D&D 5E Spellcasters and Balance in 5e: A Poll

[Dausuul]

I'm going to disagree hard here and say the lazylord filled a common niche in fantasy fiction be far better than anything else I've seen in D&D. Like it or not (and I sympathise with not) escort missions are a Thing. Having the Lazylord meant that you could have a thematically useless character being escorted and played by a player who wouldn't feel left out or with nothing at all to do in combat in a best case scenario. Does this deserve a class on its own? Hell no. Is it a useful emergent option? Yes.

I'll go farther and say it does deserve its own class, or at least subclass. Although "warlord" is the wrong name for it--it's essentially a non-magical bard, the non-combatant who can inspire others to heroic deeds or guide them to success through cunning and lore.

 

[Neonchameleon]

I gotta disagree with both of ya.

The lazylord invoked the expert class. The skilled character whose main skill isn't magic, religion, or crime and takes up a bit of comat training to not be the helpless escort. The Prince(ss). The Archivist. The Commander. The Researcher. The Noble. The Smith. The Merchant. The Diplomat.

I'm disagreeing here because part of the point of a full lazylord is that they never make an attack roll so can skimp on their combat training. What you describe is a warlord with lazylord overtones - but generally with a significant MBA and some direct attack powers even if they normally give away their attacks. It's definitely needed.

The issue with D&D is it is very combat focused so only the Rogue and Warlord ever made the cut. Then the Warlord was still cut.

Combat and magic focused.

 

[Undrave]

To me this seems like thre are two different FrogReavers!

Clearly, mechanical differences are only good to differentiate spellcasters, all martials are just whacking things with a sword after all

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I'm going to disagree hard here and say the lazylord filled a common niche in fantasy fiction be far better than anything else I've seen in D&D. Like it or not (and I sympathise with not) escort missions are a Thing. Having the Lazylord meant that you could have a thematically useless character being escorted and played by a player who wouldn't feel left out or with nothing at all to do in combat in a best case scenario. Does this deserve a class on its own? Hell no. Is it a useful emergent option? Yes.

And it's not like this idea only came into vogue after 4e published the Warlord. There have been LOTS of threads about people wanting to make "craven" characters or "intentionally bad at combat" characters. The Lazylord concept--which 4e never officially supported, unlike what most people think, it just happened to be an emergent possibility as the edition evolved--enables players to do that. Not only does it do so, but (at least in theory) it allows a character with any chosen mental stat to function as a thematically-useless but mechanically-useful character. You can have the aged gentleman-squire who's too old to fight but is really good at outwitting opponents and improving his allies' efforts, the canny street urchin who's too young to be a real fighter but is resourceful and incredibly observant, and the Disney Princess who inspires others to action through her winsome ways but would never hurt a fly.

That, for me, is a big part of why the Warlord is so deserving of being its own class. Warlords could be built to focus on any of the three mental stats, and each flavor would work out as a very different character despite being rooted in a common concept. It's also part of why, if I ever write up a 5e Warlord myself, I'd base it on the 5e Warlock chassis. Patrons map to Leadership Style, which defines what modifier you use and some basic options you have; Invocations map to Tactics, always-on/passive/frequent-use abilities; Pacts map to Strategic Focus, the particular way you go about your force-multiplier thing; instead of Spells you get Feints (actions that generate your Gambit resource), Stratagems (actions that spend Gambit). Still haven't come up with a good replacement for Mystic Arcana (though Hatmatter gave the good conceptual suggestion of terrain-exploiting/altering abilities) and probably won't until I finish my 5e Summoner writeup.

I'll go farther and say it does deserve its own class, or at least subclass. Although "warlord" is the wrong name for it--it's essentially a non-magical bard, the non-combatant who can inspire others to heroic deeds or guide them to success through cunning and lore.

I mean, "barbarian" is the wrong name for a class centered on berserker rages (since all it means is "dumb people who don't speak Greek" or "non-civic people whom we look down on for being non-civic"), since even the actual berserkir were civic people (Vikings). "Paladin" refers to the Palatine hill and the knights of Charlemagne.

I also don't really accept the argument that a Warlord is a non-magical Bard (and didn't when it was floated back during the Next playtest). Bards and Warlords may do similar things, but Barbarians and Fighters also do similar things despite being distinct classes. I'd even argue that the Warlord is more distinct from Bard (beyond the mere non-use of magic) than Sorcerer is from Wizard, and that the latter two have actually been getting more similar over time rather than less. (Remember when Sorcerers were worse at metamagic than Wizards?)

I'm disagreeing here because part of the point of a full lazylord is that they never make an attack roll so can skimp on their combat training. What you describe is a warlord with lazylord overtones - but generally with a significant MBA and some direct attack powers even if they normally give away their attacks. It's definitely needed.

