The Warlord Fighter subclass pt3 – The Mike Mearls Happy Fun Hour!

hello everyone and welcome back to the mic murrells happy fun hour I’m your host Mike miles and this week we’re going to continue our exploration of the warlord subclass for the fighter so last week in the in the prior week we talked about the concept for the warlord how we saw that subclass as distinct from other subclasses for the fighter and we also settle on essentially the the mechanic that we want to use to capture the the warlords thought process how does the warlord the character approach and look at the world and then how does the warlord player the person playing the warlord how do they look at the rules and how can we make those two things as similar as possible so when you’re playing a warlord even when you’re thinking about the rules the mechanics you’re kind of thinking like how a warlord would approach a situation so we settled on a mechanic where the warlord would have an area of focus the warlord could survey the battlefield pick out a spot that looked important to the combat and then give allies benefits or enemies drawbacks for being in that area so this week I want to go through and talk about and create some of the specific abilities we’re gonna give to the warlord to give it the things it does with that that idea like what are the benefits and drawbacks that a warlord can bestow so the I decided to start with that since we’re building the warlord off of the eldritch night and the eldritch night gets spells of up to fourth level that an easy starting point would be to look at what are some of things that spells do from 1st to 4th level now I didn’t want to go through and just look at every single spell I wanted to take a look at spells that felt similar to the effect we described for the warlord spells that essentially take a portion of them of a combat area and mess with it put a barrier in the way or maybe grant a benefit to the characters now I didn’t look at the cleric yet though right now I just looked at the wizard spell list so we don’t see too many things yet that necessarily provide a benefit to other characters that is something you’ll find more often in the cleric and to a lesser extent druid spell lists also with the bard spell list wizard is more about messing people up rather than necessarily helping others the wizard sort of buff spells are usually self buffs they’re protective in nature to make up for that lack of armor and low hitpoints but I fell let’s think what how we want to mess with your enemies first to start with seemed like a good starting point so let’s dive in take a look at my screen right above my head is the list of spells I thought this is a good good starting point let’s take a look at what the Wizards doing and let’s think about how we really want the warlord in action I’m gonna be honest I want the warlord to feel better than the wizard at this sure wizards can conjure stinking clouds and lightning bolts and all this other stuff but we’re talking about this is our tactical expert so I’m gonna be okay if the wizard spells don’t feel quite as good as some of the warm the warlord effects because that’s something where you know this is what those characters focused on the yes they need an ability to conjure me griddles I agree if you haven’t watched the stream I have a well documented love of McReynolds McDonald’s so the the so yes if I could get that personal ability that’d be pretty useful the I guess I do I can just drive through the drive through but all right so I’ve got my handy-dandy D&E be on window up and I’m just gonna take a look at some of these spells so let’s start with fog cloud it’s one I picked out very early on it creates a sphere 20-foot radius I believe or let’s see for radius yeah 24 radius sphere of fog so fog in the game it’s heavily obscured but rides heavy obscure me now immediately when I think of this if I cast fog cloud that hurts both my friends and my enemies and that’s not really what we want the warlord to do so that’s kind of nice to see right off the bat my first comparison spell I pretty quickly have a sense of like okay here’s how I can make this bed for the warlord it’s long in effect one side or the other it’s always gonna be beneficial to the Warlord’s side again this is our master strategist and tactician this character isn’t good to do things that hurt both sides of the fight this characters gonna be helping one side sometimes we make a note here that just says ok and you know the other thing to look at too is the size right we want to make sure that the warlords area focus feels that that it’s big enough that it’s really affecting things so now 20-foot radius might be a little too big I’m sure when this spell was designed since it hurts both sides look it afford to make it bigger than we might otherwise but I’m just gonna note that 24 tre Deus Sphere a be obscure me I need to see me miss spell yeah there are certain words I will always misspell all right so that’s our fog cloud now let’s take a look at Greece Greece is another area useful spell for controlling an area yeah let’s go here and let’s expand our definition so let’s first take a look at this Greece is a 10 foot square ok so smaller and any creature that area has to make a dexterity saving thorough or fall prone and if you enter that area or your and your turn there you have to make another dexterity saving through or again fall prone this is an interesting one it’s a smaller area a 10 foot square so not as big as fog cloud so interestingly enough it does have drawbacks for anyone who enters you could cast a Greece spell then walk into it and slip so similar to fog cloud it’s hurting both sides what I think is interesting and this is probably something if you’re wondering like why is the area of Greece so much smaller than the fog cloud since you have to move into the Greece spell there are a lot of creatures that could ignore it it’s much easier for the party for instance to make this something that really only hurts one side for instance imagine you’re in a dungeon you’re going down a ten-foot-wide hallway you might cast Greece right in front of the characters who are in the front of the party so that the monsters have to move the Greece and stay there since if they end their turn there they can also fall prone my fighter or barbarian or anyone similar could just stand on the edge of that Greece and for the monsters to stay within it or risk provoking opportunity attacks so that’s why it’s smaller so we’ll go ten foot square deck saver prone you end or move into space or are there when spell cast I doubt we’re gonna have effects that the the warlord is using an ability and it forces a saving throw like Greece but maybe we’ll see I think you know based on the past two weeks we really want the warlord to be enabling others to act in some way especially as a team but we’ll see well we’ll figure out where we specifically end up the we might find that uh based on the effects we want to create there could be some immediate damage effect we may be out but I suspect we be filled in through an attack of some sort so okay so we got fog cloud we have grease these are both pretty reasonable for simple spells a little situational and that’s also where I think we want the warlord to have effects that are just strictly good for the group so but right off the bat we can see that knocking people prone in an area and essentially giving an armor class buff you’re making it harder to hit people making it easy to hide these are things that are well within what we want to do so we can build off of that I want to