D&D 5E [Warlords] Should D&D be tied to D&D Worlds?

[Ratskinner]

I have some views on how this can be handled - whether they are more widely workable solutions I don't know.

On "How well is he doing?", I use the 4e bloodied condition as a solution. You can tell when he's bloodied. (And this can be narrated pretty easily for most opponents - for stone golems and the like it gets a bit trickier, but they're not that common as enemies.)

On the description that is then invalidated by later events - the "long middle" - I find that this pushes narration away from "The orc hits you and your guts start spilling out", towards a more comic-book or "PG cinema" style of narration - more emphasis on the action, less on the actual injury. A post upthread mentioned greataxe criticals as an objection to warlords, but in AD&D or 3E if you narrate a greataxe critical against a PC in any graphically vivid way you're then going to have to confront the issue that anyone can stabilise that wound, and that the PC in question will be up and about even without medical attention in a time ranging from a few days (3E) to a few weeks (AD&D).

Oh I don't think the problem is edition-specific by any means. I've had it for a while now. I agree about pushing the narration, but I find that troubling (a supers game I knew once called it "costume damage"). I'll talk more about this below.

I think that what I described is not just gamist (at least in the sense of "step on up"). Feeling the desparation of your PC via a mechanically mediating device is key to combat in Burning Wheel, for instance, and that is a narrativist system by default (though no doubt hackable to a certain sort of gamism).

I also don't think that it's not fiction-oriented: part of the point of the mechanical mediation is to bring the fiction to life for the players via the sort of proxy experience I am pointing to. But I don't disagree that it is (or can become) limiting - there are stories and thematic material that 4e will never support, for instance (and likewise Burning Wheel).

I don't think I'm disagreeing with that (except about Burning Wheel, maybe ). In fact, I think you're describing exactly what I was talking about.

I'm not 100% sure I know what you mean by "prioritising story". I think that in a certain sense of that phrase 4e prioritises story (eg by trying to ensure that its mechanical systems engender the relevant experience, so that your paladin plays as a stalwart ally, your fighter as a master of the battlefield, your warlord as an inspirational leader, etc) but I'm assuming that's not the sense that you have in mind. I don't know FATE well enough to just read your intentions off your reference to it, but are you envisaging a wider range of conflict situations than just combat as being viable? And/or a wider range of player narrative/metagame resources than 4e's power system?

What do I mean by "prioritising story"....hmmm....

This is one of those areas where Forge terminology fails me a bit (or perhaps fails ::shrug:. So I hope you'll indulge me a bit of rambling. I enjoy the stories that come out of gaming, for me, they're almost the whole point. I get irritated anytime a system is slowing down the process of getting a story out of my table-time (or otherwise hindering it). So I think I'm generally Narrativist in inclination. On the other hand, I'm not terribly attached to the "addressing Premise" part of Narrativism, at least not in the very serious sense that it seems most people take it. I want the details of the story, and I like them to matter. A mechanic like HP, which in effect punishes someone who would be trying to pay attention to the fiction/story details...is no end of irritation to me.

I brought up FATE because, FATE makes paying attention to the details important, in a way that D&D rarely does (and then its usually not through the rules). FATE's mechanics rely on the details in the fiction (without relying on detailed fiction).* This has the side-effect of providing for the wider range of conflicts that you mention. I'm not sure that I'd say FATE provides a wider range of player narrative/metagame resources, but its resources are flexible in a way that 4e's aren't. That is, a FATE character (or even environment) can have an aspect or stunt of almost unlimited meaning, but all the aspects and stunts work within fairly narrow parameters mechanically\numerically. Meanwhile 4e has a non-infinite range of races and powers, but they each work slightly differently. So...::shrug:: The important part for me is that through the use of FATE points and free invocations on those aspects (some of which players can create on the fly), FATE provides players with a much more fiction-centered experience. Which, I think, takes place through a vector more like an author creating a story, rather than the vector you describe for 4e. Although the use of dice still keeps things fairly uncertain, giving it a touch of viewership/readership (YMMV).

