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[Gorgoroth]

After all this discussion, I've changed my mind and now consider Warlord worthy of a class from Level 1, similar to how Octavius grew up, taught to lead from a very young age. It might be something one can pick up as well, should you have the wit and charisma, but it could be just as well if they focused on tactics with the same singular devotion to their craft as a wizard would to his. That said, I can also still see Warlord as a prestige class of Fighter, but starting at an earlier level than 9th in OD&D/AD&D.

A warlord should still participate in war as a footsoldier, and many great generals in history did, when they were young men fighting in the blood and dirt, only to rise through the ranks. Watch Band of Brothers for what I mean. If you don't have first hand battlefield experience and risk your life at the front lines (and that implies going to boot camp like every other fighter, and spending his early years in the trenches with his future underlings), it's hard for your peers to respect you and follow you into hell. I.e. I definitely think a warlord can be modelled as a fighter subclass or prestige class more often (but not exclusively) than its own class per se. Also, if you make it a prestige class of a melee fighting type class, it opens up to have barbarian / warlords and so on and they certainly have tons of historical and fiction support. It would be very hard to model Conan as an OD&D fighter or a 4e Warlord, but as a DDN Barbarian / warlord prestige class I see no problem with that. I don't even necessarily think that warlords need to learn their craft from books or studying textbooks, they can also learn just as well what works on the battlefield and in the trenches, by, you know, not dying. And often enough to get out of so many hairy situations that others implicitly are in awe with their tactical acumen.

"How do you know that'll work?" asks the snooty recruit to the gnarled up veteran who can't even read : "Experience, lad". I.e. you can learn stuff first hand or from books, and both those are perhaps valid paths, but who would you follow into hell? Someone who's read about it? or someone who's been there and came back out again....alive! Who would give you more confidence? More courage to stand beside?

 

[Jeff Carlsen]

Another argument for merging the warlord with the fighter comes directly from fantasy fiction. It's the novice who first picks up a sword, after a time becomes a great warrior, and eventually becomes a great leader. Sure, in reality most officers came from a position of authority in the first place. But in fiction, the great leaders overwhelmingly start as what would be considered a fighter.

 

[Manbearcat]

A warlord should still participate in war as a footsoldier, and many great generals in history did, when they were young men fighting in the blood and dirt, only to rise through the ranks. Watch Band of Brothers for what I mean.

Absolutely. I brought up Captain Winters (and Captain Miller - Tom Hanks - from Saving Private Ryan) as my ideal for this archetype. Neither of them were Fighters (in the D&D sense).

Warlord's/Marshals are natural leaders/tacticians and the disciplines of their respective life paths typically reflect that. They likely find themselves thrust (possibly reluctantly) into positions of leadership in whatever they do. Their presence and natural acumen just bleeds "I will see us through this." They have "it".

Fighters are natural athletes; dextrous, strong, hard-nosed, tough, coordinated. They may be leaders but its most often a 2nd order function of "being the biggest and the strongest" and "lesser men falling into place behind them." Not due to any "it".

I'd put Aragorn as a Ranger/Warlord. I'd put Gandolf as a Wizard (Angel)/Warlord. I'd put Cyclops as a Warlord. Beast would definitely be secondary Warlord. Tywin Lannister - Warlord.

 

[mlund]

Warlord's/Marshals are natural leaders/tacticians and the disciplines of their respective life paths typically reflect that. They likely find themselves thrust (possibly reluctantly) into positions of leadership in whatever they do. Their presence and natural acumen just bleeds "I will see us through this." They have "it".

Fighters are natural athletes; dextrous, strong, hard-nosed, tough, coordinated. They may be leaders but its most often a 2nd order function of "being the biggest and the strongest" and "lesser men falling into place behind them." Not due to any "it".

Exactly. The Fearless Leader is often not the most dangerous or unstoppable man with a weapon. He's battle-tested to be sure, but he's not usually of the caliber of a Fighter (unless he's an Uber-Protagonist character - the kind you don't get to build in D&D because it's a shared-spotlight game, not a one-man show).

