D&D 5E (2014) For the Record: Mearls on Warlords (ca. 2013)

[Guest 6801328]

Anecdote from me:

My ex-bro-in-law is an atheist. He's also an accomplished musician and takes paying gigs all over. Including a regular spot at a church.

One year, they did some mega-concert in Brazil. Now, he didn't know anything about it and he's not a believer. But he said the attendees came up for faith healing. He told me that he was expected to receive the faithful and to lay hands on them. Each band member did. And when my XBiL did this, to many many people (he said this went on for an hour), many of them fainted at his touch.

I'm not making any claims about the workings of God. (I'm a believer but we'll set that aside). I am saying there are some mental processes, maybe in this case it was a form of mass hysteria, that truly do produce euphoria and adrenaline and all manner of weirdness that normally wouldn't happen.

These are chemical or hormonal reactions (& I feel that they have to be bc brains).

So in this sense, only, I don't feel that "Inspiring Word" is so outside human comprehension to be automatically ruled out.

Ok, awesome example. I love it. (And, by the way, I grew up in a household that believed strongly in stuff like this.)

It's telling that this worked worked even when your XBiL did it. To me that says the explanation lies in the faith of the recipient, not the intrinsic qualities of the giver. Which means we're talking about a totally different mechanism than "some people are such natural leaders that they can exhort people to heal themselves." Unless we're attributing it to a charismatic leader who has been dead for 2,000 years.

And since we're talking about faith it seems to me we're straying into the realm of historical/fictional source material for Clerics. Yes, the mechanic by which Clerics heal is different, but if we're mapping game concepts ("magical healing spells") to real-world antecedents, let's face it: the Christian tradition/myth of divine healing is why there's a Cleric class. Unlike, say, fighting styles, we can't look for actual 1:1 historically provable antecedents for spell-casting; the tradition derives from something mundane and this is it.

If Warlords claim faith healing as the basis for their own tradition, what's left for Clerics?

No, I think "Live, damn you!" is better source material for Warlords, but then we run into the interpersonal bond vs. extrapersonal charisma problem. It's a narrative device almost always used in the development of the story, not in the development of the character.

Does that make sense? Conan grits his teeth and flexes his muscles and slays enemies because "ferocity" is part of his character. Trinity does not have some intrinsic ability to motivate people to resist death, but the growth of the bond between her and Neo is part of the story's plot, and it's that which enables her to "heal" him. (Otherwise it would have been Morpheus who called him back.)

Thus building a character concept around that action seems...odd. Like building a character class concept around the narrative devices of facing your fears, or leaving home, or outgrowing your friends, or the loss of innocence, etc.

A character backstory and roleplaying concept? Sure. Just not a class.

 

[Imaro]

I was assuming that the character had succeeded on the DSTs. Since it's perfectly possible to stabilize someone even without having a feat or using magic (a DC 10 Wis(Med) check--at least one person should have a nonnegative Wis mod), and at worst you're back to 1 HP after 1d4 hours, a few hours being protected by your friends plus a long rest guarantees that you're back on your feet, full HP. How did a wound, which was so bad that you were dying of it 12 hours ago, disappear so completely that you are now back on your feet?

Who said the wound disappeared? My guess is that the poultice, herbs, etc. used upon you worked well enough that with 12 hrs of rest the effects of the wounds are nullified... again happens all the time in fantasy stories.

 

[Bawylie]

But the class is not "built around that concept" at all. It includes it, yes, but that's not what we've been saying really.

We've been saying that some phenomena exists, and some tropes exist, in which extraordinary things happen to people who are previously "dead." And like wise there's some sense of influence wherein a perfectly healthy and conscious person can be so "moved" as to simply lose consciousness.

That's the phenomena. And while clerics and the laying of hands is one thing, that phenomena isn't strictly limited to that scenario. It just happens to be a convenience example.

Edit: Examples of this stuff occurring was requested in fiction. It was provided. It was requested in real life/analogs. Examples were provided. Examples were requested of similar phenomenon among strangers. That was provided.

It seems to me, the point ought to be conceded that the phenomenon "exists" at least to the extent that dragons and unicorns exist.

From there, it's a question of implementation, not possibility.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

And yet you believe those burns can be talked away... go figure.

Yes. Because I have accepted that there is a fundamental oddity to HP. I was merely returning to a pre-acceptance mindset, to show how I feel that if you find that odd, it's even more odd that you don't find these other things odd.

Not odd at all... Conan, Elric, Aragorn, Gandalf and many other heroes of fantasy do this on a regular basis... But hey if you think it's odd for the genre, it's your game so change it.

Nah, it's not odd for the genre. It's odd because HP are odd. Books can do whatever they like--they have an all-powerful author and non-agency-bearing characters, rather than a phenomenally-powerful DM and agency-bearing players. Different things are appropriate for each, so no particular thing needs to be the same. Particularly when we're talking about mechanics that exclusively exist to make the game playable, and which would be not only superfluous but wholly alien to the authors of every character you reference.

Again read some Conan stories...

I'll pass, thanks; I was mostly referencing Gygax, who explicitly called that specific situation ridiculous. (A specific, low-level character being a single blow from death even at full health, vs. that same specific character at high level taking more wounds than a warhorse and being perfectly content.)

