Water, water everywhere, Nor any drop to drink

I've mentioned before, my buddy's homebrew WWII RPG. In it we all played a band of soldiers. Through character creation choices, each character ended up with a rank. Highest ranking PC was the commander of the team/mission.

There were rules for how the leader "commanded" such that player agency remained. Any character acted as they deemed fit by them player. As the actions played out, the leader was instructing the character to performer that chosen act. We eventually dubbed it, "Schrodinger's Command". What did the boss just tell his men to do? Not sure. Let's open the box and find out...


  • Jim (playing Private Griswold): I pick up the fallen gunner's 50-cal and opens fire on the Nazis overhead!
  • Eric (playing Lieutenant Neely): "Private, <pointing at gun on ground> take out those kauts up on the ridge!"
  • Jim, with the help of the GM, resolves action.

In that order. And it always worked great. Was every action a "command"? Of course not. When it made sense and fit the narrative, the leader was there to fill that role. Never by stripping agency or stepping on another player's enjoyment.

And this would work for a theoretical Warlord as well, but it requires that the other players agree with this.

If I decide that my Ranger has a problem with authority (a pretty common trope for adventurers), and that's why he is in an adventuring group instead of in the military, then someone else bringing in a Warlord character is going to be a problem.
 

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Again, missing the point.

It appears the Devs have decided that there would be no pure support classes in 5e.
Quote?
Because i havn't seen them say anything like that.

All classes are intended to contribute directly in addition to any support they may perform.
All classes have the OPTION of contributing directly, yes. Nothing forces you to deal damage.

But if you want an examples that are already in the game...

Life Cleric can use help from 1-4. Help is about as effective as a cantrip from 1-4, or with rogues past that.
Bard's 11 has plenty of non-damage / support spells and can supplement with grapple checks or minor illusion.
Wizard 18, who get's blind/deafness (no concentration) at-will.

If this is true then there is no way to provide a Warlord that you will accept with the current design philosophy.
I never asked for a warlord who couldn't hit things if he wanted. The above is a fighter, who does not lack in that department.
 

Quote?
Because i havn't seen them say anything like that.

There is no quote. It is inferred by the fact that there are not, currently, any class/subclass combination that is purely support. A Warlord that is purely support would be the first such class and unique among the dozens of subclasses that we already have. Including the ones that are supposed to supply Warlord functionality.

All classes have the OPTION of contributing directly, yes. Nothing forces you to deal damage.

But if you want an examples that are already in the game...

Life Cleric can use help from 1-4. Help is about as effective as a cantrip from 1-4, or with rogues past that.
Bard's 11 has plenty of non-damage / support spells and can supplement with grapple checks or minor illusion.
Wizard 18, who get's blind/deafness (no concentration) at-will.

Anyone can use the help action. There is nothing special about the Life Cleric that makes this any better that I can see. A Battlemaster Fighter could do Help actions for example.

Even if a Bard (or any other caster for that matter) uses every spell for nothing but support he is going to run out of spells before the end of the average adventuring day. At least until very high levels. And then he would eventually be reduced to casing 1st level spells in a CR 15 encounter.

And now we are talking about an 18th level Wizard. Somehow I doubt people would be happy to hear that their Warlord concept could be realized at level 18. And even then it debuffs the enemy instead of buffing the other characters.

I never asked for a warlord who couldn't hit things if he wanted. The above is a fighter, who does not lack in that department.

Yes, he could attack. But he doesn't have to. He could sacrifice all of his attacks every turn and do nothing but support. Something that no other class can reasonably do.
 
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And this would work for a theoretical Warlord as well, but it requires that the other players agree with this.

If I decide that my Ranger has a problem with authority (a pretty common trope for adventurers), and that's why he is in an adventuring group instead of in the military, then someone else bringing in a Warlord character is going to be a problem.

Then the warlord-equivalent finds a way to motivate you to action that you will respond to. Oh, right, you're 100% fully engaged in doing the best you can every second, notice everything around you and got burnt out with stress after a week. Or you're impossible to motivate at all by anyone and only ever do whatever you like, and are a horrible liability to any team.
 

Lord Twig said:
And this would work for a theoretical Warlord as well, but it requires that the other players agree with this.

If I decide that my Ranger has a problem with authority (a pretty common trope for adventurers), and that's why he is in an adventuring group instead of in the military, then someone else bringing in a Warlord character is going to be a problem.

Then the warlord-equivalent finds a way to motivate you to action that you will respond to. Oh, right, you're 100% fully engaged in doing the best you can every second, notice everything around you and got burnt out with stress after a week. Or you're impossible to motivate at all by anyone and only ever do whatever you like, and are a horrible liability to any team.

So you do not approve of my character concept and I must change it to fit into your idea of a team?

This just illustrates the problem with the Warlord.
 

There is no quote. It is inferred by the fact that there are not, currently, any class/subclass combination that is purely support.
I don't infer that at all.

There are 6 cleric cantrips. 1 deals damage.
There are 11 bard cantrips. 1 deals damage, and that's a very minimal amount with the bigger effect being support.

If the devs wanted to make everyone deal damage, they would of made those cantrips mandatory, not optional.


