Whatever you have created up above is not a healer. It looks mostly like a fighter with some wildly underpowered abilities.
That looks like a vote for rubbish!
Yes, I understand that is mechanically what happens. What does it represent, though? When the player uses that power, what is his character doing?
But then, if it's you defending him, shouldn't you use your reaction to do it? The mechanics are saying that your presence allows your ally to defend himself. And that doesn't make much sense to me.
Its taking advantage of the Warlord's aggressive weapon and shield work, coupled with his own (hence phalanx), to provide cover or create difficulty for the opponent to strike true; like Spartan Hoplites in skirmishes. You wouldn't be able to impose disadvantage if your brother wasn't next to you or engaging the same target in melee. Its coordinated fighting.
My feedback is that it crosses that threshold.
I never realized before how irreconcilable these perspectives are. I always assumed that everyone thought disassociated mechanics were counter-productive to roleplaying. I wonder what it's going to take to make a game we both like. :\
Yup. That is the feedback I was looking for. I was sure it would cross the threshold for some (many?) folks.
The perspectives are quite irreconcilable. There is an entire creative agenda that is pretty close to diametric opposition to what you describe. Having air-tight coupling of in-world causal logic and mechanics (ardent process simulation) is a barrier to that creative agenda. It constrains narrative interpretation and renderings when they want those renderings loosened.
For instance:
A guy wants to play a character like MacGyver or Batman in a fantasy setting. A system gives that guy an ability called "
A tool for everything" and the game assumes that he either has every tool or can find a way to use anything as a tool, and the mechanics promote him entering director stance and "conjuring" tools to interact with the world or "conjuring" something that lets him use his cool "A tool for everything" ability. The guy rolls his dice pool and resolves the conflict and he or the GM narrates what the results means. That system, the GM/player interaction and the style of game created is very much different than a granular system that makes him put points in "open locks", "disable device", "search", "science-engineering", etc and assume that he is an actor stance (1st person limited perspective) all the time and always reacting to what the GM puts before him, serially exploring the world, and accounting for every lockpick and crobar used up.
And then there are games in between. The two creative agendas are very different from one another as is the threshold for metagame mechanics (one loves them and they're necessary to produce the style of play while the other abhors them).
That makes me pretty happy.
A lot of my "warlords don't need to be a unique class!" posts I think rely on the assumption that stuff like this is possible, that you can get at what is interesting about a warlord without an independent mechanic for it. It's sometimes tough to see that without an example, and I think this thread is great for giving those examples.
You did a great job. Its not on a Fighter chassis, it hits all the right notes, it has Daily resources to "amp up the awesome", and the maneuver/MDD framework that you composed is pretty elegant and functional. High marks.
I'm curious about the level of metagame you see in it. I was making a pretty conscious effort to tie the mechanics to things that the player could actually imagine themselves doing (shouting warnings, offering encouragement, distracting enemies, even threatening them with retribution!), so I'm interested in where that fell down in your view.
1) Any daily resources for martial classes is a metagame resource. It assumes stance fluctuation (to author) by allowing a PC to impose their narrative will on a situation as it decouples hard causal logic/process-sim and uses metagame interests as its reasoning for existence (to "amp up the awesome" and bring more tactical girth to the party); which is awesome. But again, it freaks people out who don't like such things.
2) Warlord healing (or even temporary HPs...which absorb damage as basically a "morale HP buffer" so are basically healing by proxy) makes folks get "up close and personal" with the more metagamey aspect of hit points. As much as anything, this freaks people out who want to consider HPs as primarily meat because the idea of warlords "shouting wounds closed" or, in this case, "shouting wounds closed before they happen" does not meet their causal logic expectations. I love it, however as its genre-enabling and I have no such illusions about HPs.
3) The X-Men, comic book-ey idea of characters shouting commands to each other and reacting in real time (be it a free attack or immediate action or free, tactical movement) sends some folks out of process-simulation expectations of what "should" be possible and into metagame examination mode; eg, this is "gamist nonsense for the sake of tactical depth" or "this is way too much gonzo, high fantasy, action-movie physics narrative nonsense"..."this makes no sense for my grim, real-world physics expectations."
I do note that you worked hard to make sure that "PC agency" was a sovereign thing; eg, a player
can move 5 feet.
Again, I love metagame mechanics. All 3 of those things enable the kind of genre conceits, tactical interplay and narrative space that I'm looking for. But some clearly can't stand those things. This is why the Warlord, in specific, is such a metagame powderkeg and drew so much rancor from metagame averse folks.
