A game should not be making you choose between doing the things that are fun to play and doing the things that are rewarded by the game's fundamental mechanics.
So there's no such thing as nonmagic. I delegate you to be the one who tells all the mundane fighter fans that their character concept doesn't exist. You can also call Hollywood and let all the makers of fantasy stories where some characters lack superpowers that those characters don't exist either.
That's not what I said.
This is very true. This is just a pale imitation warlord and a very specific trope but at least it's one that is achievable with a Tasha-style minimal tweak alternate class feature. The changes to the fighter, giving them more uses of second wind might help the Banneret here as well.
Healing Word in 5e is very different from how it was in 4e. In 4e, it would always heal a significant amount of hp (25% plus 1d6 per 5 levels, rounded up), and the main limit was the recipient's HD. In 5e, it heals for a piddly amount and is a leveled spell, meaning it's a daily resource that competes against cure wounds for spell slots.
Both the tactical grid and granular modifiers are a consequence of 4e being a game of inches and 5e being one of miles. For example, one of the 4e Warlord's at-will powers allowed an ally adjacent to either themselves or to the target to shift 1 square before the attack. This made it pretty likely to turn on flanking giving combat advantage (+2 to hit and activating certain abilities, notably the rogue's Sneak Attack). Another neat thing is that it was a shift, meaning it doesn't provoke opportunity attacks. But 5e doesn't have flanking (except as an optional rule), sneak attack is activated just by having an ally next to the target, and handing out advantage is about twice as powerful as a +2 to hit. Oh, and circling around someone doesn't provoke either anymore. So a "shift 1 square" power works great in 4e, but it has nowhere near the same impact in 5e.
Thing is, those of us who want Warlords don't want "a pale imitation warlord". We want the real deal. We want a steak, and you're offering us a Baby Bel cheese and saying "Well, it has protein in it, doesn't it?"
First of all, I support raising the standard of what counts as nonmagic to the level of actual reality; it certainly shouldn't be below that, and if it is the rules should be changed.
But if these labels only exist for the players, meaning they are almost entirely non-diegetic, why would it be the case that martial skills absolutely never involve anything that is Earth-supernatural but fictionland-natural?
I wasn't talking about Patient Defense. I was talking about the use of rules-aesthetics, like "well if it would be necessarily supernatural IRL, then it must be magic diegetically, and thus absolutely forbidden to characters who don't diegetically practice magic," to justify rules design that punishes people who like martial archetypes and rewards people who like magical archetypes. I was talking about things like demanding absolute rules symmetry between PCs and NPCs, which is a purely aesthetic decision, even though PCs and NPCs serve fundamentally different functions and, as a general rule, PCs do not see nor use numerous NPC rules.
Again: irrelevant. I was not talking about ensuring that every single mechanic is fun for every single player, because that's an obvious strawman position. Frankly, it's so idiotic, it's a bit insulting you'd ascribe it to me.
