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

[Neonchameleon]

Balderdash!

Next doesn't currently do this. That's far from can't.

Such mechanics as the Warlord can work in any system, and the designers of Next have said they are looking at multiple options for how to do this (they said it in the same podcast you referenced about Mearls disparaging your baby...maybe you were too focused on your anger at Mearls to hear what else was said...) And I'm sorry to disabuse you of this notion, but 4E is not the special case you seem to think it is. The mechanics of 4E are not that different compared to RPG's in general, and they aren't even that different compared to other D&D edtions. Even the underlying metagame is not that different. This artificially generated sense of specialness and uniqueness, though likely and legitimately born from the crap that 4E fans had to endure, is nothing but an illusion; and is now becomeing a serious roadblock to meaningful discussion.

Again, just let it go Man...

Please stop patronising me and trying to claim you understand my motivations. After all you've just said the same to me about Mearls, with far more evidence on my side than you have about my posts. (I could go into the subject of Mearls contributions to 4e if you like - he's added some good stuff (like Primal Power and lead author for the Essentials PHBs) but literally all save one of the 4e books* I have ever actively warned people off have his name on them - and that was before I saw who wrote them).

And the version of Next we have access to can't do this, and with Mearls and Thompson joking about Warlord healing it probably won't. So don't cry balderdash on a true statement.

* The one exception is the Dungeoneers Survival Guide. And that's because that book is half full of advertising (as well as being an unbalanced mess by 4e standards).

 

[El Mahdi]

deleted

 

[Manbearcat]

My enjoyment of the Warlord class in 4e consists mostly of its mechanical package and its effect on play and how easily this mechanical package can be used to represent metagame story-constructs just as well as it can a "Battle Captain" (which plenty of others love it for its thematic rendering thereof). My group has used the "Warlord mechanical package" in two incarnations in order to both facilitate genre tropes and to increase the enjoyment of tactical play due to its unique mechanics. We've had a full-fledged "princess build" standard Warlord in multiple iterations that the players must protect as their charge. We've also had a very user-friendly Warlord "Companion" character (DMG 2) that is solely a metagame construct representing manifest destiny + the inspiring presence of your brave allies + savvy, veteran teamwork. The players rotate spending the action economy, round by round, for these characters as a "4th PC" in my 3 PC game. These packages have enabled:

- More potent options for the "heroic comeback" than they would have without it. This is both tactically rewarding and narratively compelling as this allows for engaging resource deployment/management (in the "support" vein) while capturing many genre tropes to that "heroic comeback" end within the fiction.

- Force-multiplication play (which is at the core of the 4e Warlord as much as the inspirational healing). Again, tactically rich and through that richness it bulwarks the PCs fictional positioning of "team".

- More dynamic mobility in fights. This has the advantage of the above but also has its own benefits of making the entirety of the battlefield (from its terrain to its hazards) relevant, alive and engaged.

- The "protect the charge" trope by rewarding the PCs mechanically in the metagame for keeping the "charge" alive as L + 5 boss encounters budgeted for 4 PCs become TPKs when you're down a man. This creates an urgency and tension at the table that wouldn't be nearly as potent if the "charge" was solely setting color.


There are lots of renderings for the 4e Warlord mechanical package and potential fluff supporting that package. One such rendering is the thematic archetype at its core in 4e; Martial (small unit) Battle Captain. The mechanics capture it well in my (theoretical) estimation and it seems that groups aplenty that play 4e and players that love the Warlord (rendered as martial, Battle Captain archetype) vehemently assert as much; I have no reason to disbelieve them or challenge them on their play experience.

Having the mechanical package represented in the above bullet points unavailable to my group would be a net loss for our play experience. Its also quite clear that having the mechanical package represented in the above bullet points unincorporated (as default) in a martial, (small unit) Battle Captain theme would be a net loss to an extraordinary number of 4e players. There is no unity edition when resultant table experience equals "net loss in play". Creation and inclusion of a discrete Warlord class (and the mechanics and tropes it enables) is a trivial thing with that in mind (or even without it).

 

[The Choice]

Those are also two examples that are clearly not class abilities for those characters.