In contrast with HPs, FATE's Conflict system provides for consequences as freeform descriptors of the bad things that happened when you lose any kind of conflict. ("twisted ankle", "embarrassed in front of Angela", etc.) They are utilized in a manner similar to aspects (except usually invoked by opponents). So how you lost, or what happened actually matters, which, to me, makes it very flexible and yet compelling. It isn't restricted to "costume damage" (unless you make it that way intentionally for a specific game). It even preserves player agency because you author your own consequences. I find this much more appealing than the HP mechanic which effectively is a colored energy bar floating above a character's head.

Now having written all that, I don't get to play FATE every night. I'm in an OSRish group and I often get to play other games, both role and board, with them and my kids. It's not like I can't enjoy games with different playstyles and agendas. (Although I really question the point of Tabletop Sim games when computers are around.) I'm not a Narrativism Puritan. Which is why I'm feeling odd about 5e. I already have FATE Core (well, its in the mail) which does that story-driven thing better than D&D is ever likely to do it (mostly because it clings to its sacred-cow mechanics). I might be perfectly comfortable with a very gamist 5e with much simpler mechanics that 3e or 4e, even though it wouldn't be my ideal game. So while I'd like to see a 5e go the "story" way, I'm not sure I'm even willing to put up much of a fight for it.

*by which I mean, if the presence of that banana in your backpack is unimportant...I don't have to know that it cost you 2sp and is three days from spoiling beyond edibility, or even that its there.

 

[pemerton]

I honestly don't think any of this obviates my point.

OK. I thought your point was that "seven versions of the game only cause you to lose them when a physical event penetrates or bypasses your physical defenses." My point was that this is actually not the case - that the game has had effects that cause hit point loss without a physical event penetrating or bypassing physical defences at least since Gygax's AD&D.

I've never seen Disintegrate as causing dismemberment.

Well, if Disintegrate hits you but doesn't kill you, what happens? You implied that whatever it is, it's not something that you could push through with inspiration from your noble companion. I took that to imply dismemberment, organ damage or something similar.

healing the kind of damage Disintegrate causes through rest should and does take a long time, according to most rulesets. It's far less reasonable to me that a fighter could Healing Surge through a Disintegrate, or that a warlord could inspire a companion to walk it off, than it is to imagine someone convalescing for weeks following such an assault.

In 3.5 (accordign to the online SRD), Disintegrate is a 6th level spell, doing 22d6 (or an average of 77 hp) when cast by an 11th level wizard. An 11th level PC, with bedrest and nursing, will heal that much damage in 2 days. I don't call that "a long time" - it's certainly not weeks. I call that a short time.

As [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] has posted a few times upthread, I don't see how the move from 2 days recovery to "walking it off" is crossing some Rubicon of suspension of disbelief. No doubt there are differences of taste here; but I don't see a radical contrast. [MENTION=6668292]JamesonCourage[/MENTION] and some other posters have pointed out that the gameplay consequences of the need for even a brief rest can be noteworthy, but that's no longer a point about verismilitude but about how we want to structure the relationship between "action scenes", "transition scenes" and recovery.

Note that you had a problem with spell components being embedded in the main spell description and wanted to see it an optional sidebar. AKAICT from the Hit My Points article, that's how they're thinking of warlords and non-magical healing so far.

I've seen no indication that warlords will be in an optional sidebar. I have vague memories that Mearls tweeted "no warlords" at one point, or something to that effect; and currently some warlord remnants are part of the fighter build options.

I don't care where the warlord class is published - in a sidebar, topbar, bottombar, or appendix (like the AD&D bard and psionics rules). I'm just interested in seeing it.

please stop quoting Gygax, Mearls, or the Holy Bible on this matter.

At least in my case, this mostly comes out of being told that my take on D&D is out of touch with seven editions of the game, or something similar.

there is no consensus on this subject.

Of course there isn't. What I'm looking for is a meta-consensus that a range of approaches are part of "the core D&D experience", and that a modular, unity edition therefore needs to have the resources (mechanical, story elements etc) to make room for all of them.

 

[pemerton]

Isn't the easiest method to produce a 'warlord' just a simple case of reskinning?

You use "spells"... but you reskin them as "exploits" or "powers". Boom, you're done.

If the 4E fans considered the reskinning of the Ranger to an archer fighter to be a standard part of the game... they should also be able to accept the reskinning of a cleric multiclass into the abilities of a warlord.