take a quick look at second level then I want to start thinking about and I’ll kind of talk about what I mean now at first and second level what does that actually mean for these tactics so let’s take a quick look at cloud of daggers this is another one that I sort of felt this is kind of if I remember right sneer control spell the let’s see we got here five foot cube creature takes forty four slash when it enters the first time on a turn or it starts its turn there so this is a similar type of spell now in our theoretical ten-foot-wide dungeon carter where we cast grease you could imagine cloud of daggers being very useful for the similar reason you’d put the cloud of daggers right next to the party where the monsters want to go the drawback here is this is only a five-foot cube so if it’s a ten-foot wide hallway I can’t fill the hallway with this spell there’s going to be space there’s gonna be a gap and so now you could are you that if you’re not using the grid you’d put the five foot cube in the middle of the hallway dungeon master using miniatures is probably gonna just have everything snap to grid just for ease of play so we can assume that while this is a very useful barrier it’s not it is smaller because of the damage it’s offering I mean this is a spell that could last for a minute 40 for slashing in theory that could be 40 D for slashing every creature managed to spend you know couldn’t get out of it for some reason that’s a kunai in blender the other thing notice is there is there is no saving throw so this is damage that happens automatically Greece gave us a dexterity save for arguably in arguably a lesser effect going prone is in terms of the game is not as powerful as taking or is you know as strong as dealing 44 damage you could argue lying prone setting up advantage but we try not to think too much about like make things too dependent on well what if the group acts together we account for it but it’s not it’s not as powerful as just dealing damage potentially taking some out of the fight immediately so I’m you know five foot cube 44 all right that’s pretty easy darkness is another interesting one in that it’s essentially an upgraded version of fog cloud let’s take a peek here let’s see we’ve got a 15 foot radius so smaller spell it does block dark vision so this basically shuts down all site where fog cloud just provides heavy obscure meant the other nice thing about this the point you choose is on an object you’re holding the darkness eminates on that object okay that’s something it’s just cool it’s very supernatural though I don’t think we want to do something where I mean the warlord can already move the focus we talked about it last week we had this idea that the warlord would focus on an area and the warlord on their turn could then move the area so I’m not really worried about picking up that but this is basically it another thing I’m just gonna kind of note this is 15 foot radius block line-of-sight and it sits and there’s a lot of just kind of spells specific stuff it’s 10 minute duration I don’t believe this a concentration spell I don’t believe it is so that’s probably other balancing factor of it’s pretty useful but it’s not useful enough to necessarily require concentration I’m not seeing it and I don’t think it’s there so now finally flaming spear this one might be a little bit a funny one to look at but I was just thinking the idea that the sphere since it does take up space it’s worth looking at right so let’s take a look what we got here for flaming spear and this is our 5 foot diameter sphere fire so fills up one square for using nature’s now if you remember if you’re here last week we kind of assume we’re designing the warlord that you’re probably using miniatures we’re not going to phrase the rules in a way that requires them like in the sense that we would refer to squares or or build it out assuming that you’re looking at a grid but we’re okay with things being a little more complicated because this is a very a subclass ain’t a very specific type of player someone who’d enjoy his tactical play we’re okay with it being a little more finicky so anyways we’ve got our 5 foot diameter sphere fire if you end your turn within 5 feet of it you must make a dexterity saving throw or take do to 6 fire damage half as much on a successful one now if you compare this spell to cloud of daggers the damage is lower a little bit 44 averages out to about 10 to d6 averages out to be about 7 these spheres is it since it’s within 5 feet of this sphere this can potentially deal more damage because it’s hitting more creatures now the one drawback to it is you can’t just put this next to the fighter unless they’re a tiefling or someone who didn’t or fire damage so there’s a little bit of a drawback there the very nice thing that is a bonus action you can move the sphere up to 30 feet so again something which we’re already kind of capturing with the warlord so I’m gonna note this down it’s to d6 fire damage but really it’s a 15 by 15 area alright so I’ve looked at these spells I’ve seen some that maybe start pointing towards some good comparisons I’m not seeing things though in actually this is kind of a good thing I’m not seeing things that are really like completely blocking movement and stuff like that so I kind of feel looking at this list we have a lot of room to make interesting things the warlord that can compete well with similar spells we don’t want the warlord to feel that the wizard could just cast a spell and be a better tactician than me that this is selling the the classes abilities short especially as in its identity so so let’s see okay let’s say I’m trying to check the look in chats anything that’s come up yeah the so Caleb would mentions you know so far this is trying to do what an elder tonight can accomplish and that’s exactly where trying to avoid so we want to do is take a look at these spells because that’s actually the better comparison is think of the elder tonight they can take many of these spells I can’t my roughed up my head which spells the election I can get but in terms of power all first level spells are in theory equal so even if the elder tonight doesn’t get grease and fog cloud the idea is this is the general box that those spells will live in so we need to do things that feel dramatically better and especially or dramatically more on point for flavor so with these things in mind now we know would we have to beat these things we can’t we can’t have grease look better than a warlord tactic so my thinking here was for the warlord tactics what we would do is and this is gonna get interesting but bear with me cuz I think I think this path might actually work out pretty well I’m gonna pop up in our spreadsheet if it were from last week I went through and showed how we could just using the dungeon master Dungeon Master’s guides rules for spell creation all rules guidelines we could have said we could convert a spell slot into its rough damage equivalent we could then figure out given the number of spell slots and Elder tonight got because that’s our comparison it’s neither fighter subclass that uses magic how many dice of damage it should a warlord be able to throw out during the course of a day and if you take a look at this table here I bill we’re starting at third level that’s when your subclass comes in as a fighter the and this is just a rough approximation so this was the the total column here starts at twenty two ends up at two hundred and nine that’s the total number of 10-sided dice worth of damage oh I’m sorry that’s the total damage the dice the dice column