Why shouldn't they be? I've always held, for exemple that counting the arrows your character shoot so he/she can run out is silly when a spellcaster can't run out of spell components. So, if my concept is "this guy has gear that allows this effect", and that effect is already present in another class, but flavoured differently, why is that a problem?

The archer simply has a powerful item, and the fighter has taken a feat or simply made a series of checks if you like the UA incantation rules (which are a nice concet). They are not part of the standard training and experience that those classes represent.

Nope, my guy went to a special school to learn what he did, or maybe he had a trainer that used the same style. Maybe he just Macguyver'd it after being impressed by an alchemist's tricks. I haven't decided yet. How is that more problematic than "went to Hogswart". As for necro-fighter, yeah sure, he could just have picked a "ritualist" feat, or the equivalent background or something. I'll concede on that point.

If you're arguing that characters should be able to access those types of abilities, I agree. That doesn't mean we need a new class that makes an archer that duplicates the function of an evoker or a fighter that duplicates the function of a necromancer.

No need for a new class either, make the existing ones work that way.

There have always been rules for natural healing.

Sure, but the rules are badly designed considering HPs are not only meat and blood.

There are also rules for improving it. There are variant rules for changing the rate of healing. Again, these are all fine, but the notion that clerical instant healing is required to play or that a nonmagical class must be not only able to do it but be largely built around it does not follow.

Magical healing used to be the sole province of the cleric (with some minor healing being awarded to the druid). The reason behind this was... sketchy at best (something about how giving wizards healing abilities would make them too strong, I think). Then, in 3.X, shock and amazement! the bard can cure. So that whole "arcane magic cannot heal" thing got thrown in the garbage, but it still didn't answer the question of : "if hit points are what the description of them in the rulebooks say what they are, how come it takes forever to recover 'mostly' my 'agility, luck, and/or magical properties' without magical aid?" (paraphrased and translated from 1st Ed PHb)

Clerics/Spellcasters, going by this rule, have no right to have sole control over healing. Period. And "natural healing" needs to represent that fact too. Next is the first edition in the going-on 40 years of the game redefining this central tenet.

Characters get hurt in D&D, that's a fact. Whether that's from getting torched by dragon's breath, getting stabbed in the gut, getting her mind scrambled by psionics, having his life energy drained by a wraith or falling from a ladder. So if you offer a measure of a character's resilience, you have to offer ways of recovering it, and make it fit what it represents. Having more than one class capable of doing that/expediting the process is not a problem. There's more than one way of stabbing people in the face, why shouldn't there be more than one way to recover lost hit points.

Realism, as always, is overstating the issue. Logic and consistency are more apt goals. I'd say the rotten part is the people who have this opinion about magic. Magic isn't "special", simply different. D&D has pretty clear precedents on what makes magical abilities different from nomagical ones. They're accessed differently, and they have specific limitations and specific capabilities you don't see in the base game. There's nothing wrong with that. Plenty of people have played nonmagical characters in all editions of D&D with out developing an inferiority complex about it.

Different is fine, as long as we are talking real differences : red and blue are different colours. They each have their uses, and people can state their preference clearly without one being made out to be better all the time. Both are equaly valid. The "difference" between magical and non-magical characters in D&D (mostly 3rd edition, but previous editions and Next fit the bill somewhat) is not a choice between red or blue, it's a difference between an infinite number of canvases and all the colour palettes you can imagine vs. a piece of cardboard and a sharpee. Sure, you can make the same doodle with both, but you can't paint the Mona Lisa with one of them. Can't we share the canvases and the colours more equally without sacrificing what makes each unique. Magic is limitless because it's "magic", how can you define and frame it. Non-magical is seen as mundane, the stuff of everyday life. A fighter is just some yokel with a piece of steel, why does he deserve narrative control when my Hogwarts alumni can rewrite reality to her whims? That's the disease I was talking about.

It has nothing to do with having an "inferiority complex", it's not about being jealous.

If magic didn't change the world by its very existence, if having it didn't allow characters to do things they couldn't do otherwise, it wouldn't be magic would it? After all, the "type of fiction D&D has always sought to emulate" certainly doesn't treat it that way.[/QUOTE]

But why can't a strong sword-arm do the same. That happens in a lot of novels and movies and video games too, right?

