What would WotC need to do to win back the disenchanted?

[Neonchameleon]

Aah, good to know. My cleric, who has better charisma/wisdom/intelligence than your warlord, is easily able to choose warlord class powers with no penalties or restrictions... because, as you state, being an inspirational leader hardly requires much experience.

Yes. Yes he can. However what he needs to do in order to do so is to keep his mind focussed in the battle and watching every nuance of it rather than calling on his God for aid. At that point, for all his clerical investment he ceases to fit the cleric class and instead becomes a Warlord.

If he wants the focus on the battle that being a Warlord demands while remaining a cleric and focussing on his God, he needs serious work and practice at splitting his focus. This costs either Feats or Hybriding.

Being a Warlord, like being a Fighter is an approach to the world, and one centred on the here and now while in the moment.

 

[ExploderWizard]

Don't be disingenuous. This isn't black and white, everything is a matter of degrees. I suppose the world will crumble around you when Essentials plays with some of your sacred cows. No soup for you.

I have some verisimilitude issues with 4E but arbitrary rules in the game are nothing new. You can treat the rules of every edition as guidelines as you choose but if an edition has been produced with every rules aspect explicitly presented as a sliding scale of degrees then please point it out because I must have a major gap in my collection that goes back to OD&D.

 

[Raven Crowking]

Costs of providing PDFs

The most recent number of The Monthly - a moderately leftist Australian culture/society magazine - has an article by Malcolm Knox on e-publishing and its effect on the publishing and bookselling industry. Knox writes:

The mindset [that if you're reading it on a screen then it must be free] is quanitatively wrong: the costs of digitisation, file conversion and file management are high . . . One reason e-books were so slow to take hold was that publishers could not make money with the addition of the estimated $400 per title it cost them to digitise.​

Obviously, some of that work has already been done in the case of the WotC and TSR PDFs.

Obviously, almost all, if not all, of that has already been done in the case of the WotC and TSR pdfs. Therefore, since the costs have already been paid, it makes sense to use that spent money to make more money.

If I spend $400 per book to digitalize something, be certain that I am going to sell as many copies of that thing for as long as I can.



RC

 

[I'm A Banana]

In my personal thoughts- mechanics don't need to be added to make a setting feel unique. The flavor of the setting should do that. Flavor is what drives ME to a particular world (can't speak for anyone else.)

In my personal thoughts, mechanics need to arise out of unique flavor.

If honor is important in your setting, you should have a mechanical reason that this is true.

If chivalry is important in your setting, mechanics should reinforce this.

If your setting is about gritty survival in a dying world, you should have interesting gritty survival mechanics.

That's what creates a different feel at the table. If we're all playing elves but we're just calling them smerps (everything else is the same), that's not really different flavor. That's like the bagged cereals at the grocery store. Same basic thing, just with a different name.

Those mechanics should not be universal -- they can not be. Though they can certainly be adopted for other settings that want a similar story, they won't be appropriate in all times and settings.

IMO, that's part of making mechanics based on story. When the story changes, so do the mechanics (even if only in an additive way).

 

[Shazman]

Works perfectly well today. See: sports teams, modern militaries, even some businesses.



Congratulations on not understanding the nature of a class-based game.

It's not that he doesn't understand class based games, he just doesn't think that the "warlord" archetype is strong enough to stand on it's own as a class. I tend to agree. Anyone can be a warlord if they amass a group of followers and lead them into battle regardless of what their class is. Since D&D isn't about leading armies of henchman, but about small parties of PC's working together, a warlord (or at least what most people think of as a warlord) doesn't really fit into the picture. "Warlord" works well as a prestige class or a paragon path, but it feels artificial as it's own class (especially the 4e version of a warlord).

 

[renau1g]

Aah, good to know. My cleric, who has better charisma/wisdom/intelligence than your warlord, is easily able to choose warlord class powers with no penalties or restrictions... because, as you state, being an inspirational leader hardly requires much experience.
See, in that way, 4E is like the Soup Nazi. 'No soup for you!' for no logical in-game reason. See previous posts for elaboration.

Yup. Grab MC warlord feat and then grab a few powers via the associated feats. Not hard.