that’s the total number of 10-sided dice and then I just came up with this uses and peruse columns this is just a quick approximation of if I wanted to make a mechanic that felt easy to use the table in terms of number of dice and then how often you use it this is a good first cut now if you remember from last week we talked about giving the warlord just a basic ability to heal someone or grant them a damage bonus and that really capturing that idea of the tactical insight the warlord could give and I think I really want to try to keep of this ability these numbers these dice fuelling those abilities the other thing to keep in mind is last week we talked about how the Warlord’s healing while the warlord can’t really deal with conditions like a cleric could like if you’re poisoned the warlord doesn’t necessarily have a class feature that can deal with that their benefit is if your warlord provides healing that is an excess of your maximum that excess healing becomes temporary hit points so you could with a fully healed up character give them if this math holds up seventy ten temporary hit points at the start of a fight which is pretty good and it’s something that differentiates this this character from the cleric in terms of how that healing works and it helps conceptually balance the idea that the warlord is not as good at dealing with with conditions but it’s pretty good at dealing with just damage which felt right for a fighter you know essentially healer type okay so this is what we’ve got here what I’d like to do is try to keep these benefits purely for that healing and damage boost I don’t want to require them in order to use the warlord tactics and that’s because I really want the warlord tactics to feel like something you’re just always getting I want them to have a dramatic effect on the fight but I want that to feel because the warlord is a great tactician not necessarily because I’m always just expending something that area of focus ability is pretty it seemed to go over pretty well and I want to be something that feels like you’re always thinking about because as a tactical genius we don’t want the warlord to be a genius like for three rounds a day right that should be something where the world always has a plan it is always ready to to help pull the party together to execute a clever maneuver the so if that’s the case what does it mean for our special abilities here let’s take a look over here well I think what we want to do if we take a look at these abilities look at the first two levels of them cloud a daggers in flaming sphere dealing damage the others aren’t when I get up to stinking cloud and sleetstorm I’m going to start seeing more damage but the ability to control an area is not necessarily something I have to worry about in terms of damage because if I let the warlord do this and attack or also deal out that extra damage I’m capturing the damage that you’re going to be doing that round I can really just focus on the special effect you’re gonna create so for instance you could imagine that fog cloud could create in here of heavy obscure man and do damage as a spell well it doesn’t do that but I’m letting the warlord essentially do that by saying you can attack and then use a tactic that’s gonna be the equivalent of a first level spell so that means I don’t have to worry about putting damage in these and I think that’s actually going to make my design a lot more interesting and a lot more fun because I’m not trying to like okay not to account for the damage and where’s that’s coming in I can just assume you’re using this in addition to an attack all right so I’m gonna make a note of that so used in addition to an attack slash heal slash damage buff and potentially all of them depending on where we end up with the damage buff stuff so that’s the case it makes these comparisons pretty simple and we get down here I don’t have to worry about the damage the damage is already low enough for these effects because they’re ongoing effects does that actually is another thing that makes my life a little easier I don’t have to worry about trying to figure out well how long will this effect stick around the damage it’s doing now you’re just you’re attacking so that makes my life a bit easier the alright so let’s take a look at some pretty simple things we could do at first level so we know knocking people prone should be something we can definitely do and it feels pretty thematic so I’m just going to put knocking prone you know targets in your area of focus are knocked from the wind hey that’s pretty simple one now there are other effects in the game let you’d let you knock people prone so it might not be the most useful one but that’s a good starting point I am also going to point out this is when hit so this and it’s also targets yeah sorry hostile targets so to me I want to put this one down here it might not be someone we end up with I kind of feel it’s pretty straight forward I mean chat let me know do you think this is an ability that you’d find useful in a fight especially we could use it almost all the time I think maybe using this whole time might be too good we’ll see but I kind of want you to use it all the time because I really feel like I’m being pretty tactically clever but compared to Greece this is just better right doesn’t hurt my friends and it doesn’t require saving throw because I just have to hit you and knock you prone oh and someone mentioned in chat who was it Northland Kyle yes that’s one thing we mentioned last week using concentration yes we want concentration because that’s a nice little barrier we can put in here so that you’re not stacking these up it also gives the enemy away to try to shut it down so the so we’re gonna throw this one in here people seem to think like it might be it’s pretty good it’s always advantage in melee maybe at a size limit the oh the narrative explanation Ibanez rock star yeah what I imagine here is this is and we will mix way this flavor right but I imagine as warlord is providing oops more laud world Lord is providing insight on where to strike so we’d want to capture the name and then obviously give some description so if I was actually know what I’m going to try I’ll show you kind of how we can wrap that it might be kind of interesting we might call this well here let’s do something here this is an easy way if you have to name something what I like to do is forget hey the people of the world of D&D are naming these things and so let’s go to our monsters oh wait no monsters are over here and here’s here’s a very easy thing you can do right let’s go to who’s are awake and search for prone I don’t think that you know I’m trying to search the wolf came up the wolf knocks people prone that’s if it does direwolf do you knock people prone yes it does so this is something where we did this lot in 4th edition actually the idea that people in the world of D&D they would no direwolves are dangerous because they pull you down when they attack you so an easy thing we would do here now you run the risk of some of my not they have the player by know that but you can imagine some like dire wolf tactics when a hostile creature in your area of focus is hit oh here’s one thing we could do too well I don’t know I was about to write as a reaction I don’t know if I want to turn off the Warlord’s opportunity attacks [Music] that’s something that limits it you know but but just popped in my head like a that’s an easy way to limit this mmm mmm I’m gonna say no cuz it’s more fun to always get it but it might be too good especially when you were in this stage like we’re