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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7043130" data-attributes="member: 996">Some of us have.  5e fighters can't do everything 3.5 fighters could, either (nor could 4e fighters), and I've complained about that, too.  The Battlemaster does fail the 4e fighter by a margin not nearly so wide as it fails the warlord, though.  So you can play a 'more complex fighter,' even if it can't mark, it's 'combat superiority' is just about doing an extra die of damage, and it has fewer build options and fewer and less interesting/effective options beyond grinding out DPR in play.  The omission of the Warlord isn't different in kind from that (well, it is, there's at least a class called Fighter in the PH1), just far worse in degree.We've also heard complaints about the Ranger, obviously, and they've been addressed, if not in spectacularly successful fashion.  And we've heard complaints about the Sorcerer that haven't been addressed.  What we haven't heard, happily. is much of the edition warring - the cacophony of illogic, malice, and outright lies that constituted 'complaints' about 4e.  It's mostly much more constructive, this time around.  Except, of course, for the opposition to the Warlord, which smacks of the extremes and intellectual dishonesty of the edition war (which, I know, you personally missed out on - count your blessings!). In the case of barbarian Rage, where they were trying to evoke both the classic, non-magical (and back then, magic-hating) D&D barbarian, and give a small nod to the 4e Primal-Spirit-based Barbarian, maybe.  It still seems more plausible to me that that Rage obtained from communion with supernatural spirits is supernatural (thought not necessarily magic, sure, so there's some ambiguity for you), and the rage of the berserker the more traditional, extraordinary (as in 3.x 'EX' ability) but still natural rage.  I'm pretty sure things like sneak attack, combat style, and the like are still very clearly non-magical, and not even supernatural, even though they are limited to certain classes, while things like spellcasting and ki are explicitly magical.  [qipte]   That they just aren't worrying about that distinction.</blockquote>It's hard to speculate about their state of mind, but there was a lot of communication during the playtest, and I certainly don't recall blurring the definition of magic being a high priority.  Rather the opposite, really, as a frequent complaint leading up to the playtest was that magic didn't feel magical enough. OTOH... There was a lot of talk about 5e allowing different styles of play, and even blue-sky meanderings about playing in the styles of different editions at the same table.  There was also the clear decision to eschew jargon and embrace the ambiguity of natural language.  And there was the very successful goal of DM Empowerment, which establishes the DM as the arbiter who interprets said ambiguity, and could rule on whether something was magical or supernatural or not.  So, yeah, a class ability that could be personal, natural rage "at a world full of pain" but could also be obtained from supernatural spirits for a different character of the same class, seems completely in line with all that.  5e didn't do away with dispel magic, nor allow it to dispel mundane things (and no cracks about spells seeming mundane!), and it /did/ bring back magic resistance and anti-magic zones - also consistent with the calls for classic feel and more-magical-feeling-magic.The point remains that there are classes that have features that are not in any way supernatural, that not just everyone can do.  The Warlord would, indeed, be another such class.  Nothing odd or game-breaking about that, though D&D admittedly has a poor and inconsistent track record when it comes to balancing classes without magic and designing good abilities for them.[/QUOTE]

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