UA - Eberron; TranscendantViewer, & QuietBrowser
Core Trait Comparisons: Warforged
Unearthed Arcana: Eberron
This one has the least to offer in context, just a bare-bones explanation of their origin and a brief statement of their nature, before providing the base traits for a generic warforged character. There are no variant forms.
Core Traits
As a warforged, you have the following traits.
Ability Score Increase. Your Strength and Constitution scores increase by 1.
Size. Warforged are generally broader and heavier than humans. Your size is Medium.
Speed. Your base walking speed is 30 feet.
Composite Plating. Your construction incorporates wood and metal, granting you a +1 bonus to Armor Class.
Living Construct. Even though you are a construct, you are a living creature. You are immune to disease. You do not need to eat or breathe, but you can ingest food and drink if you wish.
Instead of sleeping, you enter an inactive state for 4 hours each day. You don’t dream in this state; you’re fully aware of your surroundings and you still notice approaching enemies and other events as normal.
Languages. You can speak, read, and write Common and one other language of your choice.
Transcendantviewer’s Homebrew Warforged, available through the DM’s Guild online as the Warforged Collection.
This offering is delivered with the most in background information on the race, outdoing even some of the basic character races in the 5e PHB in column inches. I haven’t looked at the original Eberron sourcebooks, but the description in the 4e Eberron Player’s Guide has less than transcendantviewer’s Warforged Collection in terms of explaining the nature and limitations of the race. This rendition goes into great depth, and has a large number of common traits for warforged, besides additional traits for three warforged subraces (the charger, the commando, and the scout), six warforged-specific Feats, and three racial archetypes.
Core Traits
Your Warforged character possesses a number of special benefits and drawbacks due to their construct-like nature.
Ability Score Increase. Increase your Constitution Score by 2.
Ageless. You are built to withstand the test of time. As a result of your construct-like nature, you do not age.
Alignment. Warforged tend towards lawful alignments due to their militaristic training and are often the Lawful Neutral alignment, but other alignments are equally likely.
Living Construct. You possess both the Humanoid and Construct types, and as such, any spell or ability that can affect one or both of these types can affect you normally.
Construct Resiliency. Your unnatural, forged body grants special benefits. You are immune to disease. You have advantage on saving throws against poison, and you have resistance against poison damage. In addition, you do not need to eat, sleep, or breathe but can still benefit from consumable items, such as potions.
Half-Living. You heal only half as much from magical healing, rounded down.
Ever Watching. You do not sleep. When you take a long rest, you are completely aware and you must still perform only light activity to receive the benefits of a long rest.
Self-Stabilizing. When you make a Death Saving throw, a result of 19 automatically stabilizes you, but you remain unconscious. In addition, rolling a natural 1 on a Death Saving throw only counts as a single failure for you.
Composite Plating. You are constructed with greater bodily resilience than other races. While not wearing armor, your Armor Class is calculated as 10 + your Dexterity modifier + your Constitution modifier.
Natural Weapon. You can never be disarmed because you are a weapon. You are proficient with your unarmed strikes, which deal 1d4 bludgeoning damage.
Languages. You speak Common.
Sub-Races. There are three sub-races in the Warforged Race: the Charger, the Commando, and the Scout. Choose one.
QuietBrowser’s Homebrew
In QuietBrowser’s own words: “Okay, so, as I said, I'm not hugely happy with either of the official Warforged takes out there so far, so I decided to do my own. I could really use some help working the glitches out of these guys, especially because I kind of ran out of ideas for subrace abilities.”
[Note: When QuietBrowser refers to “... either of the official Warforged takes ... “ I am not sure if the DM’s Guild’s .pdf of transcendantviewer’s Warforged Collection is one of the two “official” versions being referred to, or if there is some other version meant by that. Technically, neither the UA or DM’s Guild are fully official. They are, however, the only other versions that I am currently aware of.]
Core Traits
Ability Score Modifier: +1 Constitution
Living Construct: A Warforged is immune to disease, has Advantage on saving throws vs. Poison, is Resistant to Poison Damage, and does not need to eat or breathe, although it can still consume organic matter if needed.
Unsleeping Sentinel: A warforged needs only 4 hours of sleep per day instead of 8 to remain healthy. Additionally, whilst in its resting trance, a warforged remains fully aware of its surroundings.
Integrated Armor: As part of a short rest, a warforged can integrate a suit of armor into its body. This prevents the armor from being removed until it spends another short rest doing so. Integrating a suit of armor allows a warforged to benefit from its protection without any drawbacks, even if it does not have proficiency with that armor type.
Subrace: Choose between the Scout, Soldier and Jaeger subraces.
Comparisons and Contrasts
Ability Score Increases
All three versions agree that Constitution is the primary ability for the Warforged race. These are generally presented in the order in which the versions were produced.
1. Because it only offers one warforged race with no subracial types, the UA’s version offers a +1 to each of two Abilities. This is weaker than the racial bonuses for any of the core races which typically award at least a total of +3 distributed between two or more Abilities. However, this version’s Composite Plating trait, by providing a +1 to Armor Class, partially compensates for that by effectively adding 2 to the Dexterity score vis-a-vis AC, although it does not improve the saving throw for either Dexterity or Constitution.
2. Both the DM’s Guild and QuietBrowser versions have only the bonus to Constitution, distributing any other Ability bonuses through their sub-racial offerings [I’ll deal with those later].