Also, the argument given above. And, beyond that: why does this apply to everybody? Why does a shrimpy Wizard with 10 Con become tougher than a battle-hardened warrior when the former has adventured for a couple years and the latter is fresh out of military training? I could maybe buy it for a select few, preternaturally-hardy individuals; I don't buy it for the spoony Bard and the airy elf Druid and the waddling halfling Thief.

It's called "Rally" Battlemasters can do it for others.

Nope. Rally is THP. Second Wind is real HP. Why can the Fighter give himself real HP, but can't draw real HP out of others? Clearly all people can't draw on their hidden reserves of extra HP in the middle of combat without magic--it's something only trained/hardened weapon-focused characters can do (and not even all of those--Paladins and Rangers can't do it without magic, and Barbarians can't do it at all!). If that's the case, then it seems at least plausible that you could try to train just one person, who knows that these reserves are present in almost everyone (multiclass requirement: 13 Str or 13 Dex) but that most don't know how to tap it, so they can draw on that 'internal resource.'

 

[I'm A Banana]

I would say that in all the examples Bawylie cited earlier (not the faith healer post) it wasn't anything intrinsic to the individual that carried the power, it was the bond between the characters.

Jumping off of this a bit - one of my favorite "inspiratoinal" mechanics in recent games I've played was the ability in Xenoblade Chronicles to basically shout at an ally when they had a chance to deal a crit or when they were about to take a big hit to help them. Your ability to do this (how easy it was) was indeed based on the bond between the characters - two very intimate characters could give each other the heads up more often and it was more reliable to trigger the effect.

I've looked a little bit at modeling similar mechanics in D&D, but so far, so many of the D&D players I've seen are reluctant to form this bond with other PC's, to say "Ed's PC is my close friend" or "I'm romantically interested in Julie's PC." I bet that could be incentivized further.

But that does give us another way to model a warlord getting someone up when they're at 0 hp: damage negation. Something like "If an ally within 30 ft. of you is damaged by an effect that them to 0 hp, you can use your reaction to prevent that damage. You regain the use of this ability after taking a short or long rest."

Hell, that's subclass-sized, right there.

 

[Guest 6801328]

Ok, but the other abilities supposedly derive from the same core trait: natural-born leadership. And that's a trait that should belong to every archetype that desires it, whether they are savages or scoundrels or sages. Because in much of our storytelling tradition the "hero" is a natural leader; the others are called "supporting cast."

 

[Ristamar]

For better or for worse, the Warlord's form of motivational/inspirational healing is a barrier that many people cannot mentally hurdle. Not will not... cannot. It's hardwired. It's the straw that ultimately breaks suspension of disbelief, and no amount of rhetoric or mechanical correlations or analogous rules will reconcile it.

While neither side is right or wrong, it's probably not a stretch to assume the designers saw this and other divisive elements from 4th edition via feedback and play testing, and they chose not carry the Warlord into the new edition (for now).

 

[Guest 6801328]

Jumping off of this a bit - one of my favorite "inspiratoinal" mechanics in recent games I've played was the ability in Xenoblade Chronicles to basically shout at an ally when they had a chance to deal a crit or when they were about to take a big hit to help them. Your ability to do this (how easy it was) was indeed based on the bond between the characters - two very intimate characters could give each other the heads up more often and it was more reliable to trigger the effect.

I've looked a little bit at modeling similar mechanics in D&D, but so far, so many of the D&D players I've seen are reluctant to form this bond with other PC's, to say "Ed's PC is my close friend" or "I'm romantically interested in Julie's PC." I bet that could be incentivized further.

The One Ring has a mechanic called "Fellowship Focus"; you designate somebody in the group as your FF (some LMs won't let you pick somebody unless you've completed at least one adventure together). If you spend Hope (precious commodity) to "directly" protect your FF, you get the Hope refunded. At the conclusion to the adventure, if your FF is "unharmed" you get another point of Hope; otherwise you get one point of Shadow.

So risk/reward mechanic built from defining those bonds. (And, yes, there are many long discussion about the interpretations of "directly" and "unharmed".)

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

Seriously?

Then when is it ok to narrate a serious wound? Never?

If you have a bunch of rigid thinkers? Probably just about never. It should be OK when an NPC you, the DM, knows wont be getting healing. Otherwise you're describing gut stabs or slashed throats which can be stabilized and restored with a speed that would impress The Flash and defies our understanding of biology. Describe the results of a third failed death save as a grievous wound upon inspection, or having bled out/died from shock/whatever. That same attack when the person gets treatment? Turns out most of that blood wasn't theirs.

 

[Guest 6801328]

It's the straw that ultimately breaks suspension of disbelief, and no amount of rhetoric or mechanical correlations or analogous rules will reconcile it.

For the record, although I'm in the demographic you're describing I don't think of it as my disbelief being suspended. I think "suspension of disbelief" is in the hands of the individual; the game is already so divorced from reality that to claim "this detail makes it unbelievable" is, imho, B.S..

Rather than suspension of disbelief or breaking of immersion, what bothers me is the crossing of the boundary between that which belongeth to mechanics and that which belongeth to storytelling.