not gonna like this is something we would play test internally so I like to go crazy because then you have other designers going well this is nuts right that we could just throw it’s easy to add limits afterward but you might find in play that actually works and it’s great like oh this does work it’s balanced whatever reason it’s working out perfect so so when a hostile creature your focus is hit it is not prone and I’m gonna just say hit I don’t happen I’d think of just by an attack I don’t care it’s um I don’t care what the spell attack go up an attack I just care that you get hit because I want the wizard or the warlock to also get benefits from this like why not you know tactically in the world of D&D you know how to make spells work well with your your weapon fighters the the okay so the I’m turning key I’m trying to keep an eye on chat choose if I see things come up so if I’m a little bit like scattered I’m like looking right now people saying anything the trying to sort of see how this thing is going and kind of take the temperature so we got dire wolf tactics that’s a good thing to give some flavor and so as your allies struggle against the enemy you direct their attacks to their most whatever this is this is fake flavor because this is so generic but their most vulnerable points that’s terrible flavor because it could be in anything but this is where that first sentence we want to capture what’s going on what I imagine is you’re directing attacks two legs the limbs so we might say you make direct attacks to point yeah you know this feels really just kind of cheesy or whatever then their legs or I almost type wheels I guess you’re fretting a bunch of cars whatever this is not portable flavor text this is another great example of with flavor text you want to get get across the spirit but you don’t also want even imposition of like hey wait what if you’re attacking like a centipede or a serpent or some like that the rules for knocking stuff prone will capture that anyways in d and v we’re okay with you knocking a snake prone cuz the snake actually flipped on its back is not happy but so this is some pretty low hey this is this is the flavor texture you get live on stream it’s not all that great but it gets across this is what we want to do the you’d want to get a sense of like hey what’s happening that movie in your mind is important it helps put the player in the same mindset as the character it also helps makes things just easier to understand so but the this is apply to flying creatures oh yeah that does the area of focus extend into the air great question Abel hawk and actually makes sense for the Abel Hawk to ask what a hawk would think right yeah I’m gonna just put a quick note up here area of focus should be a cube and that’s just now you talked about having being more specific and how you want to say might be four squares but I’m just gonna say cube doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s gonna end up as a cube but just reminds me that I need to remember oh yeah this can go up and yeah that would be a very interesting one because oh so now this is a really good point Abel hawk I’m glad you brought this up what happens to a flying creature when it’s not prone it crashes so something that lets you automatically knock people prone if you hit them with any sort of attack is really good if I put my area of focus up in the air right I can knock creatures out of the air pretty easily now I’m going to say I like that it might again this might be too good and I think what we’re going to see is how does the frequency of this ability with things I want the warlord to always feel like the Warlord’s being clever but something like knocking prone if I’m always knocking everyone prone is that too good so I’m just gonna make a note down here I’m gonna put reaction save there are ways we can limit this but like I said earlier it’s much easier to put your limits on afterward if people say hey in our internal test it just feels too good so Oh Abel Hawk you mentioned it’s only a ten-foot cube it won’t crash too hard but remember I can put my cube up in the air right there’s nothing in so far that says this has to be on the ground now we may want to finesse that but what we’re seeing is that see and this is why we play test right because you can already see me thinking here I’m thinking Oh what is the name of this how do I make my flavor you know I’m working on one track in shat everyone else is working on their own tracks that’s like you know parallel processing and people start thinking of well how does this work in my game how would my players use it what happened my game last night what are some of the other options so this is why play testing is critical because it’s really it’s very difficult for one person to see all the possibilities but you give this concept of like a 100 500 people suddenly everything starts becoming more apparent so we know now we’re starting to hit some of those limits the things that are gonna turn this character subclass from hey wow isn’t it fun to Oz a DM I hate this thing all my monsters are constantly getting knocked prone but we know knocking is I’m one problem that’s a first level spell I’ve got to give us to you right like we said it’s ok for a spell so I’m gonna I want to be committed to this idea that this character has to be able to top what a spell can do it’s just to the extent to which that can happen the nice thing about spells is they are limited you can only use them so often so what I’m running into is my desire to have the warlord always have these abilities on so that might be something that’s going to require some finesse but again my feeling is start with not necessarily super obviously broken but start with something that feels like it might be too good then rein it in rather than try to self edit because you really want that first test to feel you want people you want to be able to quickly identify what your actual problems are a play test initial play test that shows no real problems is your probably didn’t actually do any really new design or you were just manage to get hit it perfectly which not very likely it’s probably much more likely that you might not be pushing things far enough all right so here we go this one comparison to Greece really just brought into focus some real issues we need to think of but right now I’m not gonna worry about them too much I want to take a look at some other benefits I could give you we have prone is a pretty simple condition we can throw around at first level notice we didn’t really have any other conditions coming in so we know magic wise mmm it’s probably something which we want to take a look at figure out when we start doing things like restrained if ever there might be too good to throw on all the time restraints very punishing condition but what we’ll figure out where we are from there now a very simple one is we kind of look at here with fog cloud have you obscure ‘men typically using that to get a defensive benefit or to let people hide so let’s go to here to our remember what do we always do we look everything up because we know we’re gonna get it wrong so let’s just go here just go to index let that load up I have you know there’s gonna be this should be in the basic rule so I’m just going to go there it’s kind of nice to have it all in one place all right so adventuring and let’s see could be under I think it’s either under the environment or it’s in let’s see it’s either under combat so let’s just pop over at the environment real quick because we have vision and light that’s we got here having a