Every type of class has ways where it can express leadership, but Combat Tactics / Squad Command in particular fall under the domain of Martial characters.

Excelling at teamwork and tactical maneuvers as your bailiwick is a very different kettle of fish from being the Action Hero, the Wild Man, the Kung Fu Guy, or the Scoundrel - even though they are all pretty darn good and making sharp things cut through soft things that scream and bleed.

Frankly, I'd be inclined to create a Frankenstein's Monster out of parts from the 3.X Marshall and the 4E Warlord. He's have the standard suite of Weapons, Armor and Combat Expertise, but likely the smaller Hit Die (d8) and be less about ignoring personal damage (like with "Parry") and more about keeping his allies in good order (like a ranged version of "Protect"). I think I'd like to see a return of the Marshall's Auras (teammates within X distance gain a static benefit from teamwork / tactic) and some tag-team or support-a-friend "Tactics" instead of solo Maneuvers like the Fighter and Monk utilize.

- Marty Lund

 

[Crazy Jerome]

Just to be clear, my comment about merging them back was along the lines of the from an archetypical range perspective, the warlord has got more call to be a class than the barbarian, maybe the ranger, and even the paladin unless you get too caught up in there is something really class about the paladin that can't be done with a fighter/cleric (as opposed to the paladin code, which is another thing). Any kind of hard-nosed look at the classes without the blinders of past favorites would readily see this.

Now, that's about looking at the characters you can build. If someone wants to carve out a niche for the tactical fighter and call it "ranger", that can work too. It fits the ranger better than "nature boy".

 

[Blackwarder]

After following this excellent discussion (kudos to every one for keeping it civil and going forward) I became convinced that there are two distinct versions of what people think a warlord means and do, some of us think that a warlord is the tactical leader, that he should be just like a 4e tactical warlord with abilities that affect combat. OTOH some of us feel that the warlord should be a great leader of [enter-your-species-of-choice] and be the equivalent of a general.

I think that the tactical role could and should be rolled into the fighter maneuver list while the leadership aspect should be a speciality.

Warder

 

[Blackwarder]

Frankly, I'd be inclined to create a Frankenstein's Monster out of parts from the 3.X Marshall and the 4E Warlord. He's have the standard suite of Weapons, Armor and Combat Expertise, but likely the smaller Hit Die (d8) and be less about ignoring personal damage (like with "Parry") and more about keeping his allies in good order (like a ranged version of "Protect"). I think I'd like to see a return of the Marshall's Auras (teammates within X distance gain a static benefit from teamwork / tactic) and some tag-team or support-a-friend "Tactics" instead of solo Maneuvers like the Fighter and Monk utilize.

- Marty Lund

So what you suggest is a fighter with a smaller HD that exchange his parry maneuver for another maneuver and got maneuvers that keeps his allies in good order...

Warder

 

[mlund]

So what you suggest is a fighter with a smaller HD that exchange his parry maneuver for another maneuver and got maneuvers that keeps his allies in good order...

1.) You omitted the command auras.

2.) You also neglected the fact that "Parry" is not a maneuver.

3.) Fighters get Combat Surges too.

Sure, if you ignore everything in the class other than Combat Expertise and Weapon/Armor Proficiency, it's just the same thing with a new coat of paint - just like the Rogue (smaller hit die, worse equipment, more skills, swap maneuvers for tricks) and the Monk (smaller hit die, doesn't need equipment, custom maneuvers list, a couple of ki uses per day).

Characters with strictly martial abilities have a core chassis you have to balance around, and trying to introduce Daily or Encounter restrictions on Tactics sends a certain percentage of the population into apoplectic fits so you're stuck with the at-will baseline, limiting your metrics, certainly. Class is a lot more than metrics, or so we've been told.

Once you start replacing non-optional class features, hit dice, spell / maneuvers lists, etc. and such you've generally got another class on your hands. You can make the same reductionist arguments with Magician variants (Clerics and Wizards) as you can with Fighting Man variants (Rogues, Fighters, Barbarians, and Monks). It just doesn't get you very far (trust me, I was all for it but DNDNext went in another direction).