This makes little sense to me. An archer ranger is a fighter archer in all but name - s/he turns up on the battlefield darting from point to point unleashing volleys of arrows.

Whereas the cleric isn't a warlord at all - s/he has a patron god, has turning undead, ray of light etc.

Furthermore, in D&Dnext there is not a uniform power structure - spells aren't just a lable slapped on a generic unit of PC effectiveness (like, say "prayer" or "exploit" in 4e). They are a distinctive mechanical structure intended to correlate to something fairly substantial within the fiction. Martial daily abilities, like the fighter's Action Surge or the barbarian's Rage don't have the same structure as spells at all (eg they don't have the "pick from a menu" character). This seems pretty deliberate to me, and to "reskin" spells as "exploits" would require pushing hard against this feature of the ruleset.

concerning refluffing/reskinning : try building a Bravelord out of a Paldin instead...

We've discussed this a few times. I think you're right that a warlord could be a non-magical paladin subclass. Because I think that D&Dnext mixes magic-as-story with spell-mechanics-as-system in a much more intricate way than 4e with its uniform power structure, I don't think a straight reskin of the Cavalier is enough. It will have ugly bumps that mere reskinning can't smooth off.

masters of metagame should have no problem taking a cleric and being like, "Boom. Magic? He just has martial daily powers. Et Viola!."

I'm not sure it's quite that easy, for the reasons given above and also by [MENTION=11821]Obryn[/MENTION], [MENTION=87792]Neonchameleon[/MENTION] and [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION].

I don't think it makes much sense to design a game deliberately intended to be different from one in which PCs are built out of uniform pieces, and in which metagame structures like daily and encounter powers are intended to also express important features of the fiction, and then tell everyone that you didn't really mean it and that they can just reskin at will.

 

[pemerton]

So, is this then an issue of balance? It seems like you want mundane characters to have powers equivalent to those of spell casters?

This is being discussed in the new "narrative space" thread. I think of it in terms of the players of non-magical PCs being able to have more-or-less the same amount of impact on the game.

What this means in mechanical terms depends pretty heavily on what "the game" is, and on what counts as meaningful impact. Within the traditions of D&D, combat and exploration would be two key elements of the game. Despite being one of the "3 pillars", I'm less sure about how social fits into the D&D tradition as far as meaningful impact by players is concerned.

So, for instance, if I choose to play a Thief, therefore upping my "exploration effectiveness" at some modest cost to my "combat effectiveness", it sucks a bit if the player of the wizard can match or better me in exploration and beat me in combat. Is there a trade-off in the fact that I get to have the experience of playing a rogue-y type rather than a scholarly type? For some players that is a genuine trade-off - ie the "colour" of their PC and their PC's contribution may be more important thatn their actual impact on the play of the game. My own preference, though, is that getting the colour you want shouldn't require sacrificing meaningful effectiveness.

A cleric and a fighter of equal level should be evenly matched in a straight fight, provided the cleric has sunk their allotment of divine grace into martial prowess and prepared for the fight accordingly. If the cleric diverts any of that grace elsewhere the fighter quite rightly gets the advantage in a fight.

<snip>

If both a wizard and a thief/rogue of equal level attempt to steal the Gem of Awesome from its suitably guarded safe their chances of doing so successfully should be about even. The rogue will stealthily subvert the defences using their skills on both the way in and the way out. Unfortunately, the wizard has prepared for this burglary and used magic to get in and out in a fraction of the time. The wizard has out-rogued the rogue! However, the wizard burned all his spells in the process. The rogue's skills don't run out and the wizard can only swear and curse his disappointment when he discovers the gem isn't where he stashed it.

My concern with this is that it seems that the cleric is basically a fighter-plus (ie they can fight like a fighter, but in their spare time do other stuff too) and the wizard a thief-plus.

 

[pemerton]

I enjoy the stories that come out of gaming, for me, they're almost the whole point. I get irritated anytime a system is slowing down the process of getting a story out of my table-time (or otherwise hindering it). So I think I'm generally Narrativist in inclination. On the other hand, I'm not terribly attached to the "addressing Premise" part of Narrativism, at least not in the very serious sense that it seems most people take it. I want the details of the story, and I like them to matter. A mechanic like HP, which in effect punishes someone who would be trying to pay attention to the fiction/story details...is no end of irritation to me.