skirt area a heavily obscured area such as darkness opaque fog fog cloud are dense foliage blocks vision entirely a creature effectively suffers from the blinded condition when trying to see something in that area so what that means is look under blinding a blinded creature can’t see it automatically fails on the ability to check the requires site attack rolls against the creature of advantage and the creatures attack girls have disadvantage okay so it’s very hard to see stuff and that also would allow us to make stealth checks to hide because I can’t see the person there they just need to focus on being quiet okay cool so we’ve got with fog clouds something that’s letting you hide and it is blocking vision what’s interesting is that that’s darkness has a similar effect the so that’s kind of we’re kind of putting those under the same roof kind of think of this as like here here’s our defensive benefit we’re gonna look at so let’s go back with our tactics um let’s see so a pretty simple thing here would be some sort of defensive bonus right so we call the shield wall and say allies in your area of focus gain a bonus to AC and saves maybe +1 it’s a little irritating so now you have to track that out there and now I can imagine now I’m gonna have to always remind players hey +1 AC remember your +1 AC but it’s also pretty generically useful and it feels like that’s something useful you know I’m always gonna want to use that I wouldn’t say no to pulse I’m honest AC and I think I’d also want to put it on saves because I think that is something again that when I look at the spell fog cloud well if I throw a fireball into a fog cloud of fog cloud does nothing for me but if my warlord is giving me a bonus to both AC and saves okay it helps against spells to helps against the broader range of effects and again I want the war load effects to feel better than the equivalent effect the wizard throws around now the scoby task what about advantage or disadvantage I’m a little leery of throwing those around they’re pretty big effects and they can also come from other sources so my feeling was if I was to give say disadvantage and all attacks against my allies here that’s really good but it also steps on a lot of other effects characters might be toting around which we’ve attached typically to using an action of some sort the classic example we’ll go right up here let’s go back to the top and let’s go to our let’s see let’s go to our classes and actually we look at the fighter itself it’s a great example here in the under our class features your fighting style so with protection I can grant disadvantage that is requiring me to use my reaction now there’s must be within five feet must be wearing a shield but essentially it’s saying a character can use a reaction so essentially once per round to grant disadvantage putting that on all attacks it’s probably a little too good whereas plus when you see you know that’s something where you could give that the party it’s useful essentially one out of twenty attacks is gonna miss because that plus one bonus but if everyone’s getting it pretty consistently you’re gonna notice that you know if it’s a three characters are getting that benefit or four if your old clumped up together you’re going to get that probably like once per encounter there’s it you’re gonna turn to hit into a Miss it doesn’t sound super good but it feels pretty good at the table we’d also made me consider going to plus two but I feel like that might be a little too good but we’ll put that there but I think the other thing also is I did disadvantage would also make it much harder to score quick so you have to roll two twenties rather than just one so the but that’s something which is pretty simple and straightforward it’s got good you utility and it’s good defensive element then again it’s something compared just to spells are being thrown around actually I will take a quick segue over to the cleric if I go to the cleric we look at shield of faith that’s our first level spell it’s a bonus action does require concentration gives plus two bonus Tacey so I think plus one bonus to the entire party versus plus two bonus one character it’s a little bit different but it also means I can protect if Ganon and that sort of if I’m if I need to have a ten-foot-wide Carter I’m giving the bonus to both characters so rather than just one so I think I think it’s a pretty good comp and you know it might be plus one versus plus two I’ll think I’m at a little bit but that’s why I put the plus one and plus two if you can see it put those in question marks I’m gonna kind of think of that and especially as we test we might sort of go well let’s try it’s try one try the other how does it feel this is also another area where I’ve talked about how balance so much of it is the feel you might be the mathematically prove the plus one is the right number but if players just don’t feel like it’s worth tracking like yes you turned one hit into a Miss and that’s a nice swing but players just don’t feel like it’s having a big impact so it’s always something to keep in mind now that doesn’t mean we could say make these if we found the eight plus two bonus are just too good we’d have to keep in mind well the field might be good but it just might be too it’s just shutting down too many attacks so so that’s a pretty good one there question it would it stack the oh yeah these abilities oh that’s a that’s a great question these abilities will probably assume that the same ability so if I have to world to warlords in the party they probably shouldn’t stack that we would probably draw on language view some spells of the same spell cast multiple times doesn’t build up unless it specifically says otherwise so it would stack there with other benefits like from Schule faith because those are two separate sources all right so we’ve got some basic defensive ability we have a basic offensive ability direwolf tactics might be too good let’s think of something that’s a little more has a little more utility and I camera if I talked about this one last week but it’s one that I liked because it’s not really useful until you realize wait I really need this so reorder ranks and I’m just gonna do this in kind of very quick spend 10 feet of movement to swamp position with any other ally in the area of focus so this is what I was thinking about in terms of if you have a group of characters defending a single point I can quickly swap people around and essentially now we’d probably to make sure make it clear like where are they moving all this other stuff but essentially it means if you have back rank in front rank you can quickly reorganize them it means for instance a rogue could swap places with one character make an attack then swap places with another character and then get away from the fight so we might even want to say swapping does not provoke but I put a question mark there because another immediate other one would be you know it’s gonna call clever movement very lame name but the allies don’t provoke in the area that might be too weak but Woolsey that’s another one which is pretty straightforward these two might get a combined but again the idea is if I’m defending a point it gives me a lot of flexibility that the characters who want to attack only have to be exposed to danger as long as they want to or if the enemies try to surround you you could the party can quickly reorganize this is also one that if we if we think the area of focus is gonna grow with level it be gets more and more useful as you go up in level so so yeah it might also make sense pen half movement