D&D 5E I don't actually get the opposition for the warlord... or rather the opposition to the concept.

[mellored]

Play 4e if you want the warlord. It's designed for that board game and well balanced.

The marshal was designed for 3.5.
It was renamed and redesigned in 4e.
No reason it could not be redesigned for 5e. (and possibly renamed again).

Make a warlord if you have to. Somehow I doubt people on this forum can stop you despite their hatred of it.

There's no reason for hatred. The marshal did not spill your milk or steal your candy.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Okay, you get one response from me.

In regards to bringing back the fallen it takes one line in the warlord that says "while you are granting a creature temporary hit points, that creature is not dying and can act normally."

Yet that actually /is/ an odd exception to a basic rule. It would certainly be a nice feature to have: you can bring allies back into a fight, you can apply it to unwounded allies before a fight, two of the nicer features of both restoring hps and granting temp hps. So for in-combat and pre-combat it'd be a pretty nice feature. I'm not sure it's fair to give a class an exception like that to the way temp hps work, and it strikes me as needlessly complex, but it's a step towards 'an offer you can't refuse.'

Ideas like that are what happens when you stop to consider solutions and alternatives to a problem rather than just dismissing them.

I've considered possibilities like that before, and they generally get shot down as 'OP.'

In regards to the prescience, well, that strikes me as more of a feature than a bug. Because you'd expect a class designed to be the tactician to involve strategic thinking and use of abilities especially when said class is aimed at 4e players - who ostensibly enjoy a game with tactical depth.

There's that line between character and player again. The Warlord should be able to model a character who is inspiring and tactically adept, even if the player is neither. Requiring near prescience on the party of the player certainly doesn't help with that. Reactive powers that interrupt the action and change it can, though, and they can be very similar. A damage mitigation ability, like an AC boost, that you put on an ally in advance, for instance, requires some 'prescience' on the part of the player, it can easily seem 'wasted' even if you put in on a PC who gets attacked it the attack roll is so high it hits anyway, or so low it would have missed anyway - conversely, a reaction that grants an AC bonus after you've heard the result of the attack roll is prettymuch always going to work, and can represent a warning or other all-but-'prescient' tactical insight on the part of the /character/ in the narrative. Taken far enough, abilities good at modeling tactical ability (or, more extreme, actual magical prescience) can require retconning whole scenes.

It can be fun to dovetail player tactics and abilities modeling a character with tactical acumen, but it's not necessary.

At that point the difference between temporary hit points and "real" hit points is just verbiage. They do exactly the same thing, but you use different words for one. What's the point?

They still don't stack, and can exceed your max hps, so not exactly the same, no.

Suddenly much closer, though.

Temporary hit points expire. The adrenaline wears off. You cease to be inspired. Your injuries catch up and you need a rest.

In 5e, when you take a long rest. So, not that handy.

To /really/ capture the idea of inspiration-fueled extra hps, you could even create an additional category of hps beyond restored hp, current hps, maximum hps, and temp hps. The game has design space for that, since 5e's pretty wide-open that way. But, it does seem like excess complexity, when simply restoring hps works fine, and it'd be taking hit points to a lower level of abstraction than they'd ever had in the game before.

Actual restoration is curing wounds. Healing. (To some extent.)

'To some extent,' means that actually restoring hps is /not/ curing wounds. Not literally Healing. (To some extent).

D&D hps are abstract. You can lose hps to something that in no way implies you're being wounded - like psychic damage. You can re-gain hps from something that in no way implies physical wounds are disappearing - Second Wind, a natural 20 on your death save, spending HD after a mere hour's rest.

This response just feels like moving the goalpost. The complaint regarding warlords granting temp HP has long been "but that doesn't get fallen PCs up."

A complaint, and a big one. It also seems to be a major sticking point the other way. Do you really think people who would relent on Inspiring Word if it didn't work on unconscious characters would be equally willing to relent if it got unconscious characters up, but with the fig-leaf of the hps granted being otherwise 'temporary?'

As nice as a special-snowflake hp mechanic might be for modeling the Warlord's Inspiration - and, indeed, as nice as it might be to differentiate healing word vs cure wounds vs healing potions vs Second Wind &c in similar ways - it seems like it would just open another set of objections.

Which is a pretty good example of why we should never have a warlord: because there no room for compromise or a middle ground, because nothing is good enough to be acceptable.

A much simpler compromise, without adding needless complexity to the rules, has already been proposed: include both hp-restoration and temp hps (among other things) as options when the Warlord inspires an ally. Give the player flexibility to customize his Warlord to eschew certain of those while having versatility in when & how he uses the ones available to him. It's a level of flexibility a support-oriented class needs, anyway, and it lets each campaign and each player implement their vision of the class.

Would you be opposed to a Warlord feature that converted unused THP into real HP following either the cessation of combat or as a result of a short rest?

Another idea that's been floated to help address some of the hp-model objections to Inspiring Word is that the hps restored would 'require' mundane attention - bandaging and such, at the earliest possible opportunity. It's mainly a narrative thing. I don't think an actual rule would be required, given how abstract hps have always been in D&D, but if hp-restoration were to be modeled in greater detail for Inspiring Word than it has been for any other hp-related mechanic in the game, that could be part of it.

