D&D has never done low-no magic well. AD&D is lower than 3e on in terms of magical saturation, but its never did either well without extensive houseruling. ... No magic is practically impossible without severe modifications to the ruleset and huge changes to source material (everything from monsters to math)... Which brings us back around to the thrust of this tangent; is a warlord needed to do nonmagical? If you say "yes", then you agree nonmagical play was impossible before 4e.
Not literally impossible of course, but, as you laid out, above, not something the game was trying to do, nor ever did at all well, with extensive house-ruling required to even take a shot at it. Until 4e introduced the Warlord in the PH1 and you could suddenly have a practical all-martial party, followed by inherent bonuses in DMG2, and low-/no-
item became practical.
5e's doing it in the opposite order, Bounded Accuracy makes no-item campaigns practical enough, we just need the Warlord, and, really, some more martial options...
...and it would sure be nice to go
further with all-martial campaigns than 4e did.
I hear you, but -
Tiefling and Dragonborn included. Second Wind included. Action Surge included. Saving Throws per Round included. some 4e Fighter and 4e Warlord type powers included as Manuevers. Hit Dice Mechanic is a variant on the 4e Surge Mechanic. I could go on.
There's lots of little mechanical bits that harken to 4e, usually with the serial numbers filed off, or also harkening to 3.x - Saving Throws per round, for instance, are not 4e-style saving throws, so the corellation is poor, they're just like the saving-throw-per-round 3.5 used for Hold spells, though. Second Wind & Action Points were very different both in impact and in availability as well as in being universal. Tieflings were introduced in 3e. Maneuvers owe at least as much to Bo9S as 4e. And we could go on, but they're nothing comparable to including a class original to the edition that was in it's PH1.
What I'm saying is, if it weren't the Warlord, it would be something else.
The Warlord stands fairly unique as 4e poster-child. It was the only new class introduced by 4e that appeared in the PH1. It was a martial class balanced with casters filling a formal role inspired by the de-facto 'healer'/buffer roles that had formerly been strictly caster-only,. There's no 'something else' that significant.
Just teasing this out as factually incorrect in one major respect: every character is capable of in-combat HP restoration and damage mitigation. Potions of Healing do the former
That's not a character capability, that's a magic item, that might be far less common in a low-magic game or non-existent in a no-magic game.
, and there are various methods for the latter (the dodge action being probably the most prominent).
Damage mitigation could even be stretched to killing the enemy faster, which martial-classes' DPR does do. It's just can't be enough to make up for lack of a support character - if challenges are tuned for that, they're not really challenges anymore. Support contributions let the party come back from a run of bad luck or the opening salvo of a deadly challenge, it's part of the dynamic D&D assumes and requires to be fully functional, and it's currently only adequately provided by full-caster classes.
The "focus" of a class in 5e doesn't limit its actions to one particular activity on every turn.
It does limit the available resources to perform those actions and their effectiveness, however.
And to be clear, the claim I'm making is this: if you have a party entirely made up of Champion Fighters in 5e, you'd still be within the expected power/healing/damage curve of the game.
You'd be way off on the tail of expected DPR, and blow through a lot of combats, mitigating the need for between-combat healing. It'd be like an all-striker 4e party. Good on paper, able to roll over combats that should have been challenging, but likely to TPK when things tilt against them, whether from the DM trying to create even a feel that a combat is challenging, or from a run of dice luck.
That doesn't say much about what someone might WANT out of a warlord, or how much one might want to shore that aspect of the game up (more variety is nice!), but it does mean you might want to reconsider the mantra of "an all-martial party is inadequate." It's adequate. Adequate might not be enough, but wanting more is a different desire than wanting basic functionality.
'Not enough,' is not 'adequate.' By /basic/ functionality, you could mean just that the game can be played through, no matter how bad the results, and, sure, d20's don't stop working for want of a caster, but that basic functionality doesn't make the game entirely playable or functional, it just means that you can go through the motions as it fails, rather than come up against a hard stop the moment you try. Similarly, you could dial down and remove challenges and have healing potions littering every dungeon and the like, that wouldn't be the game working, that'd be you kludging it to keep it running.