Just adding 4-5 things to the maneuvers list and creating a "Tactical Leader" Fighting Style isn't going to cut it. Then you've just murdered the Warlord and watered a couple of features down badly enough to fence them to the Fighter without causing play-balance issues. You've also completely eliminated any aspect of choice in the design of a Warlord because there's only room for 1-style (tops!) worth of maneuvers on the Fighter's already-crowded list.

- Marty Lund

 

[Gorgoroth]

If DDN were modular towards archetype niches like Pathfinder, I think a warlord archetype of fighter, with parry class feature swapped out for something 4e-esque could be do-able. I wouldn't want people who truly want to play a warlord from level 1 to have to take a plain old fighter then wait a few levels to prestige class into it (despite my thinking that this would model reality better). I guess we'll see how they implement it, I give a 50-50 chance between a complete class and some type of meta-class of fighter. Then again, the other examples of wizard warlords and barbarian warlords would have to be seen. I don't think straight multiclass option, where you'd give up spellcasting levels to split with warlord is going to do Gandalf builds any favours. In the sense that a specialty could give a class feature or two, or free access to MDDs (so that wizards or non-melee types might take it), would make it a no-brainer to have in every party. I'd rather he not have any unmagical healing and let the healer kit handle that role.

A warlord is not the same concept as a field medic, and should not be handled by the same person, in my opinion (and this coming from a guy who played a ranger|warlord hybrid in 4e and loved it. it was OP though, for sure. waaay OP. I gave up very little on the ranger side to get a buttload of healing, good powers, and other boons). Reorient the Axis was one of the coolest powers in my killswitch build, BUT I will say this : although it was super fun to play and tactical, it felt extremely chess-like and there is no easy way you could implement that in a battle system that doesn't assume a grid. Just too specific to positioning to be useable. The wording would have to be both precise and flexible, to allow grid and non-grid based combat viable without slowing the whole game down. If a series of quick skirmishes in DDN requires the battlemat to be broken out to accomodate the particulars of the warlord, that will be a huge design fail. Then again, OTOH, wizard spells in AD&D often had very specific particulars but they weren't grid-based quite often, they had much more fluid descriptors. E.g. volumetric fireballs. In that case, a grid actually smears the possibilities that you can do. Blow up the bottom of a well and clear up all the slime all the way up the pipe...is not something you can do in 4e, because it dreams in 2-dimensions. That's another thing, tactical options should not assume 2 dimensions. I thought that was a real cheapening of D&D when every single power was designed with a 2d-battle grid in mind. So far, the fast n loose aspect of DDN is what I hope goes forward, and let's hope the implementation of warlord party favours doesn't ruin the fast-paced action in the theater of the mind that the game currently supports. And I'm a huge minis fan, I have hundreds, but I want a game where it's optional and the 4e warlord and wizard and even most of the classes make it compulsory.

 

[I'm A Banana]

The big question is, does 5e's Fighter class (and the D&D Fighter class generally) encapsulate this:



Does the 5e Fighter class give you the ability to:

- Give advantage on Insight and Perception checks to all allies within 50 ft.
- Give all allies advantage on Initiative.
- Give allies bonuses to tactical movement, defenses, attacks, damage, temporary hit points, and outright gains in the action economy. Do this on both your own turn and as immediate actions triggered by your allies or your enemies actions. Do this especially effectively for an allied ambush or a nova.
- Heal allies; Call out to a wounded ally and offer inspiring words of courage and determination that invigorates your comrade.


The answer to both of these should be pretty clear.

The question isn't "does it already do this," but rather, "do these things need to be a different class, or are they part of what a fighter could do?"

IE: Where, mechanically, should the home for these abilities lie? Are they things that are not part of the ability set of a fantasy warrior, and thus need a new class, or are they things that are within the ability set of a fantasy warrior, and thus belong in the Fighter class.