 

[ZickZak]

The marshal was designed for 3.5.
It was renamed and redesigned in 4e.
No reason it could not be redesigned for 5e. (and possibly renamed again).

The battlemaster? *shrug*

 

[jayoungr]

Well, the PrC genie (there may even be a Genie PrC at some point) is out of the bottle - that's where the really crazy class bloat was in 3.5 - so that slippery slope is already pretty well greased as it is.

Side point, but to be fair, prestige classes are only in an experimental "playtest" stage right now. I wouldn't assume that they'll ever go further than the Unearthed Arcana article, or that they'll reach 3.5 proportions if they do.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Side point, but to be fair, prestige classes are only in an experimental "playtest" stage right now. I wouldn't assume that they'll ever go further than the Unearthed Arcana article, or that they'll reach 3.5 proportions if they do.

Sure. Wasn't trying to imply that a 'slippery slope' argument was valid, just that it's already got a bigger issue to be fallacious with.

The marshal was designed for 3.5.
It was renamed and redesigned in 4e.
No reason it could not be redesigned for 5e. (and possibly renamed again).

The Marshal was designed for the Miniature's Handbook which was compatible with 3.0, even though it was released after 3.5 rolled - so maybe a little more 3.0-official than a 3pp class, but definitely less so than even a class in a supplement. And it was terrible, woefully overspecialized and underpowered, didn't even make the late-3.5 'Tier' list - if it had, doubtless it would have been Tier 6.

The battlemaster? *shrug*

That name is already taken by a fighter sub-class, a take on the 4e 'Weaponmaster' Fighter (actual 4e fighter, as opposed to the Slayer Fighter, and Essentials sub-class, which, like the Champion, was very much a DPR-focused class), well, bits of it, anyway - 17 maneuvers trying to stand in for 400+ is obviously pretty short shrift. I get that some folks don't like the name, some of them even for reasons not made up for edition warring purposes, even if none of those reasons hold water (they all are equally applicable objections to one or more existing classes that made it into 5e with their names unchanged, for instance). But every alternative I've ever heard proposed has been worse - narrower or less evocative or with muddled connotations ('Marshal' suffering from all three).

 

[ZickZak]

17 maneuvers trying to stand in for 400+ is obviously pretty short shrift

Every single Warlord power in Compendium = 334. Ranger - 373, Rogue - 326 etc. Seems like Battlemaster is doing much better than most.

 

[ChrisCarlson]

The Marshal was designed for the Miniature's Handbook which was compatible with 3.0... <snip> And it was terrible, woefully overspecialized and underpowered... <snip>

What a coincidence. The Warlord was designed for the previous edition which was compatible only with itself (4.0). And it was terribly, overly opportunist and prone to being overpowered.

It's been a few weeks, so forgive me if I'm confusing you with someone else here, but didn't you concede that Warlords in play were often broken? Or was that mellored or maybe El Mahdi? I only recall someone from that side of the argument admitting to the fact. So many threads, and so many pages, it'd be hard to mine out the original post(s) saying as much.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Every single Warlord power in Compendium = 334. Ranger - 373, Rogue - 326 etc. Seems like Battlemaster is doing much better than most.

Fighter, 426. The Battlemaster is a fighter weighing in at 17 maneuvers. 17, you might notice, is a lot less than 426. Losing 96% of your stuff is pretty brutal, even if other folks lost 99%. And, it's not like casters lost 96% of their spells, the wizard went from 439 to 215, about 50%, and that's not counting the new spells that have already surfaced...

 

[mellored]

What a coincidence. The Warlord was designed for the previous edition which was compatible only with itself (4.0). And it was terribly, overly opportunist and prone to being overpowered.

It's been a few weeks, so forgive me if I'm confusing you with someone else here, but didn't you concede that Warlords in play were often broken? Or was that mellored or maybe El Mahdi? I only recall someone from that side of the argument admitting to the fact. So many threads, and so many pages, it'd be hard to mine out the original post(s) saying as much.

Prone to being overpowered is probably the correct way to say it. I think i did the calculations at some point, and it was OP in 30% of a randomly selected group. Though groups are rarely randomly selected.
And still not nearly as OP as wizards/clerics/druids where in 3e.

Plus, most of the already OP things the warlord had in 4e have been solved with bounded accuracy and tighter action economy.

I mean in 4e you could (with a large amount of char-opping) grant an opportunity attack, a free action attack, and a reaction attack, with a +int (10) bonus to-hit all on the same turn. And given that a basic attack was ~80% of your normal damage, that's ~480% normal damage.

In 5e the same warlord could grant 1 reaction attack, with +int (5) bonus to-hit. And each attack would deal only 50% of most characters (past 5). That's ~75% normal damage.

 

[mellored]

Fighter, 426. The Battlemaster is a fighter weighing in at 17 maneuvers. 17, you might notice, is a lot less than 426. Losing 96% of your stuff is pretty brutal, even if other folks lost 99%. And, it's not like casters lost 96% of their spells, the wizard went from 439 to 215, about 50%, and that's not counting the new spells that have already surfaced...

I think it's a pretty disingenuous. Many 4e powers where simply upgrades to already existing powers.

Come and get it, and warriors urging are the exact same ability. One was just "at higher level" (1d8 extra damage, and a 5' bigger area).