we’ll figure it out this is also another one we’d want to test to make sure if the area gets really big it doesn’t now feel like you’re teleporting you can imagine if the area is large enough that there’s space between the characters and they’re swapping positions all the time like does that feel real so but that’s you again we’re just going across the the gist of the ability is you can reorder your ranks normally you can’t do that right so this is gonna let us maneuver the party around in reaction to threats much much quicker the alright now let’s talk about some other abilities so far we’ve talked about abilities that say hey your carrot your allies already occupy a spot how can you give them benefits last week we talked about the idea that you could have an area focus that essentially acts like a magnet it pulls your allies into it the example being imagine you’re fighting some monsters in a doorway the wizards in the back suddenly a secret door opens up and a werewolf bounce into the room to attack the wizard well what if the warlord had the ability to quickly move the party to the new threatened area so I’m gonna give this one the very flavourful name of charge magnet and what it just means is allies can use a well let’s see I don’t know if I want to use their reactions I think I want you to do it you’re actually gonna stay here you can use your action or reaction to move allies into the area focus that means you get to keep your opportunity attack up it also kind of makes you wonder if this reaction business if the Warlord’s the warlord come using reactions to make opportunity attacks mmm I’m gonna throw this up here as a question because now we work another one where it’s like light I don’t want the character that the ally to use the reaction because it’s moving you across the battlefield might not be too useful if you can can’t actually defend this pot you’ve gone to you’re like Hello The Fighter the barbarian is no next to the werewolf any waves as the werewolf just keeps going because the Barbarian used the reaction so so that’s another easy one what the forget what’s happening now is we starting to build our content we’re starting to see where it’s pushing against the framework we built you said we want you to use these all the time we want to make them manageable but now we’re starting to pop out some of the stuff of like well this might not really fit right does it is this fitting in the space we’ve set aside for it and that’s kind of like it’s kind of how I think about design for this content I gave a box and a ninth double spells you know the boxer 9/9 all spells huge you can fit a lot in there the box where a can trip is a lot smaller um these are kind of contra e but I also want to compare them to Wizard spells and make sure that the warlord feels so you can kind of see that tension right I have a can trip sized box but now I’m comparing it to much of bigger boxes I stripped out the damage so those boxes got smaller but they still might be bigger now I’ll do you know if this one might be getting much bigger in comparison to this so it’s always a give and take so let’s see what we got here how about blinding tactic is a reaction from hulking 73 how about blinding tactic is a reaction he blindsides target enemy to Allah ally to move the proton an opportunity attack oh that’s pretty yeah that sounds kind of interesting like what if the that’s not something I necessarily thought of what if we attach some of these things to our warlords attacks that could be pretty useful I’m gonna throw this in here just as a note but attack buffs on targets and area of focus triggered on warlord attack so I’m just gonna put that down here I’m gonna put it in bold because why not it’ll just make it stand out a little bit more but that’s another interesting model I hadn’t really thought of that could be a pretty nifty way to channel some these attacks so for instance the direwolf tag this might be I hit someone and if the next person hit them also knocks on pro so that might be another way to kind of channel that so I thought that that’s an it that’s an interesting way to look at that because then we can bring in more more effects and more control elements that are nested in conditions but I don’t want them to get out of control there the nice thing is as the warlord gets a second attack now you can tag two people so that’s another that’s an interesting to look at it also gets across the teamwork benefit now it does require some tracking you have to remember hey I as the warlord hit that creature I hit the werewolf the next time the werewolf gets hit then this thing is gonna trigger but it’s definitely worth exploring and it’s always good to have a lot of sort of at this stage of the design a lot of tricks up your sleeve because then as things get complicated you kind of already have a few ways to to mitigate some of that you know the box is not the right size we’re going to do so the okay and then so we’ve got that stuff here so we’ve got something that live allows for movement we got some jointed defensive abilities I also want to take a look and think okay what did what happens when we’re not fighting the warlord is a tactician but there should be some sort of benefit you can get like I think if you’re not in a fight let’s say the party for some reason has to build a fence the world Lords probably pretty good at organizing that too so you know one of the things we could look at doing is let’s call it help boost right you know when the warlord uses the help action it applies to everyone in the area of focus so now I’m gonna take a quick look at my help action make sure I’m not completely hosing that mechanic but if I go back home and I go over to my real strontium it’s bending the basic rules I just like to have the basic rules for this stuff cuz a lot of times the core element it’s it’s smaller right I’m gonna go down to combat go to actions in combat and let’s take a look at help okay you come in your age another creature in the equation of a task okay when you take the help action the creature you aid gains advantage and the next ability check it makes perform the task you’re helping with provided that it makes the check for the start of your next turn okay cool so the the other alternately you can eat a friendly creature and attacking a creature within 5 feet of you you faint distract the target or in some way so so this is also another thing I can so I think both of these are great now and here’s why the attack version is actually strictly worse than what the mastermind row can get kind of the mastermind road can choose one person as a bonus action one person gets the benefit of the help action so it’s pretty good I get still attack I can still sneak attacks this is saying a bunch of people could get a benefit there might be times there’s a warlord I might decide I’m gonna forgo my attacks most likely at low level once I get my second attack it’s not as useful but I might use this to give everyone advantage because let’s say I have the rogue is up next I whatever they want to make sure they hit but I also know the the warlock is gonna throw an attack spell but else wanna make sure it can hit so that can be useful but I do like the skill thing and I think that using this for the skill for instance we’re all trying to climb a wall I make my air focus the whole base of the wall wherever it’s standing I can aide and everyone gets advantage now on their checks to climb not as useful if time isn’t an issue because we can assume that if like we have an hour to climb this wall each character can just you know take the