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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8307682" data-attributes="member: 6790260">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 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?)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.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.</blockquote>

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