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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6146242" data-attributes="member: 42582">There is a motif, common in what I have been calling "romantic fantasy" (pointing to Arthurian romance and Tolkien as exemplars), that a hero does not die, in the end, from phyiscal harm, but from a failure of will or spirit.For instance, Aragorn (in Appendix A) is not described as dying of any particular infection or organ failure. Denethor only kills himself when his will fails. Attention from Faramir is what bring Eowyn back to life and health. Etc.A certain sort of heroic fantasy - comic books, some "action" movies, etc - also embrace a version of this motif, although for them the time frame in which will/spirit operate is often more compressed - rather than minutes or days or weeks, the inspiration happens in moments (for instance, a hero sees a loved one about to be attacked, and therefore struggles to his/her feet and rejoins the fray).This is the fiction that the warlord's inspirational healing is modelling. If you don't like it, you naturally wouldn't use the warlord class. If you want to model it by introducing a separate "morale point" track, go to town! - but you'll be taking D&D in a direction it's never really gone before.No inspirational healing? What do you think happened to Eowyn? How do you think Gandalf lifted the curse from Theoden? How did Theoden turn from a tired old man into a fearless and valiant war leader?If you want to read LotR as if its themes and motifs have no connection to the pre-modern literature that Tolkien devoted his academic life to studying and defending from modernist criticism, that's your prerogative. For me, the connection between pre-modern romances and LotR is extremely obvious. One of the key and recurring motifs is that the presence of a leader - Aragorn, Gandalf, Theoden, Faramir - makes a greater difference to the outcome of a conflict than any question of materiel or numbers (and in that sense the treatment of war in LotR can be seen as a massive rejection of the First World War, which was very much a "materiel war").As I've posted multiple times upthread, the question then becomes - how does one implement the idea that the moral factor in combat is more important than the material factor - into D&D. The most immediate and powerful way is to have inspiration produce hit point recovery.No one is forcing you to read, or to post in, this thread. And maybe 4e killed your enjoyment of RPGing, but it had a positive effect on mine. And as to the warlord being a "token" class, I don't know what that claim is based on at all. It's a robust class that a lot of people seem to like and to play, as best I have a sense of the 4e fanbase.Your argument basically seems to be that, because you don't like 4e, 4e didn't work and anyone who did like it is foolish and/or ignorant. The argument only has to be stated for its absurdity to be apparent. I know from other posts of yours that the range of non-D20 rpgs that you are familiar with is very narrow. You've never played classic games like Runequest or Pendragon, nor modern games that occupy something like the same thematic space, such as Burning Wheel. So your comments about "no precedent for it in other games" is baseless - Burning Wheel, which predates 4e by a number of years, has a PC-affecting morale mechanic (based around the Steel attribute) that creates, in effect, a parallel track on which combat can be won or lost; Marvel Heroic RP (a game that is subsequent to 4e) has 3 tracks of "damage" (physical, mental, emotional) which operate in parallel, but are mildly substitutable in the resolution mechanics, and any of which can lead to disablement or death; 1st ed AD&D had purely mental attacks (psionics, for instance) which could generate hit point damage.What about games which treat different forms of harm and disablement on the same track, as 4e does? Two I know of are Maelstrom Storytelling (1996) and HeroWars/Quest (mulitple editions from around 2000 or so). Possibly also Over the Edge (1992), but I don't have my copy ready to hand and my memory of it is a bit more shaky.If you don't want to play a warlord, or use inspirational healing, in your game, I don't think anyone is going to force you to. But given that a warlord class, or some similar inspirational healer build of another class, can be built into the game without affecting its suitability for doing whatever you want it to do, what is it to you that others have the option? Are you worried about the 4 or so pages of rulebook space that it might take up?I completely agree with Neonchameleon here - the combat a war/combat as sport dichotomy is not one that I think was coined by those whose playstyle is being characterised as "combat as sport".And I think it's interesting that the poster in this thread who has embraced both sides of the dichotomy - [MENTION=21169]Doug McCrae[/MENTION] - thinks that D&D doesn't fall under the "combat as war" label for similar reasons to those given by Neonchameleon - namely, that it is has an overly regulated metagame (eg its action economy and its hit point economy, which are prominent features even in classic D&D).In any event, the presence or absence of a warlord with inspiration healing has little bearing on the combat as war/combat as sport dichotomy that I can see, unless the combat-as-war side of that dichotomy is also taken to entail a very gritty processs-simulation approach to action resolution.</blockquote>

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