using 'psionics' distinct from arcane, divine, or primal magic.

Yet, WotC hasn't shied away from putting psionics into the pipeline.

The Warlord has existed in one past edition, in one form. At least some of it's fans want it to grow beyond that.

No, that's really not much of a stumbling block.

And, I mean, seriously, what about the Ranger? The Ranger has that 'problem' worse than any class, it's the poster boy for no one really knows, let alone agrees, what it's really supposed to be.
Yet they tried to pull it together for the PH1, and are still trying out sub-classes, trying to come up with a few that stick.


As to how to please people with a variety of different visions of the same class? Sub-classes. Alternate class features. Options.

OK, this is nonsense. The Warlord is right there, in the 4e PH4. Fans differ on what they consider most important, and on what they might live without when pressed to 'make compromises' (why? with whom? in return for what?). Everything the Warlord was in 4e could be done in 5e.

5e is not some hobbled, strictly inferior version of D&D, it can do any class that 4e did, and probably do it better.

I apologize if it seemed that I meant Warlord fans were inflexible. I just mean that the fans don't 100% agree on what it needs to turn out as. As I mentioned in other posts though, I agree with you that it is not a real block, just a reasonable concern someone might present if they had a real reason for not wanting the Warlord. There is no reason of course that their reasonable concern outweigh your own reasonable request. If you go back through my posts, I am pretty much playing this discussion down the middle, with a bias towards Warlord. Not having any past experience or emotions on it, be they negative or positive, gives me a nice clean point of view on both sides, which is why I can understand the arguments against it, but still think it should happen.

On the ranger, that is kind of a nice example of what I am talking about. So many people were unhappy with the original that they have had to redo a ton of it. Unless some level of consensus or compromise is made on what goes into the Warlord class, the same thing will happen with him.

As for your last part, Compromises made with the designers, because they don't want to transfer every individual power a fan might at some point want, and in return for actually getting the Warlord in the game? I understand that no one* wants the warlord pulled over whole-cloth, but just hitting on the wants in this thread will take a little work, though no more than they put into the mystic.

*Someone probably does, but I count those people as unreasonable as the guys who refuse to allow the existence of the Warlord.

 

[Lanliss]

That's a general challenge for D&D designers. With the paladin they seem mostly to have succeeded. With the ranger they seem to have failed to some significant extent.

The warlord isn't any sort of special case here. WotC have copies of the 4e books to look over. You look at them, you collect data from the Character Builder (to see what patterns there are of popularity in warlord builds), and you have a go.

It seems that WotC have fairly well-developed mathematical models for the classes - the curious and non-traditional spreads of spell damage dice are enough to show that. The Battlemaster's manoeuvres are factored in, in some fashion, to that classes potency. So are its 4 attacks and action surge. Likewise the cleric's combat abilities and spell casting.

That's your starting point. As I've said, I don't know what the endpoint would be, but it seems plausible enough to me that there is one. And - as with other classes - you can build in flexibility in all sorts of ways to satisfy those who prefer inspiration to tactics to field medicine to . . . Clerics get to change their suite of abilities on a daily basis! Presumably a support class that allows choosing manoeuvres from a somewhat disparate range of options isn't going to be overpowered by comparison.

EDIT: [MENTION=996]Tony Vargas[/MENTION] in post 530 answers this better than I did. There's one class in one edition. You model it in 5e by adapting that class: healing, buffing (esp init, attacks movement), limited control (based around tactics, unit-level feints, etc). That's some tiny fraction of the scope of a class like the cleric, the bard, the warlock or the wizard. (I mean, [MENTION=7635]Remathilis[/MENTION], not far upthread, is saying it can't be done because it's too narrow!)

As far as I can see the initial design challenge is technical: how to make the manoeuvre/inspiration dice mechanic fill the space of full-casting? That's a non-trivial thing, because it's such a coarse-grained mechanic compared to all the minutiae of resource allocation and so on that are found in casting (although 5e's adopting of the Arcana Unearthed approach to "memorisation" has reduced that granularity somewhat, which makes the warlord easier to achieve).