If you can forgive me some Forge labelling, those sound to me like a type of simulationist preference. Also a preference for "lite" techniques. Out of curiosity, have you ever tried Runequest or HARP?

Anyway, it makes sense that 4e would irritate you. (And Burning Wheel as well?) Neither does a good job at "not slowing things down".

Btw, why do you say that hp punish someone paying attention to the fiction/story?

FATE makes paying attention to the details important, in a way that D&D rarely does (and then its usually not through the rules).

<snip>

This has the side-effect of providing for the wider range of conflicts that you mention.

<snip>

its resources are flexible in a way that 4e's aren't.

<snip>

through the use of FATE points and free invocations on those aspects (some of which players can create on the fly), FATE provides players with a much more fiction-centered experience.

<snip>

In contrast with HPs, FATE's Conflict system provides for consequences as freeform descriptors of the bad things that happened when you lose any kind of conflict. ("twisted ankle", "embarrassed in front of Angela", etc.) They are utilized in a manner similar to aspects (except usually invoked by opponents). So how you lost, or what happened actually matters, which, to me, makes it very flexible and yet compelling. It isn't restricted to "costume damage" (unless you make it that way intentionally for a specific game).

That all makes plenty of sense. It reminds me quite a bit of Marvel Heroic RP (Distinction and Complications rather than Aspects and Consequences), which I imagine was FATE-inspired.

The closest 4e gets to this sort of stuff, at least as I experience it, is in its skill mechanics (including skill challenges). But that's perhaps not all that close. I agree that 4e is relatively narrow in what it does well, and I think it relies very heavily on the conduit from mechanical resolution to proxy emotion that I described upthread to deliver a compelling play experience. If that's just a headache for you, than I don't think 4e would have a lot to offer. (I see parallels to Burning Wheel here, but maybe that's just me.)

A significant difficulty in handling long-term consequences ("costume damages") is perhaps one of the bigger weakness in 4e, because that matters even within its narrow scope of focus. It all falls to the GM to handle through the framing and narration of subsequent encounters. There's no straightforward mechanical system. ( [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] and others have pushed the disease/curse track fairly hard, but I don't know if they've used that to model things like "embarassed in front of Angela").

 

[DMZ2112]

OK. I thought your point was that "seven versions of the game only cause you to lose them when a physical event penetrates or bypasses your physical defenses." My point was that this is actually not the case - that the game has had effects that cause hit point loss without a physical event penetrating or bypassing physical defences at least since Gygax's AD&D.

If an attack requires a to-hit roll or a saving throw, then it is penetrating or bypassing defenses. If I recall correctly, psionics in AD&D1 only gave the target a chance to defend if he was also a psionic, but I chalk that up to truly unforgivably bad game design and you should too.

I also realize this description excludes most iterations of Magic Missile from the category, but I consider magic missile to be a defense of my point rather than a contradiction. From the d20 SRD: "A missile of magical energy darts forth from your fingertip and strikes its target." The operative word here being "strikes."

It doesn't miss. It isn't deflected. You eat that damage.

To reiterate my opinion, because I think it's getting lost, I am not in support of an interpretation of hit points that considers them to be entirely meat. My position is that the rule is ambiguous and should remain ambiguous, because the crunch of the game says they are meat while the fluff says they are more broad in definition and this has always been.

Further to that, the cleric does not require specificity in hit point definition, and the warlord does, thus the warlord should never have been introduced to the canon.

Well, if Disintegrate hits you but doesn't kill you, what happens? You implied that whatever it is, it's not something that you could push through with inspiration from your noble companion.

I think the loss of large quantities of skin, muscle, and bone is sufficiently traumatic to call that possibility into question, yes.

Again, I'm not arguing that it has to ALL be meat. Maybe only half of it is meat damage. But in order to go toe-to-toe with the cleric in terms of healing, the warlord needs to be able to ameliorate ALL of that damage. The cleric can do this, because it does not matter to the cleric whether the hit points in question are meat or fatigue.

The warlord, by definition, can only deal with the fatigue. So the warlord only functions equivalently to a cleric in an environment where no hit point loss is meat. That is not a concession I am willing to make.