action eight everyone’s aiding and moving it back and forth but during a fight this could be really useful or anything any situation in which time is of the essence it’s the kind of thing where it’s simple enough that this might almost become a it’s just something all warlords get now put a question mark maybe they shouldn’t but it’s just very simple it’s very flexible right I don’t need to try to start predicting what you might want I can just give you look you can give everyone advantage people like advantage there are plenty of times when outside of a fight this is gonna be useful I mean you can even imagine in social encounters the parties trying to talk their way past the barbarian patrol that stopped them the warlord could use this to like sort of buff up everyone else and so if everyone has to make separate charisma checks or if the group is trying to accomplish multiple things so and it really kind of hits home that idea of the Warlord’s smart the Warlord’s cunning it’s not just during a fight warlord is also good in areas outside of combat and I always like that field the more we can make these things crossover the better so the so chat what do you guys think about that hunt I see people like that or the yes yeah Keith I’m on I agree especially a were lurch lead from the front while the mastermind does is working back yeah that’s that’s probably good feel what we’d want here the world’s gonna get up in that area of focus everyone’s around him or behind them is gonna say okay hey we’re gonna do this we’re gonna build this this we’re gonna paint this fence and everything they do a great job the okay cool people seem to like that so cool alright so what will keep that there and I think there might be something which is just a core thing the nice thing about it is we don’t now have to start coming up with a specific ones for climbing or jumping like okay I just named climb like jumping which might be because that’s not usually a check but there are a lot of areas with the our ability checks are gonna take up so much space that this feels more liberating than it does confining in the sense of I can think of a lot of ways to use this so cool the let’s see so what else we got here so this is like a decent starting point we’ve identified our pain points like we just worried that to give you really fun abilities it’s gonna have to come to cost you know the more I think about this I don’t know if I can just let you knock people prone all the time so we’ll have to figure out is that too good let’s take a quick look I think though what we are doing is about to compare this to things like darkness fog caught in grease I kind of feel like what we’re talking about here is already it’s more useful and it’s it’sit’s more on point on it quite a Jacob and 144 what do you think the level 20 ability would be I have no idea we’ll get to that when we get to that cuz I’ve been feeling we’re gonna do maybe one more week on the warlord now because we’ve made some half-decent progress here with these abilities prior to the point now I can write a few up but yeah it is interesting to think like how can we extend this like what does a capstone ability look like for the warlord I don’t want to do something like on your turn as long as you’re conscious I think I’d say something like everyone within every day my area of focus gets an action so that is super good it’s super broken which means yeah it’s probably a level 20 ability that might work right you can imagine you get your focus on the wizard the cleric the rogue the barbarian all of them get to do something and you get your turn I would not want that to take up your turn because that’s like I mean it’s cool that you got to watch every ounce do something awesome but I also want the warlord leading from the front as chat pointed out earlier so it should feel like I know I’m in there attacking so the wizard and the cleric and combo up a spell it might be too good it’s probably something we’d say once per day you know it just kind of kind of floating out there’s your thing but I think that would really feel like finish them right you’re fighting the tower ask and it’s almost yeah it’s on its last thing or when you do the combo right like you know and you could also imagine in non-combat situations right where it’s like we need to you know smash the you know the vial the demons essence in it then someone needs to set it on fire then something needs to throw it down the pit okay the warlord can make us do that in a snap right so the okay so that’s I’m gonna just make a note of that make sure they don’t lose that and I put it in quotes I came over the exact level the does is it at level 20 I can’t remember shout we’ll take a look later but allies in your area of focus you use an action boom so that’s a pretty good so we just jumped ahead but that but it’s kind of actually what’s used to what doing that it gives us a sense of like what’s the most powerful thing we can think that a warlord could do letting the entire party take an entire turn like rounds worth of actions that’s really good not a lot of creatures unless they’re much more powerful than you would want to cope with that so let’s take a look once we get to third and fourth level I’m gonna zero in on wall of fire because that to me that’s where I’m like okay I wanna make sure the wizard isn’t just a better tactician I want to respect the Wizards Lane but I don’t want to I don’t want to cross over into it too directly but I want to make sure that the wizard again just through the use of high level slots does not just feel like a better tactician so let’s go over to our spells let’s go to all spells and let’s take a peek at wall of fire fun spell I actually quite I’d like I always like the wall spells are fun alright so we’ve got a concentration spell the last one minute it’s gonna if I remember right it’s 60 feet long so that’s pretty big the useful thing here for us to think our tactical focus is probably at the start maybe approaching this size now how wide is it’s one foot thick but still that’s essentially 12 squares so we can also make it a ring we’re just well some pretty good to for trapping things or keeping a bunch of enemies at bay ah the walls opaque so that’s pretty interesting that means we’re getting a lot of those benefits just fold it in of those lower level spells like fog cloud this is just baked into its blocking line-of-sight it’s also essentially it’s like fireball Junior it’s 5 D 8 fire damaged half on a successful save that’s anyone within the walled area so if I make the wall on you wish you get roasted and the nice thing about the wall spell is since I can essentially make a path I can thread this through a group of enemies you know my friends don’t have to get hurt by this my foes can one side of the wall selected by you and you cast the spell deals 5 D 8 fire damage to each creature that ends it’s turned within 10 feet of that side or inside the wall creature takes the same damage when it enters the wall the first time on a turn or ends its turn there the other side of the wall deals no damage so this is a great spell for blocking off an area it is blocking out of sight so it’s not so useful for our fighter types if they’re next to the wall as a DM I would judge if you attack through the wall you wouldn’t take the damage because you aren’t going through it but we kind of let up at the dungeon master if you’re if you’re playing with me you’re probably even though the walls only one foot wide you’re probably feeling the square with the wall so unless you ever reach weapon you can’t attack through it