Commanding Officer Powers

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A character who is a leader, officer, strategist, or tactician character gives other characters or units non-magical Status Buffs by giving them orders. This allows gameplay to quantify a character's non-personal impact on the battlefield while keeping everything under the player's control. Since these buffs are non-magical, they can show up in a setting where magic does not exist, or where magic has significant story implications (such as being limited to certain people). As non-magical abilities, these boosts might bypass the use of Anti-Magic or Power Nullifier. A frequent, but not universal, limitation of these abilities is that they can not be used on the user themselves due to the strangeness of giving oneself orders.

Examples of Commanding Officer Powers include:

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons has had various minor abilities of this type pop up over the years, but has had a few instances of a class focusing on it.
  • The Marshall class, introduced in Third Edition's Miniatures Handbook, gains the ability to let allies within a certain distance of it non-magical boosts to various checks of the Marshall's choice and let allies move a second time a small number of times per day. Since these abilities are "Extraordinary" and not magical, they function in Antimagic Fields and cannot be dispelled like spells can. Unfortunately that's all the Marshall does, having absolutely nothing beyond the minor bonuses they provide by simply standing there, making the class notoriously shallow and weak.
  • Near the end of its life, Third Edition introduced the White Raven Tactics discipline, used by the Crusader and Warblade classes, in Tome of Battle. Maneuvers from the discipline allow buffing allies and occasionally debuffing enemies when used in conjuction with the Warblade and Crusader's innate ability to hit things.
  • Fourth Edition introduced the Warlord, which focused on abilities of this type, in place of the traditional Bard class, which claimed magical buffing among its very wide portfolio and did not make the core rulebook this time. Aside from Fourth Edition's general design decision to make Hit Points a matter of morale as much as actual injury (allowing a Warlord to heal allies by shouting at them) and the plot implications of calling the class's role "Leader", Warlord's existence and abilities are actually one of the less controversial additions of a very controversial edition. Even after the Bard returned later on, Warlord's non-magical nature and secondary focus on hitting things allowed the two to remain distinct.
• The Noble class of Star Wars: Roleplaying Game: Saga Edition can gain this kind of ability from its Leadership and Inspiration talent tree. Due to the nature of Saga Edition, it is not required a Noble possess this kind of ability. The Officer Prestige Class also has this kind of ability and is essentially a less squishy combination of Noble and Soldier.

Video Games

• Advance Wars is the Trope Namer. As units under a character's command damage units or are damaged themselves, their CO Meter fills up. Once the CO Meter is filled enough (each character needs a different amount) they can unleash a CO Power that increases the attack and defense of all units under their control on the map till the start of their next turn in addition to other, character specific, benefits.
• Valkyria Chronicles allows the player to spend Command Points, normally used to let a character move and attack, to issue an Order. An Order gives a boost to one or all units currently deployed. A handful of plot important enemies can also issue Orders to the enemy on maps where they are present, though with a much more limited array of options. This ability returns in the sequels, but heavily nerfed to prevent stacking a lot of orders on one unit that then rushes to the objective.