In 3.5 (accordign to the online SRD), Disintegrate is a 6th level spell, doing 22d6 (or an average of 77 hp) when cast by an 11th level wizard. An 11th level PC, with bedrest and nursing, will heal that much damage in 2 days. I don't call that "a long time" - it's certainly not weeks. I call that a short time.

Ah, but to quote Jack Sparrow, "We've established my proposal as sound in principle. Now, we're just haggling over price." Two days does seem short, but the game has always agreed that the dungeon master has the right to set healing rates in his own campaign, based on his own perceptions of challenge.

You are right; this comes down to where we see the logical disconnect. You see it between two days of bedrest and weeks of bedrest. I see it between, "Rub some dirt on it, you pansy," and hedge-magic nursing for two days.

 

[Neonchameleon]

A cleric and a fighter of equal level should be evenly matched in a straight fight, provided the cleric has sunk their allotment of divine grace into martial prowess and prepared for the fight accordingly. If the cleric diverts any of that grace elsewhere the fighter quite rightly gets the advantage in a fight.

Similarly, a magic-user should be evenly matched against a fighter by burning all their spells. The fight, however, will be asymmetrical because the magic-user must use offensive and defensive magic to avoid being hit: if the fighter can land blows he'll likely beat the wizard to death. This may mean the wizard "wins" the fight by running away.

If both a wizard and a thief/rogue of equal level attempt to steal the Gem of Awesome from its suitably guarded safe their chances of doing so successfully should be about even. The rogue will stealthily subvert the defences using their skills on both the way in and the way out. Unfortunately, the wizard has prepared for this burglary and used magic to get in and out in a fraction of the time. The wizard has out-rogued the rogue! However, the wizard burned all his spells in the process. The rogue's skills don't run out and the wizard can only swear and curse his disappointment when he discovers the gem isn't where he stashed it.

And mine is that that would be fine if and only if a character tried to do one and only one thing. If in the course of an adventure you need to steal the Gem of Awesome on one day and fight on the next and you have any forewarning about either then the wizard can be as good as the thief on the gemstealing day while the fighter will almost be sitting out and as good at the fighter in the dragonslaying day when the thief will almost be sitting out. And you're saying this is fair?

Flexibility is a strength of its own and is one that Vancian casters get. If there is to be any shred of balance they must give up power in exchange for the ability to be able to prepare the type of power they are going to need.

Either that or you limit wizards to the number of spells they can cast in most fiction - Gandalf casts what? Six in the whole of Lord of the Rings? That's about the number that one of Jack Vance's greatest casters could memorise.

 

[Imaro]

And mine is that that would be fine if and only if a character tried to do one and only one thing. If in the course of an adventure you need to steal the Gem of Awesome on one day and fight on the next and you have any forewarning about either then the wizard can be as good as the thief on the gemstealing day while the fighter will almost be sitting out and as good at the fighter in the dragonslaying day when the thief will almost be sitting out. And you're saying this is fair?

I'd say that's suck adventure design. "It's a team game" applies as much to the DM (or whoever wrote the adventure) as it does to the players. If the only thing you are doing in an adventure can be accomplished by one class, that's not a problem with the classes it's a problem with the adventure.

Flexibility is a strength of its own and is one that Vancian casters get. If there is to be any shred of balance they must give up power in exchange for the ability to be able to prepare the type of power they are going to need.

So the Wizard, even if devoting all his power into a single capability, should always be sub-par in it? So then in a balanced party, why play the Wizard?

Either that or you limit wizards to the number of spells they can cast in most fiction - Gandalf casts what? Six in the whole of Lord of the Rings? That's about the number that one of Jack Vance's greatest casters could memorise.

Or, as the DCC rpg does you make magic less predictable and include an inherent chance for danger to when it's used.

 

[pemerton]

I think the loss of large quantities of skin, muscle, and bone is sufficiently traumatic to call that possibility into question, yes.

<snip>

The warlord, by definition, can only deal with the fatigue. So the warlord only functions equivalently to a cleric in an environment where no hit point loss is meat.

The warlord can deal with more than fatigue. The warlord can urge his/her friends to push hard through their physical injuries.

