NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 6144275" data-attributes="member: 6696971">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).</blockquote>

Verification