1) See my post above, I agree with pretty much all of this. I am just playing Devil's advocate for the purpose of deeper discussion.

2) I just had a thought. What if the warlord had a sort of Ki (Inspiration points, trust, luck*, whatever you want to call it.), as well as a scaling die like the Monk has, but for maneuvers instead? Give some free abilities, like spending your bonus action to let an ally make a single attack, in the main class. Bigger things, like giving a full attack action, costs 1-2 points, and adds your Maneuver Die to their (Attack/damage/AC/Saving throw).

*I still think Luck should be a valid consideration for part of the Warlords ability. The same strategy won't work a hundred times in a row, so, early on, the Warlord should need to hope his enemies have an opening. After all, he won't be the Ultimate Tactician at 1st level.

 

[pemerton]

[MENTION=6801219]Lanliss[/MENTION] - In focusing on the BM model, I hadn't looked at the monk as a possibility. It's an interesting idea - I think something "ki-ish" (perhaps a new label is needed, but that seems a small thing) might work. Like you suggest, it already allows more fine-grained balance (because it can be 1 to X points for an effect; the same sort of economy is used for legendary actions).

I'm not sure if it's your intention, but your post tends to confirm my feeling that the challenges are technical - how to do it; not whether it can be done.

 

[Sacrosanct]

What else do you want me to do? I'm me, not you. If you want your opinions to be stated, then go ahead and state them!

This question doesn't even make sense.

If I want to play a warlord, and think the game doesn't give me what I want in that respect, then the fact that 1 million other people are happily playing their PDKs and BMs is neither here nor there. Their satisfaction doesn't give me the warlord that I want.

And why am I the gatekeeper of what I want from the game? Because it's a purely voluntary leisure activity. So no one else has the standing or authority to tell me what I do, or should, enjoy in respect of it.

Yes. Likewise for rangers - opinions range the gamut from "5e can already do everything I think the ranger should do" to "there's no way you can create a functional ranger + pet in 5e".

Likewise (apparently) for the ninja.

Luckily I don't have to make any decision about what WotC publishes, so I don't have to work out what is the best commercial way forward. In some recent thread (maybe this one? it's been going a while now) I posted that I doubt 5e will see a warlord published outside the existing fighter examples, or minor variations on that.

But that's a fact about commerce, not a fact about design space. As far as design goes, I've stated what I think the constraints are on warlord design in 5e (namely, (i) trying to fill full casting with some manoeuvre-like system; and (ii) making that work on a short-rest economy). Within those constraints it's largely a mathematical optimisation-type problem. I haven't tried to solve it. If someone can show that it's insoluble that would be interesting. But mere assertion about brokenness in the face of 18th level wizards who cast 2nd level spells at will isn't going to cut it.

This is a nice wordy post, but has exactly nothing to do with what we were talking about. Me beef is when I said I know exactly how warlord fans feel, because the ninja is my favorite class and 5e doesn't quite allow me to replicate the class in 5e's system the way I want (explaining in detail why), and folks like manbearcat, hussar, Tony, and you all pretty much took the position of "Yes you can, just put together x, y, and z parts." while at the same time telling people who are telling you the exact same thing about the warlord that they are wrong to do so. That's a double standard, or hypocritical. The only way it could be true is if you are the final word on what a warlord should and shouldn't be, and no one else's opinion matters.

Heck, manbearcat outright said that what I consider omitted abilities are trivial, to it can't be a comparison at all. I'm sure if I told aldarc or hussar or doctorbadwolf that the abilities they want from a warlord that are missing is trivial, they might strongly disagree. That's my point. The ability to replicate a warlord (or ninja) in 5e is entirely subjective. We know this, because we have large amounts of people who say as of right now, you can replicate both in 5e, and we have people who say you can't, and there is no consensus as to exactly the abilities a warlord and ninja should have. Without being able to have consensus, there is objectively no way anyone can say definitively one way or the other. The only thing that is objective is that WotC made attempts to cover both the warlord (PDK) and the ninja (SM), and that there are people who think they did a good enough job, and people who don't. That's it. Therefore, when I say that I know how the fans of the warlord feel, that's a true statement. Both are rooted in the exact same argument, and unless you're trying to deny my experiences or something, I don't know how you can say they aren't the same.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