A Warlord that is purely support would be the first such class and unique among the dozens of subclasses that we already have. Including the ones that are supposed to supply Warlord functionality.
All the more reason for it to exists.
 

I don't infer that at all.

There are 6 cleric cantrips. 1 deals damage.
There are 11 bard cantrips. 1 deals damage, and that's a very minimal amount with the bigger effect being support.

If the devs wanted to make everyone deal damage, they would of made those cantrips mandatory, not optional.

-Light, Mending and Thaumaturgy are utility spells.
-Guidance helps Ability rolls and requires Concentration, so no Bless.
-That leaves Resistance, which also requires Concentration. If you want to spend an Action every round to add +1d4 to one save for one person, be my guest, but I don't think that is really contributing to the success of the party.

Sorry I don't have time to go through the Bard spells. Maybe they are better?

All the more reason for it to exists.

No, it isn't.

If you make a game where all characters are expected to directly contribute to combat (do damage or otherwise hinder the enemy), then creating a pure support class would be a mistake. Now you have a game where all but one class directly contributes to combat.

If you don't think they intended to leave out pure support classes, how come there isn't one yet? Bard, Cleric and Wizard are all traditional support classes. Yet every single one will be sub-par if you try to run them that way. You do some support, then you help with damage or other effects that harm or hinder the enemy.
 

Quick look at Bard spells (Cantrips) from the SRD.

Dancing Lights, Light, Mage Hand, Mending, Message, Minor Illusion, Prestidigitation, True Strike

Not a single support spell...
 
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pemerton, If you are arguing that 5e is unable to portray Boromir's death scene from The Fellowship of the Ring, I agree. It was why HP recovery from Hit Dice and full HP recovery from 8 hours of rest was a bad idea to include. They probably should have made it an optional rule.

<snip>

A Warlord class would take that mechanic and make it front and center.
I think that there are two features of 5e that get in the way. One is very easily tweaked. The other is a bit more baked in, but probably not so fully that it can't be tweaked too.

The easy one: changing the ingame time required for recovery. This is as easy in 5e as in 4e. (For balance reasons, everything else built around that schedule needs to change too, not just hp recovery - but for a Tolkienesque feel, having spells and the like return on a weekly or monthly cycle rather than a daily one is a feature, not a bug - it slows the whole pace of the game down for that more languid, "roll of years" feel.)

The trickier one involves what happens at zero hit points. First, you have to get rid of healer's kits and have to stop treating stabilisation as 6 seconds of medical treatment. This completely ruins the verisimilitude of a game that is meant to involve more-or-less mediaeval technology, by bringing in sci-fi style "medipacks". Making stabilisation a matter of inspriation, and of having a friend persuade the dying person not to go into the light, brings the game closer to the classic fantasy tropes and feel.

Second, you have to slow down the dying process, and allow for dying words. That doesn't mean you have to slow down death saves, but it means that when the final death save is failed, the character is dying but not yet dead. This is how, for instance, you can have Boromir speak his dying words to Aragorn; or have Eowyn carried from the field of battle and then (with the application of suitable magic and healing skill and the love of Faramir) recover.

This change then makes room for a third: healing skill, plus inspirational abilities, are used not to apply implausible field medicine but to actual help people recover in hospices and the like, over time. This also allows for an inspirational rather than cleric-style healer to use "Raise Dead" effects: they don't literally bring the dead back to life, but rather are able to restore hope to those who have failed all their death saves, and so who would - without such intervention - die over a period of time.

And this sneaks in every time. In order to be an inspirational leader you require all other characters to be inspired by your character and they must recognize him as a leader.*

Honestly this might be a case where the Warlord would just require buy-in from the rest of the group in a manner similar to how the old-school Lawful Good Paladins had to be approved by the rest of the group so they didn't end up killing each other. If the rest of the group agrees to let your character be the leader, there is no problem.

*And what if there are two "inspirational leaders" in the group? How does that work? You never see a modern military group with two leaders. And for good reason.
I think you are giving the word "leader" a lot of weight, probably more than is warranted.

First, on the issue of two leaders: the Fellowship had two leaders (Aragorn and Gandalf), and in Sam's case there was a third (Frodo), and survived.

More generally, leadership in this context is not about command authority; it's about the power of personality. In the context of D&D play, I've never heard any suggestion that when one person is playing the warlord, s/he is entitled (in character) to tell the other players what to do (in character). The capacity of the warlord PC to lead those other characters is already mechanically built into the class - we know that when the warlord character tells another character that it's not yet time to die the other character listens, because the player of the warlord declares an action that restores hit points to the dying character. The player of the dying character doesn't have to make any choices or follow anyone's instructions.

If the group doesn't like the flavour of this then it mightn't work. I don't see how that's any different to a player who doesn't like the idea that his/her PC is inspired by the bard's song, or is blessed by the cleric's pagan god, or anything else of that sort.

Maybe, across the D&D cohort as a whole, the idea that one's PC might be inspired by another's PC is more controversial that that one's PC who is devoted to god X might receive blessings from another PC who worships god Y. It's not anything that's ever caused an issue in my group, though.
 

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