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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8189719" data-attributes="member: 6790260">While this is a somewhat frustrating answer, I appreciate it nonetheless. "I can't help you" (or other related answers like "I don't know") is all too often stigmatized. I appreciate your willingness to give it, even if it's not what I'd like to hear.Not really. A major part of it is that I basically cannot get in-person gaming. Nearly all of my gaming experience is electronic--which counts well over a decade before Covid-19 reared its ugly head. It is substantially harder to find a DM willing to do things the way you want to when they aren't a friend you can appeal to personally.Yeah. I gave OSR gaming a genuine shot. It...wasn't for me. Even with a DM pretty willing to do whatever I was interested in playing. I live with enough fear in my regular life; making it an ongoing part of my leisure time is literally the antithesis of fun.I have not found any class in 5e that has meaningful tactical options, at least without resorting to spellcasting...which is a big problem for me. (I'm okay with spellcasters having cool tools; I like Sorcerers, for example. But I'm not okay with spellcasters being the choice if you ever want to have real tactical options you didn't extract from the DM via negotiation, since EVERYONE can extract options from the DM via negotiation.) Even for many casters, you do your One Obvious Thing, unless you can't, in which case you do your Backup Thing. It strongly reminds me of playing Dungeon World, where I was able to mentally generate a flowchart to handle essentially every combat ever. I had a wonderful DM, but I had to do other things to keep my mind occupied or I would've gone crazy during combats, and my experience with 5e has not been a whole lot better than that. Better, I will admit, but of the "I don't know which of the three flowcharts I'm on yet" variety, rather than "wow, I really need to be paying attention and planning ahead and thinking about what resources I might have two turns from now" stuff.As for the Warlord debate...well. [SPOILER="Warlord stuff not directly relevant to the thread at large"]Repeatedly in the Next playtest, the devs voiced support for fans of the 4e Warlord, a non-spellcasting class capable of pretty much all essential party-support-role stuff.* Mearls himself even explicitly tweeted that they were cool with martial healing being in the game, and if people didn't like it, they could just ban that option at their tables. But they did three things, which not-fully-intentionally ended up torpedoing any chance of playing a Warlord character in (at-launch) 5e. Then, because the devs have been (with rare exceptions e.g. Hexblade) pretty cautious about any moves that make a big splash in terms of altering underlying mechanics (frex: the ongoing Ranger and specifically Beastmaster issues), they were effectively trapped by the choices of the PHB, unable to really push beyond that.Notably, those three things each individually probably wouldn't have been a problem. All three together killed any hope of an official 5e Warlord. The things, in chronological order, were:1. Deciding that the Warlord didn't make sense as its own unique class. They were very explicit (frustratingly so, since they openly joked about it using actual edition-war arguments in a podcast) that the Warlord was actually either some kind of Bard, or some kind of Fighter, or both. They chose to mostly do the latter, so the Warlord had to fit into the Fighter chassis.2. Making the Fighter a "tanky bruiser," to use the MOBA term--a character that can both take hits and dish them out very well. Sort of the middle-ground between "glass cannon" and "stone wall"--not quite what TVTropes would call a "mighty glacier," but close. All Fighters, no matter their subclass, have high defense, high personal offensive power, and high personal utility. By itself, not a problem, except...3. Making the Warlord option the poster child for their "Specialties" subsystem. Long story short, originally, you would've selected a package of themed feats (or created your own package), which were your Specialty (possibly with some other minor goodies). And then it turned out they couldn't make Specialties work the way they wanted, so they had to silently just...drop them and hope no one noticed.As a result of all three--not doing any work to make Warlord its own class, making Fighters strong AND tough AND self-supportive, and going all-in for Warlord-as-Specialty and then having to drop it not very long before they needed to hit publication--there just wasn't anywhere for a Warlord to go, and every subsequent attempt (such as the Purple Dragon Knight) has been a non-starter. Mearls and co. almost certainly still believe the Warlord isn't appropriate as its own class, but there isn't an existing class you could add that level of depth and support to without risking it being overpowered, and anything you could add to the Fighter ends up being so anemic it won't satisfy Warlord fans. They accidentally painted themselves into a corner, and now have no option but to just hope Warlord fans stop caring. (Of course, the legions of haters could never have been more pleased; they're certain 5e actually does support the Warlord and anyone who says otherwise is just demanding that their needs be perfectly 100% catered to all the time forever. Yes, I may be somewhat bitter about this.)*Keep in mind, character resurrection was a Ritual in 4e, meaning anyone with the Ritual Caster feat, and enough money to learn and cast the ritual, could resurrect the dead. So "party-support-role" stuff mostly meant healing, buffs, repositioning, granting saving throws, and granting extra attacks. Non-combat utility was something everyone got, and Rituals covered a huge swathe of all utility magic previously only accessible to spellcasters. Warlords were really good at buffs and granting attacks, which was part of why they were popular; they had very proactive support.[/SPOILER]</blockquote>

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