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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6099815" data-attributes="member: 42582">Your question was, Are there literary/fantasy figures who are warlords? I answered.I take everything you say here to be obvious. By the same token, I could design a classless game in which both Aragorn and Gandalf are built from the same PC-build widgets.But no D&D class is going to be that broad. And even if we get narrower, your argument is just as strong for the ranger, paladin or barbarian, and arguably for the monk also (although it should perhaps be a rogue variant rather than a fighter variant). Likewise, by your argument, the wizard, cleric and bard should all be the same class (in literary terms, some sort of "mentor/wise person" type).Now this is a completely different point. I would make this argument, or something like it.It's widely observed that Rolemaster was a poor mechanical fit for LotR/MERP. The flip side to this is that another system might be a better mechanical fit. In mainstream fantasy terms, 4e (confined to Heroic tier) is one of those systems - mostly because of inspirational healing, which I think is pretty central to Aragorn and to Tolkien more generally.Playing classic D&D there is basically no way to generate a story with key Tolkienesque elements to it, because heroic inspiration will never matter until someone drops to low hit points at the end of the attrition-inducing "adventuring day", at which point it's time to break out the cleric (or the potions).Sure. The main mechanical argument is this: the warlord needs metagame-y abilities. For a mix of legacy and 4e-aversion reasons the fighter will not have such abilities. Therefore they need to be insulated in an optional warlord class.It's much the same reason for keeping the monk separate - namely, people don't want magic/mysticism infecting their fighter class. But for this, you could make the monk a fighter option, something along the lines of the original Oriental Adventures martial arts maneouvres, which mixed mundane and magical.Besides the reasons in my earlier paragraph - ie go this route and we won't get a warlord, due to the various constraints that are operating on fighter design - there is an additional issue. As others have posted in this thread, a warlord should have at least one strong mental stat. There is nothing in the fighter to support this, and it is non-trivial to introduce it. That's another, though on its own modest, reason to have a warlord.And on the manoeuvres thing, sure - you could do a warlord like that. And a barbarian - raging looks like a manoeuvre to me. And a monk - running up the side of a wall looks like a manouevre to me. And a paladin - smiting things looks like a manouevre to me. I don't see any distinctive fit for the warlord in this respect.</blockquote>

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