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Oct 6, 2012 -- 9:42PM, The_Jester wrote:

The leadership thing just seems like much more of a charactr trait, a personality not a class feature. "Hey, I'm a variant ranger with Charisma and leadership skills like Robin Hood. So I'm not a ranger, I'm a commando." Or "I'm a rogue with knowledge of tactics, so I'm a Strategian."

The leadership thing is a character trait up until you define it in mechanical terms. Much like how being religious is just a character trait, until you make it mean something in game, at which point it becomes not just one class, but several. I'm really not sure I see your point here.

If a warlord is defined a fighter with social skills, what happens when you give a 5e fighter a high Cha, a background with social skills, the Healer speciality, and role-play him as a leader?

What happens when you give a 5e fighter a high dex, a background with sneaky skills, ambusher specialty, and roleplay him as a rogue?

Backgrounds and specialties help tailor your character, and yes let you get a semi-multiclassing thing going on. This does not invalidate the need for a base class to represent the concept.

Edit: Also apparently Im tired and need to read better, I assumed you had gone with some theoretical leader specialty, rather than the healer specialty. The healer specialty doesn't make the fighter a particularly capable, or even decent, in combat healer, and misses out on huge chunks of what the warlord can do, so it would be even further from the mark than I was thinking.

As an aside, the Fighter has little to no incentive to have any mental attribute as a decent stat. All of his class features and combat capability key off of str(or dex) and con. By taking another attribute as a primary/secondary (and thus making it high enough to matter and let him contribute meaningfully either as a Lore guy/tactitian or social guy), he is sacrificing attributes elsewhere, and making himself less effective, while lacking the class abilities to make up for that, because his class abilities are all made with the assumption the fighter is making himself better.

Oct 7, 2012 -- 1:56AM, Admiral-JCJF wrote:

Every version of D&D has allowed for a definition of Hit Points which leaves room for Martial Healing and those people who don't like it were running house rules, not the RAW. 

Really? I recall a Warlord class (the Marshal) in 3.5 from the Miniatures Handbook, but even that class didn't have any healing abilities. 

I can't think of any non-magical healing that wasn't based on herbal remedies or bed-rest in 3.x, or any of the previous versions of the game. Even if the definition of HP throughout any edition allowed for martial healing (and I'm not convinced they did), I'd argue that the pathetic natural healing rates and complete lack of utilization of the concept were fair indication that being told to "hold the line, soldier!" wasn't something that supposed to stack up on the healing front.

In that light, you can hardly accuse those who disliked the idea of running house rules. That the RAW never addressed the issue isn't an indication that they were allowed, any more than it's lack of comment on the strength enhancing powers of spinach were an indication that it could be used as an anabolic steroid. It simply had not been thought of at that stage.