Warlord Player's job is to tell other players what to do??

[tenken]

It's not about having nice buddies or jerks in the table.
It's about a weird class that can move his teamates around (without ANY magical power) as he sees fit... I know it's a "cool and fun" mechanic, very useful, etc. But it should not happen, a player moves his mini... and is not messing arround with the rest of the board...
Some of you are comparing it with backstabbing or poisoning your teammates.... at least here's an attack roll/defense involved... Not just arbitrarily moving other dudes arround... It feels more like a board game... Again... this "Narrative" stuff.... the other players tell the story too... and they may diceide what goes on with my character too. (I want my imersion atmosphere back!)

There's no roll if I stab a fellow party member in the throat in the middle of the night while I'm on watch.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

It has a theme of sorts if you excuse the inappropriate name and give it a proper military title, but one that belongs in a war or military engagement, and that doesn't fit by default in an adventuring party, because not every adventuring party is a military squad.

You don't need to be an army or a military unit to work together and have tactics.

I could just see it now:
Warlord: "I've been in a lot of battles. Creatures like this can be easily distracted by movement. If you move over there, Bob should be able to hit it while it is distracted."
Fighter: "Sorry, I don't belong to any ARMY. I'm not part of your MILITARY UNIT. Distracting monsters is not part of my job description. Don't you understand that battles don't involve strategy when there are only 4-6 people involved in them? Why don't you go back to your King and Country where your help is useful instead of helping us work better as a team?"

 

[hong]

It has a theme of sorts if you excuse the inappropriate name and give it a proper military title, but one that belongs in a war or military engagement, and that doesn't fit by default in an adventuring party, because not every adventuring party is a military squad.

Exactly. Not every well-organised adventuring party is a military squad.

D&D parties are not armies, hong.

Nobody has said they are, except you.

This is Dungeons and Dragons, not Full Metal Scabbard. D&D was about taking the fantasy heroes off of the battlefield and sending them into a dungeon without the soldiers, just like in the novels. Duh.

Nobody has said anything about soldiers, except you.

(And yes, I know there are military-themed fantasy hero groups in novels, even Tolkien features them...but they're not the default.)

And they're still not the default. Whatever the heck "default" even means.

 

[hong]

Crazy Apologist Theory Number One:

Hmm. Maybe the Warlord is the one doing the sliding because the rules explicitly state that you may never slide your own character. (And I've seen enough of the Dreaded CharOp board to know that there would be good reasons for such a rule).

AFAIK, "slide", "push" and "pull" are forced movements only in the sense that they take place out of your turn. Therefore, unless you have some funky ability that lets you move out of your turn, they must be due to some other factor moving you, hence "forced".

This has nothing to do with being involuntary in the sense of players being sidelined.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

It's not about having nice buddies or jerks in the table.
It's about a weird class that can move his teamates around (without ANY magical power) as he sees fit... I know it's a "cool and fun" mechanic, very useful, etc. But it should not happen, a player moves his mini... and is not messing arround with the rest of the board...
Some of you are comparing it with backstabbing or poisoning your teammates.... at least here's an attack roll/defense involved... Not just arbitrarily moving other dudes arround... It feels more like a board game... Again... this "Narrative" stuff.... the other players tell the story too... and they may diceide what goes on with my character too. (I want my imersion atmosphere back!)

Crossposting:

For D&D 3 to D&D 4, we're going from
- Player decides what his characters wants to do given the circumstances as described, and then rolls the dice to see if it succeeds. The decision the player makes is usually also a decision made by the player.
- Player decides that the circumstances allow the character (party/enemy) to do something, and then rolls the dice to see if he succeeds. In the game world, the character sure didn't decide the circumstances, he just decided to try it, and it was the players influence to change the circumstances so that the character could try what he tried.

Until you understand (probably easy) and accept (not so easy, since it's also a question of preferences) this shift, 4E will be hard to swallow. These two approaches / paradigms are different, and what makes sense under the first might not make sense under the second, or vice versa.

