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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6661381" data-attributes="member: 996">It's also worth noting that two abilities that do the same sort of thing don't really need to be consolidated, and, indeed, may really need to be kept separate to maintain versatilty, flavor, and remain true to the class.  5e didn't condense all the damaging spells down to Magic Missile, for example. It's also an opportunity:  TotM is more abstract, looser, and lends itself well to more narrative styles.  That opens up the possibility of more 'tactics' or stratagems that shift the course of the battle in a broad way, rather than get lost in the details of re-arranging figures on map.  Own the Battlefield, for instance, could be quite different, and possibly more dramatic and intuitive. In 4e, it was prettymuch automatic, but it's not that hard to adapt to 5e.  When a spell (usually a cantrip) uses an attack roll, it's straightforward, anything the warlord does to improve attacks could apply (maybe language to point that out would be helpful).  When spells grant saves instead, you just need to repeat/invert that kind of language.  It's inefficient in presentation, but doable.  An example of a warlord exploit that was more pointed at casters would be "Join the Crowd," the Warlord used it as an interrupt to slide an enemy into an ally's AE.  But... ...there is that expectation that 5e is specifically designed for "TotM" and thus can't handle forced movement, shifting, OAs, and the like.  Thing is, 5e is, if anything, more detailed - more granular, I should say - when handling movement, range/area, and positioning (ie: to the foot, instead of 5' square or 10' "inch").  Though there's fewer effects that do it, nothing prevents involuntary movement from working.  Thunderwave is an obvious example, pushing victims 10' back. But, 5e is also a lot more open to novel and one-off mechanics or effects that might be more open to DM interpretation, so there's really a tremendous amount of 'room' to take a power that does something bland, if clear & consistent, like "slide STR mod in squares," (to paraphrase part of the hit line of JtC), to something that still fulfills the intent, like "place the target in the triggering spell's Area of Effect."Another interesting example of this is Wolf Pack Tactics, a fairly popular Warlord at-will which let an ally adjacent to the target shift 1 square.  There's no shifting or squares in 5e, but the net result of WPT was usually either to take the ally out of the enemy's threatened area or move it into a flanking position.  That would correspond to letting the ally disengage or granting the ally advantage against that enemy.  In 5e, that's really rather powerful, since disengage is an action, where shift 1 was only a move, and the corresponding 5' step was free.  Similarly, there's an at-will cantrip that /just/ causes an enemy to grant advantage. Having played the game since 1980, I question that idea.  Hit points are a limiting resource on the length of the 'day.'  Run out of hps, go back to town and rest, that was the classic D&D dynamic back in the day.  Clerical healing extended the day, but couldn't get a dead (or dropped to negatives) character back into the fight - if your hps reach 0, you either died, or you went into negatives and it would take a full week of rest before you could adventure again, assuming you survived (depending on which DMG option your DM used - IMX, it was usually negatives) - so healing tended to happen immediately, before the ally was dropped, and once it was used up, you'd need to 'rest' and the cleric would re-memorize spells as all Cure..Wounds and heal everyone up, then rest another day to get a full slate of spells, and back you went.  In 5e, HD let you heal in only an hour, overnight healing is automatic without having to go through the formality of re-memorizing and blowing through Cure Wounds spells, and (as it has been for a long time now) in-combat use of a healing spell will pop a dropped ally up and back into the fight.  You have the capacity to start most combats at or near full hps, either from HD or spells and you can stand up dropped allies in the middle of the fight.  Further, there's the opposite incentive as in the classic game:  instead of healing an ally as soon as you could do so without 'wasting' healing, you wait until he's dropped, because you heal up from zero, meaning the enemy 'wastes' damage each time an ally is dropped - that's a massive difference from dropping meaning a week of bedrest!   So, in 5e, in-combat healing is critical, and in some ways, optimal. That's true of the mechanics in the first part of it, yes.   There's also the concept - usually the Warlord player doesn't want to use the concept of a magic-using character, rather than want to avoid the complex mechanics of spellcasting.  The serious support role requires a fairly significant amount of versatility, at the 'cost' of greater complexity, which the Warlord needs to provide.  The stereotype of the martial-perfering player wanting a simplistic character doesn't apply in this case (and doesn't apply nearly as often as people seem to think).</blockquote>

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