 

[pemerton]

What is unique to the warlord is granting actions to allies, moving allies around the battlefield, granting attacks, and the like.

There is very little room in the action economy of D&Dnext for such abilities, and so I am not expecting to see them. The reason there is no room for these abilities is because there is no analogue to the encounter or daily power - all standard actions are the equivalent of a single basic attack, and hence the only tactical warlord ability for which there is room is Commander's Strike and its ilk.

Whereas there is plenty of room in the mechanical architecture of Next for non-magical healing.

The base warlord can: grant movement, grant bonus damage, or grant an attack. What ability would you take away to add healing? What should warlords no longer be able to do so they can instead heal?

Why do I have to take away anything?

Let's drop the extra attacks, for which there is no room in the action economy at least until we get to the high level "action surge" sort of stuff. What would be imabalanced about a class that was able to heal, to grant out-of-turn movement to allies (probably letting them use their move as a reaction, so as not to unbalance the action economy), and to add bonus damage? Mechanically, it could be a cleric or a paladin variant, but with significantly different flavour text.

But often the healing is unrelated to being a leader. Aaragon's healing is unrelated to his being a king and is all about his wilderness lore. Sam's speeches to Frodo doesn't make their wounds disappear nor does it mean Sam is somehow a master strategist.

I don't know where this idea of "wounds disappearing" comes from. D&Dnext at present has no wounds mechanics - like most versions of D&D, it has a hit point mechanic. And obviously any table that is using warlords and non-magical healing is not interpreting hit points as meat.

Sam is an interesting case, because I think the only version of D&D that can easily model him is 4e - as a mostly lazy warlord who helps Frodo - but I think it is fairly hard to build a lazy warlord into the D&Dnext architecture, because (at least in its current form) it lacks the metagame sensibilities to support that sort of build.

When you assign Arthur and Aragorn and Faramir as warlord archetypes, what do you do when someone else argues that Arthur is a knight, Aragorn is a ranger, and Faramir is a fighter, or some other variation? Do you argue with each other forever, or just agree to disagree? If the latter, then discussing the incarnation of the warlord archetype as a D&D warlord class is about as useful as discussing a D&D version of Batman.

Huh? This is no different to debating whether Arthur should be a paladin or a cavalier, or whether Merlin should be a wizard or a druid. [MENTION=2067]Kamikaze Midget[/MENTION] upthread advocated the "three ways to be a vampire" approach, and I have nothing against that. If someone wants to build a ranger Aragorn or a fighter Faramir, go to town. I am just talking about the version of those characters that I am interested in.

And to reiterate: that version (the inspiring battle captain) is a staple of the romantic fantasy genre; I have an edition of D&D that makes it easy to build that character (in fact I have a wealth of options - STR cleric, WIS melee cleric, paladin, whether STR or CHA, plus all the warlord variants - and that's before I look at multi-classing and/or hybriding); and I therefore don't think it's unreasonable to ask that D&Dnext, which is meant to be the universal edition that captures everything D&D-ish that there is in D&D, to also allow me to build that character. At the moment the closest I have is the cavalier build of the paladin, which brings with it quite a bit of mechanical and flavour baggage around spellcasting and divine magic.

 

[pemerton]

being an inspirational leader and tapping into supernatural power are apples and oranges, particularly in these examples where the source of supernatural powers is external to the character, and given that they are not entirely understood.

Why are they apples and oranges? In Runequest or Burning Wheel - just to name two popular and pretty well known fantasy games, one old and the other more recent - these two things are not apples and oranges. You can spend player effort and resources trying to become an inspirational leader (eg by building up your Oratory or Command skill) or trying to become a divine devotee whose prayers are likely to be answered (by joining a cult in RQ, or by developing and then building up your Faith attribute in BW).

