D&D 5E Why is There No Warlord Equivalent in 5E?

[Micah Sweet]

There are no “quick” combats in 5e. Even rolling for initiative is time consuming. But trash mob has a distinct meaning, there is nothing dismissive about it.

I'll accept that you don't intend it that way, at least.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

So I'll start by saying that the warlock is my least favorite chassis to build classes over, at least in vanilla 5e. That's one strike against it.

My real concern is that in 5e, there are scant few checks on magic as it stands. The DM can screw the wizard things like antimagic, spells like dispel magic and counterspell, or try to control components with silence and grappling. I worry about when people start tossing around martials having abilities on par with spells because the first thing they do is remove those last checks on magic.

You did notice that I have been vehemently opposed to the proposal given up thread where that was precisely what they wanted to do, right? That I have specifically cited both that I dislike it, and that there are folks who see that and immediately go, "Nope, nuh-uh, sorry, that's never going to be acceptable."

Because that's what I've been doing this whole thread. Easily the past sixty posts or more.

Let's give the hypothetical warlord access to an ability that mimics the power of haste. You have a warlord and a wizard both with the ability to haste an ally. But the warlord's power works in a beholder's antimagic eye. An evil mage can't disrupt or dispel it.. The warlord doesn't worry about a focus or somatic components (I'll assume some verbal is needed by the warlord to give orders).

I made this exact argument to someone else upthread, so I'm not really sure why you're making it to me now. I already grant all of this. I don't want Warlords who cast spells. I am, instead, simply taking the overall idea of the Warlock. That is:

• Split subclass, with a "main" subclass that defines your tone and style, and a "minor" subclass that defines your mechanical approach
• A small number of short-rest-recharging potent things you can do
• A selection of class-specific benefits, usually passive, or if not, then an augmentation to one of the previous two things
• More powerful high-level abilities, but which can't be used as often

That's it. Please, please, please do not interpret this as "Literally carbon-copying the Warlock but with the limitations on spells removed." That is emphatically NOT what I want. This is not a spellcaster. Literally the only things that I would be even remotely comfortable porting over mostly-unchanged would be healing word and (maybe) cure wounds, and even then I'm not sure about that. I would want the Warlord's short-rest-recharge stuff--call them "Strategies," call them "Exploits," call them "Spiarmf", don't care--to be things clearly distinct from spells. I don't want them to do blatantly supernatural things like:

• Summoning or calling entities (objects, beings, energies) from anywhere else
• Creating elemental effects (with the possible and rare exception of psychic, thunder, or force damage, since those have SOME meaning as fear/morale damage, concussive damage that isn't bludgeoning, and physical pushing)
• Leaving permanent changes to the world itself that aren't caused by, y'know, a person actually physically changing something
• Manipulating time or space (no teleports please)

So what is the warlord's downside? Why should the wizard ever bother with it if the warlords version is the exact same but harder to counter? You can repeat this process with cleric vs warlord healing as well.

Well...firstly, just so we're clear, I would generally not want to just carbon-copy haste because, again, I don't want spells. I want Warlord short-rest abilities that have their own distinct effects and style. Things that are fitting into the mechanical power budget that Warlock spells used to fill, but which are not themselves spells, but genuinely a completely distinct system.

That said, haste could be useful as a very high-level Warlord "Exploit" (or whatever we want to call them), but which might (again, spitballing, because as I've said I literally haven't written the homebrew for this):

• Cost a resource, "Gambit," which can only be generated by having the Warlord or their party members take damage, miss attacks, or some other thing. AKA: they must build up to it, so the downside is that the Wizard can cast haste whenever she likes, but the Warlord must wait until he has enough Gambit, and if he just doesn't have enough when he would really like to use it...tough luck, buddy.
• Require actively sustaining it in some way (as opposed to the passive sustain of spellcasters' Concentration), perhaps by being adjacent to the target at the start or end of your turn, meaning it could be disrupted in a genuinely unpreventable way if the enemy can separate the Warlord from their chosen ally.
• Provide fewer benefits, but possibly a selection from round to round. So, you get an extra action, OR +2 AC, OR doubled speed and advantage on Dex saves. So it's still strong, but someone (Warlord or recipient, depends on how the final design would shake out) might need to take a gamble on which benefit is going to be most useful.
• Shorter or unpredictable duration. Haste always lasts ten turns, unless the caster fails a Concentration check. Perhaps Exploits could have a check each round to determine if they persist or not, so there's always a chance that the effect fails after only a single turn, which would be a pretty significant downside compared to magic, I should hope.

I'm sleep deprived (have slept like absolute canine feces this week), so I hope the above is coherent. These are all spitballed ideas.

There is a secondary notion also that if you codify martial abilities as "spells" all martial classes will want access to them. We saw that with weapon mastery and how many classes (and subclasses) got or wanted them. You think the fighter or barbarian won't? The rogue or monk? Paladin or ranger? Martial casters like war cleric or valor bard? If popular, they will be everywhere in a few years. All the classes are casting spells, either magical or martial, and we're back to ADEU meets Vancian.

Question: Do Barbarian totems make every class want to have such effects?

In my experience, the answer is "absolutely not, folks understand that's a Barbarian thing." Same goes for Sneak Attack being a Rogue-only thing, or Ki being a Monk-only thing (even though that's a supernatural power source and thus, implicitly, "magic.") If designed as their own distinct thing, a mechanic specific to the Warlord, I think "Exploits"/"Strategies"/"Flugeldufels" would be likewise just fine. Battle Masters get Maneuvers, Rogues get Sneak Attack, Barbarians have Rage and Totems, Warlords have Exploits and Tactics. Each gets a distinct mechanical expression.

