Mike Mearls Happy Fun Hour: The Warlord

[Kinematics]

Can someone please provide the link for the 3rd episode.

YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywqZv5sejsY

 

[Remathilis]

He spent her time learning strategy and tactics, instead of practicing his sword swing.

Is the warlord one of those new genderfluid elves?

 

[Aldarc]

Another question then.

Why shouldn't the Warlord be able to fight well?

The Warlord should be able to fight well. The issue amounts to (1) how well, and (2) with what sort of focus/emphasis. If we presume, as you do, that being able to fight well equates to the Fighter class, then we may also be within our perogative to ask "Why shouldn't the paladin, ranger, or barbarian fight well?" Most advocates for a warlord, IME, would probably rank the Warlord alongside the paladin, ranger, and barbarian in 5E in that they fight "good enough" that they receive a second attack (~5th level), but no additional attacks.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Why shouldn't the Warlord be able to fight well?

Not an issue, really. In 5e, everyone can fight pretty well. You get HD to weather fights and weapons or cantrips (or both) for offense, and everyone gets the same proficiency bonus. In a basic competence sense, wizards fight as well as fighters. An S&B fighter and an abjurer wizard with the same DEX, playing darts at the pub, will be about evenly matched in terms of accuracy. In the practical sense of who wins duels when magic's not involved, the fighter, however, is "Best at Fighting."

There are only a couple of D&D concepts that really call for outright non-combatant status: the Pacifist Cleric and the Lazy Warlord, for instance.

The other warlord concepts don't call for it to be the best at fighting, either, nor even second-best like a Barbarian or tied-for-best-if-I-can-use-magic like a Paladin, nor placing like the Warlock or Rogue by virtue of DPR, nor showing like the Ranger. Well, the Bravura maybe should 'show' in personal combat - maybe get a choice of two or three melee combat styles and an Extra Attack at 5th (really, it's the only Warlord flavor that would be plausible as a Fighter sub-class). And, the Defender/Protector/(lifeguard ;P )/etc that popped up in this thread maybe should have, well, Protection or Defensive styles.

I think there is a difference between what a warlord does and simply having an entourage of followers.

The difference is features that support the concept. The old-school fighter as 'Lord' is like a magician class that has all sorts of mystical trappings and flavor and automatically gains a respected 'court magician' position at 9th level - but doesn't actually know how to cast spells.

Caesar, for example, strikes me less as a "figther" and more as a "warlord." I don't think he necessarily would have been a "high level fighter," but, rather, a moderately levelled warlord. But I also think that a lot of mytho-historical figures that I think of as warlord also come out of literature such as Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

One of the problems with modeling characters from myth/legend, literature, and especially history, in D&D, is that D&D so tightly links competence to level, so if you were really world-class at something, you had to be high level, and thus had to be a beast in combat. If you were world-class at anything remotely martial & didn't use magic, you fell into fighter, for lack of anything else, and had no choice but to be a tank. Particularly good at strategy & tactics, or a natural leader & great public speaker, but without magic, shouldn't map to "Best in personal combat, before magic - or strategy or tactics - come into it..."

The 3e Sorcerer says hello. The 3e Warlock also says hello.

Yes, there have been a lot of classes born /just/ of mechanical necessity/experimentation, like the 3.0 Sorcerer, 3.5 Warlock, Warblade, War Mage, (really anything starting with War it seems like), Ardent and PrCs like the Mystic Theurge among others, and like the 4e Avenger, Invoker, and Warden.
There have also been those born of just a concept that, while do-able mechanically, were excluded from the best ways to do it by over-narrow fluff. The Witch might be an example, a wizard could be a witch, but all the Vancian stuff didn't fit. Or a non-LG holy warrior.
Then there are those at the happy intersection of mechanical & conceptual 'need' (more like 'nice to have' it's a game, it's not like we /need/ clerics or wizards, either), like the 4e Warlord & Shaman, the post-Essentials Skald and Elemental Sorcerer, the 2e CHP priest, the 3e Artificer, etc...

But, regardless of the genesis of a concept, it becomes a valid concept, for D&D, just by having been there. Especially in the context of 5e.

 

[Tony Vargas]

he didn't note anything regarding needing to be a certain level to use any given ability. They might be like the Battlemaster's maneuvers, where you just keep picking up more options as you level. I think he wants to avoid making them spell slot-like, in that you get this ability at level 3, and this ability at level 5, and this at level 7, etc.

That was a problem with BM maneuvers, some of them started out a bit strong for level 3, and then as you leveled, you picked your 4th-string and later choices, so it ended up front-loaded. Aside from that BM CS dice are strongly analogous to spell slots, say, of a Warlock. As you level up, your slots get higher level or your CS dice bigger, and they do more, even when you use them to use a maneuver or cast a low-level spell you first learned at 3rd level.

Level gating, in general, in D&D is a major way of showing advancement within a class, and the way the BM lost sight of it didn't work out to well, IMHO.

I don't think gambits should get a half-level rating like spells, nor a level-you-picked-'em-at rating like 4e powers, rather it'd be pretty intuitive and reasonable to level-gate them by Tiers of play. So 'maneuvers' like the BM's half-dozen vaguely-warlordly maneuvers, could be Apprentice-Tier gambits, then you graduate to heroic battle-plans, then grand stratagems, and finally pass down a legacy of a new military doctrine, or something like that. ::shrug::

I've disagreed with you quite a bit in this thread, but your comments on frontloading and level gating are spot on, and are one of the reasons the alchemist artificer feels so bad. You don't want your unique features be I pick the second and third and 4th best choices of a given set you want to really feel like you are growing as a character.

That is why I used the warlock as a template

That was pretty much the route that I took, with my warlord maneuvers gated by class level and prerequisite maneuvers, similar to warlock invocations.

This was my idea as well, three tiers of maneuvers (some lifted from BM, some new and some warlord exclusive) fueled by lots of superiority dice. More powerful maneuvers were level locked.

This unsurprisingly reminds me of Mearls's work back in Malhavoc Press's Arcana Evolved with the "Ritual Warrior" class he designed. The class had tiers of martial rites/maneuvers that operated in a similar fashion as spells. At high enough level, some of those rites became at-will. It even used Concentration checks to maintain some of its abilities.

That's sounding suspiciously consensus-like.

 

[Satyrn]

That's sounding suspiciously consensus-like.

Quick! Someone toss in a disagreenade!

 

[Tony Vargas]

Quick! Someone toss in a disagreenade!

Lay down a suppressive fire with the blamethrowers and fall back by squads...

 

[chunkosauruswrex]

That's sounding suspiciously consensus-like.

*Inserts distracting slightly snarky comment designed to sidetrack and derail discussion

 

[cbwjm]

The same reason he shouldn't be able to cast spells. He spent her time learning strategy and tactics, instead of practicing his sword swing.

Ideally (IMO), a fighter would be able to choose between fireball, mass healing word, and haste multi-attacking, inspiring, and buffing. With some options to specialize in one or the other.

That might be how you see the warlord. I've always seen them as just a different type of fighter, it was how I built them in 4e. In my case, fitting them in as a 5e fighter subclass fits perfectly. It's probably one of the main reasons people argue so much about it, no one can agree how it should look.

 

[Satyrn]

That might be how you see the warlord. I've always seen them as just a different type of fighter, it was how I built them in 4e. In my case, fitting them in as a 5e fighter subclass fits perfectly. It's probably one of the main reasons people argue so much about it, no one can agree how it should look.

The really silly thing about arguing about this - how it ought to look - is that it simply doesn't need to look one true way. It can exist as a fighter subclass right alongside a class all its own, just like the wizard does.