The reason D&D handles these things differently from RQ or BW is because it is a class-based game. Once you decide that there are a couple of classes for the ultra-faithful (cleric and paladin), and a couple of classes for the ultra-tough fighters (barbarian and fighter), what is wrong with a class (or two, if you count bards) for the ultra-inspiring? And if someone is wondering, why can't my guy be that inspiring?, the answer is - build a warlord. Just like the player of a paladin who is wondering why his/her PC can't be as skilled with weapons as a fighter gets told to build a fighter instead.

The cleric and sorcerer certainly get better magical abilities because they have invested more effort in training, as represented by their class levels

If you are comfortable with the idea of training in prayer, or training in channelling the mutant powers you inherited from your draconic forebears, then I would think you might be comfortable with the idea of training at being inspirational. I mean, plenty of people think it can be done - there's a pretty lucrative market for management and leadership courses, after all.

In general, classes ARE distinguished by in-game reasons

What's the ingame reason why devout non-cleric PCs cannot pray and have the gods answer their prayers? What's the ingame reason that a fighter descended from a dragon cannot use the magic that a sorcerer can?

 

[Jester David]

There is very little room in the action economy of D&Dnext for such abilities, and so I am not expecting to see them. The reason there is no room for these abilities is because there is no analogue to the encounter or daily power - all standard actions are the equivalent of a single basic attack, and hence the only tactical warlord ability for which there is room is Commander's Strike and its ilk.

Whereas there is plenty of room in the mechanical architecture of Next for non-magical healing.

"Because there's room to add the mechanic" is a pretty soft reason to add a mechanic.
And we've seen encounter powers with the warlock and the fighter pretty much has encounter powers in this iteration. Just because they'd not bolded "encounter power!!" doesn't mean they don't exist. And there are plenty of daily powers so I don't see where you're coming from there.

There's plenty of room in the action economy as well. You just have to be creative. As you state below it's easy to allow the warlord to trigger reactions. The warlord attacks and an ally can use their reaction to move. The warlord takes an action but does not attack and an ally can spend their reaction to attack. The warlord spends an action to activate a unique power (battle strategy or something) and all allies that can see and hear him can move 10 feet or gain some pre-set bonus.

Why do I have to take away anything?

Because classes get far fewer cool tricks at first level in Next. And in general. Warlords can't do it all.

ThereLet's drop the extra attacks, for which there is no room in the action economy at least until we get to the high level "action surge" sort of stuff.

What would be imabalanced about a class that was able to heal, to grant out-of-turn movement to allies (probably letting them use their move as a reaction, so as not to unbalance the action economy), and to add bonus damage? Mechanically, it could be a cleric or a paladin variant, but with significantly different flavour text.

Nothing would be imbalancing but that's too much to do at first level.
A cleric can heal twice at first level and channel divinity. If the warlord can heal an equivalent amount once they can do two other things once a day. But daily powers don't fit a martial class, so they can do one less sexy thing roughly once an Encounter.

So if they have a heal, at first level they might be able to grant out-of-turn movement and maybe so small minor power. That's it. Warlord, the class that lets you move an extra 15 feet each battle. Bask in its glory.
Warlords would be far better off if healing were ignored and they instead had a couple cool powers to choose from each encounter.

I don't know where this idea of "wounds disappearing" comes from. D&Dnext at present has no wounds mechanics - like most versions of D&D, it has a hit point mechanic. And obviously any table that is using warlords and non-magical healing is not interpreting hit points as meat.

Which is the catch. Including it as a class mandates how I view hitpoints. The base assumption becomes hitpoints = gumption.

 

[Cyberen]

If you want an inspirational battle captain : use a paladin chassis, refluffing healing as inspirational.
If you want a tactical one : use a fighter chassis, and pick your "powers" accordingly.
If 5e casually turns the metagame on its head ("there is a lot of design space ! Let's use it and rationalize it. Leaders ! Strikers !") the way 4e did, the best 5e can hope for is ending up as a second-grade 4e. 4e was, at least, very tight in its design, and its robustness opened interesting possibilities.
I would prefer combat healing to be very sparse, rather than just a commodity among others. I understand opinions varies greatly on this subject, and even I can enjoy games based upon massive healing during combat, but it would be very nice to be able to put it on a dial.
So, I guess I am with the OP proposal to divorce D&D of its D&Desque take on healing, but firmly against the return of the Warlord who heals because of the Panic Button.