2a. The Dm’s Guild is the stronger version in this trait by granting a +2 to Constitution. That is both tied to and balanced by the fact that it is the only one of the three versions with the Half-Living trait, which halves any benefit it might receive from magical healing.
Half-Living, imo, is a necessary trait, since healing spells state that they have no effect on constructs. This trait emphasizes that the warforged is half-organic in its construction. Healing magic is wasted on its inorganic parts, but does work on its organic portion.
Warforged and Aging
The UA article does not address this. QuietBrowser’s version is still on the ENWorld Thread drawing board and may yet address the issue.
In the Warforged Collection, transcendantviewer goes into warforged aging at some depth in what I term the “cultural” contexts of a race (fluff) before getting to the Traits section (mechanics).
Some or all of that material may be transcendantviewer’s own, or may have come from the original Eberron sourcebook(s), or may be a mix of the two; I do not know which case applies.
In the section Sleepless Minds and Endless Lives, the situation is described thus:
“Warforged also do not age and as such cannot die from old age. They do not grow from children like other races; all Warforged are created in the prime of their life and never get older. Instead, for the first 6 months or so of wakefulness, they possess youthful curiosity and a readiness to learn any information they can, much like an infant. Past this brief time of intellectual development, their minds are taught to be rigid and stern, and they often lose their curiosity about the world. From that point on, they are, more or less, who they will always be.”
The No New Warforged section goes on to state:
“A unique quality of the Warforged is that they are incapable of reproduction and following the end of the Last War, when they were recognized as a true, sentient race, it became decidedly unethical to produce more. This fact makes it painfully clear that one day, the last Warforged may die, signaling the death knell for this proud warrior-race.”
This all gets boiled down to a succinct definition in the Core Trait, Ageless.
I would argue the point about ethics since there are plenty of disagreements about just what constitutes ethical behavior, as I learned while studying the topic in college. Are ethics absolute or situational? That debate continues in both academia and politics.
Personally, my preference is that warforged continue to be constructed just because I really like the race.
Also, neither the vegetative nor the metallic parts are likely to be immune to the natural effects of daily wear and tear, unless specifically deemed to be so by the magical processes of construction. Nothing in any of the three versions of the Core Traits explicitly says that warforged are immune or even resistanct to bludgeoning, piercing, or slashing damage. Their durable nature may slow aging down somewhat, but I can’t really see them as being any less vulnerable to wearing out than, say, an automobile. Maybe that's a bad example. Ask a gamer who has owned car. Or happens to be a warforged that owns a car.
I believe that Warforged Collection hews closely to the race’s aging as depicted in Eberron, and look forward to seeing what direction QuietBrowser may take that trait.
Alignment
Neither the UA article nor QuietBrowser address this, so I will assume that the definition of warforged alignment inclinations as described in the Warforged Collection is acceptable to all.
Size and Speed
All three versions appear to agree on Medium size and a 30-foot walking speed for the standard warforged build and movement.
The fun will start when I get to the different subracial versions and their variance from the Core Traits.
Living Construct / Construct Resiliency
The UA and QuietBrowser’s definitions of Living Construct begin with a match. The Warforged Collection’s Construct Resiliency says the same thing, and so should be retitled as Living Construct.
What Warforged Collection does describe under Living Construct should instead be included in the Half-Living trait, and then Half-Living should be included in the Core Traits for all versions.
This version’s Ever Watching should also be absorbed into Living Construct.
QuietBrowser’s Unsleeping Sentinel, likewise, should simply be included within the Living Construct trait’s definition.
Composite Plating / Integrated Armor
Here, I prefer Warforged Collection’s definition. It just feels intuitively right for how I picture the race.
Integrated Armor is so strongly related to this, and is so intriguing an idea, that I would want to include it in the definition of Composite Plating. If it is, I have two things to consider:
1. Since the underlying idea is to improve armor class, by using Integrated Armor the character should lose one of the ability modifiers granted by Composite Plating. Dexterity should be the default modifier to keep, but I’d allow a choice between the two ability modifiers, with the caveat that the modifier cannot exceed +3 for medium armor and cannot exceed +1 for heavy armor.
2. While engaged in integrating the armor during a short rest, a warforged character would grant combat advantage to any weapon attack rolls made against it. Surpri-iiise!!!
Self-Stabilizing and Natural Weapon
Only Warforged Collection includes these two options as part of Core Traits. Neither one is necessary to the warforged race, but I like them both.
Self-Stabilizing is another one of those “this makes sense for a living construct” things. Although it might be added to the Living Construct trait, it is significant enough to warrant its own trait.
The same goes for Natural Weapon.
I can see scaling Natural Weapon by character size for the warforged sub-racial types: 1d2 bludgeoning damage for Small warforged (still better than the simple 1 bludgeoning damage for unarmed strike in the PHB), and 1d6 bludgeoning damage for the jaeger and charger.
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This does if for now as far as the Core Traits go.
I’ll post later on the different takes on warforged subracial types.
I'm glad you like the race so much, and I'd love to make it even better; I got most of my original draft concepts in, but I still lack that "kobold sorcerer" trait for spell-like abilities, which I think would be a perfect addition to the Draconic Gifts segment, and a lot of the kobold traits from Pathfinder's "Kobolds of Golarion" are minable for inspiration, I'm sure, if I could just figure out what to do with, say, Wyrmhorned or the Wyvaran's tail attacks or... well, you've got the list a couple of posts further up, I'm sure you can see where I'm coming from. 