In 3e, you had to MC to grab those powers from other classes also. My memory of 2e is a bit hazy, but IIRC wasn't there Dual & multi-classing options? I forget their specifics, but weren't there a lot of limitations around races, classes and level caps?

 

[Doug McCrae]

D&D isn't about leading armies of henchman,

In the past it has been. OD&D in particular is still part wargame.

a warlord (or at least what most people think of as a warlord) doesn't really fit into the picture.

The issue is really that the class name, and indeed the term for the role, 'leader', is not very appropriate. But there's nothing wrong with the class itself. It's really a small unit support role rather than a leader of armies, a facillitator, cheerleader and healer.

There's a guy in my gaming group for whom the warlord could've been specifically written. He loves the support role. He played a marshal, the warlord's precursor, in our last 3e campaign.

I rather like it myself, as I also enjoy the support role but I dislike the religious baggage attached to the cleric.

 

[Mallus]

The issue is really that the class name, and indeed the term for the role, 'leader', is not very appropriate.

Well, the 4e designers could have called them 'buffers', but then it sounds like you're talking about someone who works at a car wash, or perhaps on the set of a pornographic movie. Or 'combat supporters', which sounds like the proper term for a military-issue jockstrap.

But there's nothing wrong with the class itself.

The warlord in our group is great. He's like Dr. Phil in chain mail.

I have to admit, this particular strand of the discussion perplexes me. D&D has always been a class-based game. Which means there's always been a significant amount of friction between the mechanics and in-game logic. Why can't single classed (and honor-free) fighters learn to stab people in the back? Why is it only rogues can learn to watch their backs? Why are advantageous fits of anger the sole province of barbarians? These are gamist design choices which, if you're in the mood to be apologetic, can be dressed up with logical-sounding explanations.

It's time for a (barely) appropriate analogy. Complaining about the gamist aspects of D&D 4e --for instance, the warlord-- is a little like a man who's been dating a transvestite for years. One day his transvestite partner buys a new dress, and suddenly the manly-dressing partner says "Wow. You're not really a woman. I'm no longer attracted to you. We should break up". All because of the new dress.

Now an outside observer might be tempted to say "You never noticed her large hands before? Her Adam's apple? Her penis? I though you knew all along and were cool with it."

Now no one can explain the rules of attraction, and heart is a lonely, not to mention blind and insane, hunter. So there's nothing wrong with the guy who dumps his transvestite girlfriend of several years because of her new dress, in the same way there's nothing wrong with gamer who objects to 4e-isms like the warlord, but accepts all the equally gamist design choices which have been part of D&D since the beginning.

But neither can they be explained logically. There are, after all, matters of taste.

 

[Mallus]

Yup. Grab MC warlord feat and then grab a few powers via the associated feats. Not hard.

My 4e paladin heals people divinely via Lay on Hands and by the power of his slam poetry via Majestic Word and the bard multiclass feat.

 

[MrMyth]

In my ideal 4E, you can only build a 'warlord' using any base class and the right abilities and power selection. Take a knight class and add some tactical powers. Take a cleric and add some inspiration powers. But don't fabricate a warlord class out of relatively thin air and call it a 'warlord'. Creating a warlord class to fit the predefined roles is about as arbitrary and gamist as 2nd edition Outer Wheel designed to personify the 9 old alignments. Take away the old 9 alignments and the Outer Wheel collapses on itself, its gamist spine torn out, with no tangible in-game justification left to support itself.

I think this is an area where different people just see things in different ways. I'm not even saying that 'gamist principles are acceptable to me'; I'm saying that 'warlord' feels just as reasonable as something relying on a character's ability and skill as 'fighter' or 'rogue', and thus I don't see any lack of justification for it existing as its own class.

I just don't get how require a character to mechanically acquire the ability to inspire people in certain ways, whether they have a high Charisma or not, is somehow worse than require characters to mechanically represent their ability to sneak and handle traps, whether they have a high Dexterity or not, or their ability to hit people in the face, whether they have a high Strength or not.

But you don't see it that way, and there is no real way around that - different players have always had different views of what seems 'realistic' or 'justifiable' or so forth. There is nothing necessarily wrong with either view - it just demonstrates the challenge WotC faces, providing a game that will be acceptable to millions of different gamers, each with their own different view of the game.