 

[pemerton]

Which is the catch. Including it as a class mandates how I view hitpoints. The base assumption becomes hitpoints = gumption.

The whole idea is that if you don't like that version of hit points you don't use the class. It's an optinal module (to use the jargon).

"Because there's room to add the mechanic" is a pretty soft reason to add a mechanic.

I want the mechanic because I want the archetype. That there's room for it isn't a reason to have it; it simply means there's no countervailing reason not to have it, given that I want it.

"And we've seen encounter powers with the warlock and the fighter pretty much has encounter powers in this iteration. Just because they'd not bolded "encounter power!!" doesn't mean they don't exist.

I know they're there. But my feeling is that they don't carry the action economy heft of 4e's encounter powers. I must confess I haven't sat down to do the full maths - how much better than a fighter's 1st level encounter dice would it be for a warlord to grant that fighter an additional attack once/encounter?

And there are plenty of daily powers so I don't see where you're coming from there.

<snip>

But daily powers don't fit a martial class, so they can do one less sexy thing roughly once an Encounter.

Martial classes do get daily powers, but not until 11th level unless you're a barbarian. Hence my discounting of them for warlord build purposes.

There's plenty of room in the action economy as well. You just have to be creative. As you state below it's easy to allow the warlord to trigger reactions. The warlord attacks and an ally can use their reaction to move. The warlord takes an action but does not attack and an ally can spend their reaction to attack. The warlord spends an action to activate a unique power (battle strategy or something) and all allies that can see and hear him can move 10 feet or gain some pre-set bonus.

As you note, I canvassed the move action. It's the extra attacks that I think are hard to make room for, in a way that's not so much the case in 4e, because in 4e (especially pre-Essentials) there is both greater regularity in the power level of a basic attack, and a more steeply scaling power curve between at-will, encounter and daily powers which creates the space in which warlords grant their allies bonus attacks.

But as I've said, I don't have a complete handle on the maths of D&Dnext. I'll have a go now: a bonus attack for a fighter looks to me like +1d10 (standard weapon die) +4 for stat +1 for something else (feat, magic, etc) or 10.5. Let's say a 2/3 chance of hitting (+4 for STR, +1 for class, +1 misc for overall +6 vs AC 13 for an Orc or 14 for a goblin or hobgoblin), then the average damage is 7, which is the same as 2d6. So maybe a 1x/enc bonus attack from the warlord is comparable in effect to a fighter's encounter damage dice.

Because classes get far fewer cool tricks at first level in Next. And in general. Warlords can't do it all.

<snip>

A cleric can heal twice at first level and channel divinity. If the warlord can heal an equivalent amount once they can do two other things once a day.

So if they have a heal, at first level they might be able to grant out-of-turn movement and maybe so small minor power. That's it. Warlord, the class that lets you move an extra 15 feet each battle. Bask in its glory.

The cleric's 2x/day healing is a total of 4d8+4 at R:T, or 2d8+4 at R:50' and as a swift action. Given that a whole premise of D&Dnext is that we can balance daily against encounter at something like a 1:4 ratio, let's say our warlord can grant one extra attack per battle or bonus movement for the whole group per battle (as an out-of-turn action in either case), and then once per battle can heal (say) 1d8 (an alternative would be to permit use of a hit die) as a standard action at R:5'.

To balance against a fighter you would reduce armour proficiency to light and medium, and hit die from d10 to d8. Now instead of expertise dice we have our bonus actions, and instead of armour, hit points and a feat we have 1x/enc healing.

How broken is that?

 

[pemerton]

If you want an inspirational battle captain : use a paladin chassis, refluffing healing as inspirational.

I've seen a similar sort of comment about the ranger's hunter's quarry becoming a spell.

Traditionally, D&D has put a lot of mechanical weight on something being "magic", or "a spell": the casting mechanics, the dispel mechanics, etc. This is an obstacle to refluffing. I don't have a sense, yet, of how close D&Dnext is to this tradition. (Though the fact that it's Anti-Magic Field spell goes for more than half a page makes me a bit anxious!)