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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6758381" data-attributes="member: 996">The primary concept was as a tactically brilliant and/or inspiring battle-leader, a familiar archetype from many genres, including heroic fantasy.  To that were added a number of variations, including resourceful, aggressive/intimidating lead-from-the-front, insightful/perceptive, and even oddball 'lazy' builds that were more kibitzing bystanders or victims in need of rescue than leaders.  It's trying to capture a swath of character concepts that neither the Fighter nor Rogue have ever been able to model well.  The Fighter has often been expected to cover them, but was given no mechanical abilities to do so.  Perhaps incidentally, the Warlord also opened the game up to themes and playstyles that were previously impractical without heavy modification, like all-martial parties and low-/no- magic pulp/S&S style campaigns (not just low-/no- item, but limited or no PC casting).  Now it's debatable whether you need several different classes - Fighter, Rogue, Warlord, Barbarian, Cavalier, Knight, Champion, Slayer, Swashbuckler, etc - to model the various non-magic-using archetype from genre, or whether you just needed to finally give the fighter a sufficiently diverse range of abilities.  5e hasn't done the latter, so it's stuck with both Fighters and Rogue, plus one Barbarian sub-class (myabe) and a noticeable lack of other non-magic-using options. It was neatly balanced with other support classes (like Cleric and Bard) in the past, and those classes are much more powerful in 5e than they were then, so, no.  If anything, the Warlord is going to have to be powered up substantially to fit in 5e.  A direct port would be underwhelming, indeed.There's no telling what the 'why' may be.  Worst-case, the chief developer, Mike Mearls has made comments that could be interpreted as deeply prejudiced against the class, for instance, so it could, literally, be personal.  More cynically, there was an epidemic of on-line nerdrage called the 'edition war' in reaction to the release of the last edition, and since the Warlord was introduced in that edition, there's a fear that introducing it could re-ignite the flames (in any discussion of the Warlord, you'll see someone taking the opportunity to say something negative about 4e).  More pragmatically, 5e is being developed with fewer resources than any edition since the earliest days of the game, so it may have just seemed too daunting a task to create a viable support class without leveraging the existing spell lists, tackling the sorts of mechanics it'd require a few at a time in other classes may be a way of spreading out what would otherwise be an impractical development challenge.</blockquote>

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