You can discuss whether this shift is good or bad, but one shouldn't try to use the "old" paradigm to understand or explain game effects that are created under the second paradigm. (But one surely can discuss them using the second paradigm...)

Link
I could also write something like "adapt or perish"!, but that would imply that the 4E approach should generally to be considered superior - Which I don't believe, it's a matter of taste - but in this case, it seems to fit my taste. (Once I understood the differences. I started out as a "no daily powers for non-spellcasters", and was a bit at odds with the Bo9S idea of not-exactly-magical power granting extra movement and stuff. But it didn't fit so well in what 3E had already established. After some time with the 4E previews and discussions, I understood the difference, and liked it...)
So, the battle call should probably be "Adapt to 4E or don't!"

 

[Nytmare]

that can move his teamates around (without ANY magical power)

What part of his power scheme denotes the need for magical abilities? For all the dumbing down WOTC did for those of us who like the game (thanks again WOTC!), you'd figure that people would have an easier time understanding things like a slide not meaning mystically grabbing unfortunate party members by unseen forces and dragging them bodily about random dungeons against their will for your own diabolical schemes.

 

[Valdrax]

I think a lot of people here have the conceptual problem that another player moving your piece around the board represents their character having direct control over your character.

This isn't necessarily true. Remember that D&D's very polite turn-based combat is an abstraction of a real fight. For example, the reason people only attack once every six seconds is not because that's as fast as they can move but only as often as a good opening comes up.

What the Warlord does is create opportunities for teamwork by rallying his allies. White Raven Charge doesn't mean that he's (or any other ally) is forcing your character forward so much as opening up the opportunities for characters to move into more advantageous positions without drawing opportunity attacks.

Oh, and note that the power also let you move his character around the board when you get to make your attack. It's not one sided at all.

 

[Bagpuss]

Technically you don't need their consent, permission or anything else to stab them in the back either. Despite this, D&D has somehow managed to survive for years without explicitly disallowing people from stabbing each other in the back. It is amazing, when you think about it.

It would be interesting to playtest the 4th Ed rules to see where you could break them though if you follow the letter of the rules, rather than the spirit.

I would totally slide my ally into the lava for a laugh. "Oh sorry didn't see that there, is it hot?"

 

[hong]

It would be interesting to playtest the 4th Ed to see where you could break them though if you follow the letter of the rules, rather than the spirit.

Why would it be that interesting? The WotC CharOp board has been doing that for 8 years.

 

[Primal]

This is one of those things about metagaming. Metagaming is when you think of the game AS a game and use that information to base your characters decisions on.

The problem is that often game rules have a direct correlation to the in character world so the only difference between metagaming and roleplaying is the choice of words you use to describe it.

If a player says "There's a trap here. Whoever made it must have made a way to turn it off so they could get past when they needed to. Let's search for it." then it is roleplaying.

If a player says "The DM wouldn't put a trap that was completely impossible to get past without giving us a way to disable it. He wants us to get to the other side. Let's search." then its metagaming.

However, the result is the same. It's advisable to use roleplaying thinking whenever possible. However, metagaming isn't such a bad thing 95% of the time.

I, personally don't care if someone says "I only have 15 hitpoints left out of 200" or "I'm extremely hurt and tired and I'm not sure how much longer I can hold out against these foes!" The only difference is one takes less time to say and is more precise and doesn't end with bad feelings when the cleric casts cure critical wounds instead of heal and causes the death of the character involved. The other one might be slightly more flavorful, but ends up bogging down the game so that battles take forever when a game is filled with them.

I think metagaming has always been part of D&D mindset, and always will. I try to encourage my players to always talk in character when advising others. Anyway, I think that metagaming will increase in 4E with the increased focus on group tactics in combat (in 3E, most Feats affected only your own abilities).

You know, speaking of traps, since they're part of encounter design now, it's pretty easy actually for players to determine if there is a trap in room with a suspiciously easy combat encounter ("Hey, those Gnolls are only about 6th level monsters and since there was no terrain hazard at all, there must be a 3rd level trap somewhere in this room!").