All of which is why I'm very leary of martial magic. You want to give martial abilities that mimic spells? Give them magic and be susceptible to magic's downsides as well.

As said: I hear your concerns and I have explicitly advocated for those concerns in this very thread. I am opposed to giving martial characters spells. I have stridently opposed @I'm A Banana 's proposal to make allegedly non-magical spellcasting Warlords. I was not specifically thinking of you when I raised that opposition, but I was thinking of...well, pretty much this exact response, especially because part of their pitch was that existing players (and designers) would inherently find such an idea unobjectionable.

 

[MuhVerisimilitude]

Which is great evidence that "warlord" really wasn't an appropriate name.

That's probably why Paizo calls it the Commander instead too. Warlord isn't a well chosen name.

 

[Undrave]

A warlord who self buffs is a tv show protagonist fighter who uses the POWER OF FRIENDSHIP! and I FIGURED OUT YOUR WEAKNESS! at the end of the show.

"I must defeat you. Because my friends and kingdom depend on me."
(Theme song plays)

"The Theme Song Victory Flag has been triggered! There's no way we can lose now!"

an AkibaRed Warlord!!!!

Aside from 5e having absolutely no rules for them,

We have sidekicks in Tasha's. They even have three different classes: Expert, Spellcaster and Warrior.

 

[I'm A Banana]

An ancestor of Aragorn magically cursed the Men of the Mountain to become restless undead until they fulfilled their oath. When Aragorn arrives, the undead are finally able to fulfill their ancient oath. The situation is Necromancy.

Warlords are something different.

I've got zero problem with a level 20 warlord calling up supernatural help with their (entirely nonmagical) ability to call in an oath, be they angle or debil or zombo or dragin or whatever. It's a magical world, there's magical armies, this person knows how best to use them, even if they don't quite know how to do what it is they do.

I have a hard time conceiving of a Warlord with CORE class features that just improve themselves that wouldn't just be a Fighter feature

Which is, I think, why a lot of people point at the Fighter as a place to put a Warlord (as an archetype). If the Fighter already is a good portion of what the Warlord would be, then it kind of makes sense, and certainly would be more possible to see. But the subclass power budget is low, and possibly not enough for the Warlord, at least without some extra steps, and it wouldn't work especially if we need the warlord to specifically be a full class in order to be satisfying.

And we might need that! There's value in talking about why 5e doesn't accommodate new official classes very easily.

Actual martial exploits are not like that.

"No TRUE Scotsman..."

Look, I've never been trying to solve your problem. The idea of martial exploits as a kind of spellcasting trait is not meant to satisfy Warlord fans or be the solution to the problem of no Warlord in 5e. It's only ever meant to demonstrate the idea that the gap between martial and caster is mechanically trivial to cross.

 

[TwoSix]

Look, I've never been trying to solve your problem. The idea of martial exploits as a kind of spellcasting trait is not meant to satisfy Warlord fans or be the solution to the problem of no Warlord in 5e. It's only ever meant to demonstrate the idea that the gap between martial and caster is mechanically trivial to cross.

Wasn't that the whole point of 4e?

 

[Undrave]

But mechanically, a class that uses its own buffs to match a fighter's solo combat abilities is just burning resources on himself to do what the fighter already does.

Like a Monk.

i wonder if you could do a 'my friends are my power/power of friendship' warlord subclass that works like a mimic(not the monster), being able to replicate or channel some of their party's abilities using their own resources?

That seems like it would be terrible to word properly.

My real concern is that in 5e, there are scant few checks on magic as it stands. The DM can screw the wizard things like antimagic, spells like dispel magic and counterspell, or try to control components with silence and grappling. I worry about when people start tossing around martials having abilities on par with spells because the first thing they do is remove those last checks on magic.

Let's give the hypothetical warlord access to an ability that mimics the power of haste. You have a warlord and a wizard both with the ability to haste an ally. But the warlord's power works in a beholder's antimagic eye. An evil mage can't disrupt or dispel it.. The warlord doesn't worry about a focus or somatic components (I'll assume some verbal is needed by the warlord to give orders). So what is the warlord's downside? Why should the wizard ever bother with it if the warlords version is the exact same but harder to counter? You can repeat this process with cleric vs warlord healing as well.

Why would you assume it wouldn't have downside? We could easily add them in a way that fits the theme. The Warlord gives someone the benefits of Haste? Well then they get Exhaustion right after the duration and the duration could be shorter too. Frenzy is basically a low level version of haste and people don't even use it.

 

[Mephista]

Why would you assume it wouldn't have downside? We could easily add them in a way that fits the theme. The Warlord gives someone the benefits of Haste? Well then they get Exhaustion right after the duration and the duration could be shorter too. Frenzy is basically a low level version of haste and people don't even use it.

People don't use Frenzy because they HATED exhaustion. The most popular reason I heard is that they really disliked an ability that killed you as you used it. Nevermind that it was effectively the same thing as saying "you can do this once per day." Virtually everyone I talked to about Frenzy hated the drawback, not the power itself.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Wasn't that the whole point of 4e?

The Warlord in 4e was a full caster, 'cuz everyone in 4e was a full caster, and if you want to make a Warlord in 5e, we should use a Wizard chassis, and in this essay I will....

 

[TwoSix]

The Warlord in 4e was a full caster, 'cuz everyone in 4e was a full caster, and if you want to make a Warlord in 5e, we should use a Wizard chassis, and in this essay I will....

No joke, I'd love a 6e that was just 5e but everyone is a Warlock.