but you still can’t see so you’re probably a disadvantage so but the interesting thing here is now but here’s the one nice thing this spell is just dealing lots of damage I’m not worrying about damage because I’ve already decided upfront I want to just put that into my generic healing and damage boost ability so what this is really showing me is just this idea of more the size what I should be looking for I’ve just gotta sumed that my damage you know I figured out what those dice those spell slots are worth I’m just gonna ride that unless unless playtesting starts showing it’s just doesn’t feel powerful enough so but it’s kind of good that I’m looking a wall afire and feeling okay this is pretty good this is just a lot of extra damage in some ways you know again it’s showing me that what I’m seeing consistently from spells is they lack the precision I want to give the warlord this is a very useful spell but it has drawbacks I can easily if I’m not paying attention if the fight changes I can easily position this where it’s actually hurting the party more than its helping I actually had this I’ll tell you a story about one of my campaigns I actually had this happen with the players used a wall of fire to protect themselves and with fire fighting a giant horde of bug bears and they’re using it to control a doorway that led into a very big room they were in so the face of the bug Bears were hosed that they couldn’t get at the party but what happened was when the way that the wizard dropped the wall there was a secret door in the room that when the bugbears opened the door they were actually able to hide behind the wall and move in and ambush the wizard which then dropped the wall so it’s a good example of it was very useful but because in this case the players didn’t know about this secret door it actually ended up working against them the bug bears are able to open the door and then able to hide because since the party couldn’t see through the wall of fire the bugbears could hide and then move along the wall and it’s believed it where they were they were safe in the wall the fire the way is positioned they did have to take damage from it and then launch an ambush I wouldn’t want a warlord ability to offer that the more led ability should again just feel like okay this is tilting way toward favoring us and it’s tilting towards holding back the enemy so that’s a good sign that these fourth double spells while they’re dealing a lot of damage let’s take another look I’m gonna throw any bards black tentacles is another example I think it’s gonna have something similar where if you go into the area that’s bad news for you wherever you are so draw a 20-foot square on the ground when a creature enters the affected area the first time in a turn or starts its turn their decks save or 3d6 damage and restrains so again this is very good for keeping enemies at bay but you and your allies don’t want to go into this area you could imagine in effect where the monsters managed to escape and it’s actually making it more difficult now for the party to engage so it does require a bit more precision to make sure it’s tilting to pure benefit and now I do see the restrained condition coming in so I’ve got to keep in mind restraints pretty good that is my main concern is I want to make sure that the warlord can compete on those sort of condition benefits that spells just aren’t aren’t overshadowing it so but again since now the warlord is just pure benefit it does make those conditions more powerful alright so but I feel like to start with we have a pretty good foundation here I think that what’s nice about this is we have a pretty clear vision of where we want these abilities to end up we so far have managed to keep damage and healing out of them so that can be a separate track we do see some pressure though for even a condition as simple as prone we already kind of feel you know chat I saw you know you guys talking I’m thinking of this too it might be too good right especially when we start talking on flying creatures and where I can put this it just might be too much of a shutdown ability so we want to think about some ways to elegantly limit these but we’ll try playing first and we’ll see what happens and then we’ll start putting some limits on this but otherwise you know it wasn’t too hard to come up with some new what new new concepts and what’s nice is looking at the spells or comparing to I think we do have some nice space here I think we can create effects that just feel like oh yeah I’d rather when it comes to tactical benefits the warlord can outclass the wizard the Wizards probably that on going the image element obviously like wall of fire that can be hard to top especially since the wizard can also still cast spells though not a concentration spell so but I don’t think it’s so far that it feels like oh that’s a real drawback you know I’d feel comfortable as a designer thinking well that’s the benefit the wizard spells hose everybody so the benefit is there is like you can get more damage thrown in on them if you are able to tilt it actually what ideally what you’d have is the warlord is working with the wizard to turn those spells into just strict benefit that there’s something in the tactics you’re using you know I want to try to find a me I don’t think of some ways to like create tactics that they feel like they they dovetail well it’s like a wall with fire so again we’re creating that sense of teamwork so and we also have our art our capstone ability let the the party gets to basically take an entire round of actions and the enemy just sits and watches and takes the punishment so that’s where we are we’re just sort of 2 o’clock so we’re gonna call that a session here next week without what I’ll do is a walk through the warlord how it’s all coming together and really importantly to one of the things we’ll have to resolve and I’ll talk through this is okay we have all this stuff that’s going on how do we manage it can the warlord attack heal someone and use a tactical ability all in one turn and also make an opportunity attack so starting to see there’s a lot getting packed into again they’ve that idea that it’s like a box okay your turn is like a box what can we fit in it we may have too much there especially we’re thinking you’re doing it all the time now the nice thing is without those heal and damage bonuses going back to our spreadsheet we were looking at somewhere between like starting at two uses at level three tapping it at six at level 20 those might not be the right numbers but they’re probably in the right zip code or right neighborhood so maybe we don’t have to worry so much about the damage bonus and heal being something you use all the time maybe use that in place of your tactical benefit yeah we’ll see I’ll start putting some thoughts into it and start building out some prototype characters and lay out the skeleton for the subclass right well thanks everyone for joining in thanks for your comments in chat and next week we’ll take a look at sort of the the foundation of the class we’ll have something actually that’s fully playable so looking forward to sharing that talk through how it all comes together and then we’ll have something you can check out and maybe using your own games thanks everyone I will see you next Tuesday 1 p.m. Pacific time

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— Mike Mearls (@mikemearls) March 20, 2018

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The Warlord Fighter subclass pt3 – The Mike Mearls Happy Fun Hour!

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