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!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6829490" data-attributes="member: 42582">Well, it's an Enchantment effect with no save.I can think of two possible interpretations of that; maybe there are others.Maybe it lets the casting cleric override the will and desires of the target character - dispelling, with no save, that character's instincts of fear and self-preservation. Generally intra-party mind control is frowned upon, but if people tolerate it in this case because of the buff, then maybe they would tolerate the correlative consequences of having a warlord in play.Or maybe it generates "vibes" of encouragement and courage that a willing character can be swayed by. In this case, it seems to raise the same issues as the warlord: for the buff to work, the player has to allow that his/her PC is swayed by those vibes (which, presumably, are coloured by the the cleric's god, or - for an Eberron-style world of distant gods - by the cleric him-/herself).To be blunt, it seems to me that the implications of a hypothetical warlord for PC characterisation and roleplaying have been explored far more thoroughly than the implications of this actual, ubiquitous buff spell. I'm not sure why that is. Some posters upthread have conjectured that the outrage over the warlord's implications is not entirely sincere; it certainly seems to me that the warlord generates a degree of scrutiny (over the relationship between mechanics and emotions/relationships; over the interaction between character level and capability; over the silo-ing consquences of a class system) that isn't applied to other elements of the system. And it's not just about "legacy", either, because the warlock has no more legacy than the warlord, and (given its flavour and mechanics) seems equally open to such scrutiny, but doesn't appear to receive it.</blockquote>

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