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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7675063" data-attributes="member: 996">IRL, the point of morale was to stay on the field, fighting, longer.  Inspiration is obviously closely tied to that concept.  And, of course, in the context of the warlord, its Inspiring Word restored hps (often among other things, depending on player choices)...Too-short combats are anti-climactic, too-long ones eventually become boring.  Frankly, 5e has swung the 'fast combat' pendulum a little far, so having more than one in-combat 'healer'-psuedo-role PC in the party might not be a terrible idea.  But, it's an idea that's flexible to implement.  If you want really fast combat, no healers and lots of DPR is the party configuration for you.  That would completely fail to capture the Warlord.  That doesn't replace the cleric.The critical difference between a party with a cleric (or Bard or Druid) is not healing between combats, total healing per day, nor even high-level spells like Regenerate or Raise Dead.  It's in-combat healing that enables the D&D combat dynamic. It may be a tenet of D&D, but not of modularity.  For modules to pop in and out and work smoothly you need points of attachment.  A Variant like changing the time to heal fully or number of HD doesn't work so smoothly precisely because healing spells are independent of it.  When you have a single mechanic that most/all healing is linked to, you can adjust healing to fit your campaign's theme/tone/sub-genre/whatever without having to change many different rules.  That's one way in which the Warlord might reasonably differ from the cleric.  Extending the adventuring day with a cleric means using a lot of its slots for healing, which reduces the participation of the cleric's player, and the contribution of the PC in other areas, including out of combat.  So a cleric might extend the adventuring day very little.If you did want the Warlord to extend the adventuring day, up-front whole-party Temp hps from inspiration would be a way to do it.  It'd be separate from in-combat hp restoration, which, again, would differentiate it from the Cleric, while still filling the critical aspects of the role implied by it. Unless it's a bonus action like Healing Word.  Which, really, would make a lot of sense, especially for lead-from-the-front inspiration. Insisting that the Warlord not get his full abilities, then accusing him of being lacking is a pretty lame debating tactic.  Let the Warlord do his thing as well as he did in 4e, and he'll keep a party going in combat just fine, thank you.  It really needs to be its own class.  5e design philosophy is to make each class unique, and the close candidates, functionally, use magic, which makes them wholly unsuitable, while the close candidates conceptually, are locked inflexibly into a narrowly-focused single-target DPR role, also rendering them unsuitable.  5e tried very hard to evoke the classic D&D feel, and the Warlord concept (the archetypes it models) was something that classic D&D consistently failed to deliver.  The warlord was simply an innovation, and the only way to include it is to accept that it can't be hobbled by the classic-D&D design imperative, but must be presented as an an optioal alternative that Houdinis that particular straightjacket.</blockquote>

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