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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7041613" data-attributes="member: 996">To be fair, you'd also have been waiting until Epic to kinda sorta rival the pacifist cleric. Still don't see 5e as as that starkly inferior.  Sure, something that was neatly balanced in 4e might be broken in 5e - that's the case for every caster that was in both editions, for instance - that's just the way 5e design works, it's not balance-first, or even third.  Balance is something the DM can impose if he wants, not something that determines what classes can exist in the game.5e's design philosophy is class-concept-first.  The hardest part of sticking to that is going far enough in making a class awesome without feeling too guilty about it.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> Most of D&D's history, it's been a poorly-balanced game, and getting a 'lucky'-rolled character or a wildly OP magic item in the olden days, or crafting a wildly OP build in 3.x was a significant aspect of enjoying the game for some players.  If you played any edition other than 4e, you can't help but internalize that to a degree, you /know/ part of the appeal of the game is 'winning' by getting the character that overpowers and overshadows everything else.  4e, in relative terms, all but did away with that, and that really seemed like it was always the driving force, the bottom line behind the edition war, that it didn't have the 'system-mastery' or 'skilled play' opportunities to 'win' by overpowering that 3.x and the classic game provided.So it's deeply ironic, as well as flatly unjustified, for you to be harboring that particular fear. There's actually no inconsistency there.  4e was the most nearly-balanced edition of D&D, by quite a large margin.  The Warlord (and Fighter & Rogue & Ranger) were all wildly effective compared to the traditional Fighter & Thief, precisely because they were roughly balanced.   Fun's like that.  I don't get the appeal of the 4e Striker role, it's boring, to me, while Leader was awesome, Controller potentially fun, and Defender something I could at least work with.  But, I don't hold that against people who do want to play a Champion or a blasting sorcerer or whatever.  And, hey, if I can give them an extra shot of their attack-and-damage-rolling fun, in the process, it's a win-win.   Happens in the movies all the time.  The set-up, the encouraging word, the tossed weapon, the significant look even.   That's an ideal D&D has rarely come close to.  The closest it came was in 4e, and even then, it would have to be in terms of classes of the same role, as synergies among roles would make swapping out any character for any other quite different.  In other editions, swapping in a caster is usually better than swapping in anything else, period.  A party of CoDzillas & Wizards in 3.5 was strictly superior to just about anything else, even if you could work up some synergies.  A party of multi-class characters in the classic game was superior at low-level, at high level you'd want a bunch of humans - but class could be less important than magic items, too. Even the crazier takes on action-granting would be unlikely to result in a Warlord that would be strictly better when swapped into a party than a character of any other class.  Strictly better than another martial class in combat, perhaps, since all the existing martial classes are primarily contributing DPR, and in a party full of DPR, swapping in anything else would be a good.  But that's a failing of the existing classes. The Warlord already has a name, and it's a fine one, evocative of genre, especially the pulp end of it, and of characters like John Carter.   Sure, it has an arguable sinister side to it, but it's not like Warlock and Assassin - and in the benighted modern context, even Cleric - don't, either.  And what was Odysseus?  A Hero.  The existing class and sub-class names Wizard (originally the name-level title for an 11th level wizard), Knight, Champion, and backgrounds like Noble already imply primacy or accomplishment.  'Fighter.'I'm sorry, but any 'requirement' a returning class's name be changed to fit is going to have to be one that every other returning class's name already fits.  And that's neither of the two you've put forth. If you combined every toy the fighter ever got in every edition, with everything the Rogue ever got, and added everything anyone's ever wanted for the Warlord, why, then, you just might have a genuinely OP class.Though in 3.5 it'd've probably been Tier 2.</blockquote>

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