And your characterisation of Disintegrate puzzles me. Imagine an 11th level 3.5 fighter - 65 hp from dice (10+10d10) plus (say) 55 hp from a 20 CON bonus for a total of 120 hp. Say this PC takes 77 hp from a Disintegrate spell - s/he still has 43 hp left, and probably has a reasonable chance of wrestling a tiger to death bare-handed. Are you sure that this character nevertheless has lost large quantities of skin, muscle and bone?

And if that was so, how is that a cleric can heal him/her back to full health with multiple applications of Cure Light Wounds? (8 * 9.5 per spell would restore 76 of the 77 missing hp.) Where are the light wounds that are being healed here?

Whatever exactly Disintegrate does, I find it hard to accept that it strips away large quantities of skin, muscle and bone. Whatever exactly it does, it can be healed as a series of light wounds, and the victim of it can continue on with great feats of physical prowess. I therefore have no trouble with the idea that the victim might continue with even more forthrightness if urged on by an inspirational companion.

 

[DEFCON 1]

This makes little sense to me. An archer ranger is a fighter archer in all but name - s/he turns up on the battlefield darting from point to point unleashing volleys of arrows.

Whereas the cleric isn't a warlord at all - s/he has a patron god, has turning undead, ray of light etc.

And there were plenty of 3E people who didn't see the Ranger as just 'Fighter archer in all but name'. To them, there was as much of a differential between what a Fighter and Ranger were as you feel between a Cleric and a Warlord.

Furthermore, in D&Dnext there is not a uniform power structure - spells aren't just a lable slapped on a generic unit of PC effectiveness (like, say "prayer" or "exploit" in 4e). They are a distinctive mechanical structure intended to correlate to something fairly substantial within the fiction. Martial daily abilities, like the fighter's Action Surge or the barbarian's Rage don't have the same structure as spells at all (eg they don't have the "pick from a menu" character). This seems pretty deliberate to me, and to "reskin" spells as "exploits" would require pushing hard against this feature of the ruleset.

As I mentioned... it basically involves people carving out of their own brains the idea that "You can't refluff/reskin Magic!". Which is baloney. The entire game is nothing but mechanics. And that's true in every edition. Every bit of fluffing layered on top of these mechanics makes them interesting to play... but are by no means the ONLY fluffing that works.

What is spellcasting in D&DN from a purely mechanical point of view? It's that at 1st level you have 2 or more "things" you know, and twice per day you can do any of them. That's it. That's the extent of the mechanics of spellcasting at it's base form.

Now the game layers on top of this all kinds of fluffy rules describing how a person learns or finds those two "things" he knows, what he needs to have or do in order to accomplish those two "things" he knows, when he can get another opportunity to do those two "things" he knows, and why he is doing those two "things" he knows. All fluffed as "magic".

But those two "things" he knows? They can be anything. However you choose to fluff them. And our "warlord" might know two things-- 1) he can grant a bonus of +1 to +4 to attacks and skill rolls to other players for 10 minutes, and 2) he can grant a recovery of 1d8+2 hit points. Does anything in those two "things" scream "Magic!" in any, way, shape or form? No. Not in the least. Because we just had an edition where these exact kinds of "things" were granted by all manner of classes, magic or mundane.

I don't think it makes much sense to design a game deliberately intended to be different from one in which PCs are built out of uniform pieces, and in which metagame structures like daily and encounter powers are intended to also express important features of the fiction, and then tell everyone that you didn't really mean it and that they can just reskin at will.

Why not? If this game is meant to be inclusive of all players... there's no reason for them NOT to mention both ways. Maybe not in the same book or in the opening chapters of basic character creation... but in a "modular" game, I see absolutely no reason why you wouldn't or couldn't have a section on refluffing/reskinning/sub-class design. If you're trying to cut down on the number of classes you create (because of the amount of "stuff" you then have to create to support that class-- which yes, they would HAVE to do otherwise they'd get people complaining about it incessantly a la the Seeker and Runepriest)... then going into ways to create your own classes via refluffing/reskinning/sub-class design makes all the sense in the world in my opinion.

And getting a "warlord" by adding a few cleric multiclass levels to a fighter sub-class seems a pretty easy way to accomplish it, unless it's really just the fluff of the warlord a person cares about and has to see it written down somewhere.