While this is fair, "lazylord" has always (in my mind, anyway) been a continuum. Yes, it does in principle emphasize the most extreme point on that continuum. However, given that most Warlords in 4e couldn't have been purely "lazy" because an absolutely pure "lazy" build didn't exist until fairly late in its life, it's just more useful to treat it as a term covering characters who are "mostly lazy." Supporting the "mostly lazy" character archetype doesn't automatically mean including the full 100% Lazylord, but it does mean supporting most of the range of archetypes I discussed above.

Combat and magic focused.

And that's sort of the rub of the thread, isn't it?

D&D is--by its very name, with "dragons" in the title--a game ABOUT magic. Which means we either need to let our non-magical characters do things that can thwart magic (or sometimes do what it can't), so that they fit the premise of being "magic focused" by challenging(/exceeding) magic, or we have to accept that our non-magical characters aren't meant to be the focus of play. Given the latter is unacceptable to the fanbase, I continue to be confused by the adamant and extensive pushback on the former.

 

[FrogReaver]

To me this seems like thre are two different FrogReavers!

The first quote was suggesting that conceptual differences don't need to be mechanical and most often shouldn't be.

The second quote was suggesting that once you have a class that ties the conceptual to mechanics (wizard spellbook) that you can't use that implementation of the class as something to base conceptual classes on that don't use that concept. Else they get tied with conceptual-mechanical baggage that doesn't work for them.

Those positions aren't contradictory.

 

[FrogReaver]

Part of the challenge for introducing a warlord into D&D is that it tends to eschew the psychological/emotional aspects of combat that you mention - fear, focus, encouragement.

I don't think it's a surprise that the version of the game that did the most to introduce these as elements of play - 4e - is the version that had a warlord. The natural home of the warlord is a context in which:

* being set back in combat is understood not just as, or even primarily, being wounded, but includes loss of resolve and the will to fight (ie non-meat hp, which are core to 4e);

* it's taken for granted that combatants, including PC combatants, will be subject to internal as well as external constraints that they can't just ignore or set aside at will (ie the tremendous range of effects - forced movement, conditions, etc - that are part of 4e combat resolution, and which in the fiction may be external, like being pushed down and winded, or internal, like recoiling in horror from a living corpse);

* the action and resource economy is not understood to be purely meta, but neither is understood to be a sort of "natural law" of the universe's metronome, but rather is seen as the mechanical expression of how hard the protagonists are pushing themselves (ie everything from action points, to choosing what sort of power to use, to using immediate and opportunity actions to capture - in mechanical terms - the back-and-forth of combat).

So even though 4e didn't have player-side morale rules like Traveller and some other RPGs have, it did a lot to make those psychological and emotional aspects of combat part of the game; and hence did a lot to create conceptual space for a warlord.

To the extent that 5e downplays these things, it becomes harder, I think, to fit a warlord into the game.

I played 4e and none of those descriptions sound accurate of it to me. Maybe there were 2 different 4e's out there

 

[FrogReaver]

Clearly, mechanical differences are only good to differentiate spellcasters, all martials are just whacking things with a sword after all

That's not at all a fair characterization of what I said.

 

[Neonchameleon]

I played 4e and none of those descriptions sound accurate of it to me. Maybe there were 2 different 4e's out there

I've played most editions and it depends what my baseline is. Because everything Pemerton is saying appears to me to be more true for 4e than 5e or 3.X - but most of it is more true for e.g. Fate. Apocalypse World, or Marvel Heroic Roleplaying than for 4e.

 

[FrogReaver]

I'll go farther and say it does deserve its own class, or at least subclass. Although "warlord" is the wrong name for it--it's essentially a non-magical bard, the non-combatant who can inspire others to heroic deeds or guide them to success through cunning and lore.

That already seems too big of a tent for a 5e class.

• One that inspires others to heroic deeds.
• One that guides them to success through cunning and lore.

I can't think of any other 5e class that can't be described without relying on 2 divergent concepts (that's where subclasses come in).

Barbarian - Angry Fighting Man
Fighter - Skilled Fighting Man
Paladin - Magical Oath keeping Fighting Man
Monk - Mystical Martial Artist
Ranger - Magical Wilderness Warrior

Bard - Inspiring and Musical Magic user
Druid - Magic user with nature granted magical power
Cleric - Warriors with God given Magic
Sorcerer - Arcane caster with innate magical power
Wizard - Arcane caster whose power is derived via studying arcane magic
Warlock - Arcane caster whose power is derived via a pact

 

[Neonchameleon]

That already seems too big of a tent for a 5e class.

• One that inspires others to heroic deeds.
• One that guides them to success through cunning and lore.

I can't think of any other 5e class that can't be described without relying on 2 divergent concepts (that's where subclasses come in).

So what you are saying is that, given that the only class that might be overlapping with the warlord now is the bard, we need not just one warlord class but several?