It sounds like you don't actually care about the integrity of the model. There's a lot of that going around, lately. Lots of people seem to prefer treating it like some simple boardgame, where you can swap around game mechanics without regard for the inherent meaning behind anything. Or they want to treat is as an exercise in collaborative storytelling, without regard for the separation between character and author.

There are entire game systems which focus on one or the other of those concepts. There's no reason to turn 5E into one of them, though.

Or people just don't agree with your assessment of what "integrity of the model" even means, and what is or isn't compatible with it.

Right now, you can build an unarmored magical swashbuckling swordsman about 5 different ways, in 5e. Which isn't actually different, in he end, from just having a magical swordsman class, with multiple subclasses. The model remains un-borked. Why? Because there is nothing antithetical to it about there being multiple ways to approach a given concept.

And in fact, having multiple paths to the same goal is directly beneficial to roleplaying, which you claim it is antithetical to.

You earlier example of the nature cleric and Druid is a fun case, because they aren't even necessarily the same concept, and certainly in 3.5, are not the same concept. The Cleric is not an emmisary of nature itself, has no special connection with animals, etc. it is a Cleric, with all the conceptual underpinnings of that, that worships a god of nature. The temple of Silvanus in Waterdeep isn't run by Druids (or at least shouldn't be. Sometimes the do dumb things with FR), but by Clerics of Silvanus.

But let's go back to the gish. In my home campaign, set in an alt-history Earth, the players are all highly mobile sword fighters. Not all are swashbucklers in th classic sense, but at least three are. Using three different classes. Two are members of the same in world faction, and trained together. In the world, they use different techniques, but are called by the same titles, and trained in the same places, albeit with different mentors. Just like the twins I know who are both competitive in Kung Fu, and use different techniques/styles, and trained in the same school, with different mentors.

The mechanics reflect the fiction, and vise versa. But the fiction is more important than the mechanics. The mechanics serve the fiction.

If your idea of roleplaying, and the "integrity of the model", can't fit that, then I have little regard for *your definition of the relevant terms and concepts*, which says nothing of my regard for the concepts themselves.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

1) See my post above, I agree with pretty much all of this. I am just playing Devil's advocate for the purpose of deeper discussion.

2) I just had a thought. What if the warlord had a sort of Ki (Inspiration points, trust, luck*, whatever you want to call it.), as well as a scaling die like the Monk has, but for maneuvers instead? Give some free abilities, like spending your bonus action to let an ally make a single attack, in the main class. Bigger things, like giving a full attack action, costs 1-2 points, and adds your Maneuver Die to their (Attack/damage/AC/Saving throw).

*I still think Luck should be a valid consideration for part of the Warlords ability. The same strategy won't work a hundred times in a row, so, early on, the Warlord should need to hope his enemies have an opening. After all, he won't be the Ultimate Tactician at 1st level.

Leaders have to be lucky! Luck is perfect! Like, literally every great leader/general/commander in history and fiction is lucky. The Captian (I won't be moved from this hill!) should definately have Luck as a meta resource, comparable to superiority dice or ki.
[MENTION=15700]Sacrosanct[/MENTION]: I agree with you about the ninja, btw, and feel the same way about the assassin. The included the 3.5 prc as a subclass, but the disguise expert poisoner is t the only kind of assassin concept, and I don't care for it, personally. It's a far cry from what I like about playing assassins.

I was simoly pointing out that there is a huge difference of degree, and arguably a difference of type, between the lack of a warlord and lack of a ninja, in 5e. Both should be included, with purpose built mechanics, preferably as full classes. With the caveat that imo the ninja is an assassin, so it would be fine for it to be part of an assassin class, since Assassin is the more generic term.