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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8307447" data-attributes="member: 42582">A related funny thing:In 1977 Classic Traveller had the Leader skill, which - in the rules as published at that time - could be picked up (on the right roll) by educated soldiers (Army and Marines).The main effects of Leader skill are (i) to improve the prospects of recruiting NPCs and retaining command over them, (ii) to assist in avoiding surprise, and (iii) to assist in avoiding loss of morale. In Classic Traveller PCs are subject to morale checks, and so (iii) is significant even if no NPCs are hanging out with the PCs.*********************************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.</blockquote>

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