Do warforged dream of construct sheep?

[Bagpuss]

If you didn't need sleep, you never could choose to do so.

I'm guessing you never had to attend any University lectures.

The only thing that bothers me about the Warforged is that from their discription they should have to take their first level in fighter, since they were build as fighters and have already served in a war.

 

[Trickstergod]

I'm guessing you never had to attend any University lectures.

The only thing that bothers me about the Warforged is that from their discription they should have to take their first level in fighter, since they were build as fighters and have already served in a war.

Well, some might have been created or trained to be rangers or rogues - considering that they don't need to eat, sleep or so many other things, they make ideal scouts or other far-ranging soldiers.

Even disregarding that, keep in mind that the oldest wizards, clerics and the like amongst them are, at least by the book for PC's, all of four years old. During which time, peace had, more or less, started settling in if it hadn't quite been formalized. So there were likely a number of warforged created who weren't quite yet being trained and possibly had some "free-time" where it really wasn't certain what was going to happen to them.

Not to mention a few noble or merchant houses also likely had a few that weren't necessarily geared for war. Likely rare, but some may have desired the novelty of having a warforged butler or other such servant; not really a case for a PC-class one, but, not too out there.

Of course, the majority of them will be fighters, but there are cases for them not all being one, and, in general, the PC's should be the exception, anyway, so shouldn't have some guidelines for curtailing the number of non-fighter warforged PC's.

 

[Sejs]

Actually, I would take cues from the film version more than the book that spawned it. Er, Blade Runner over Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, that is.

They way I would do it is that yes, they do have emotions; but there's a few important points to remember as to their development. First, warforged are sentient right out of the box - they don't have several years in which they're functionally helpless and in the care of others. The base that every human has to build up from just isn't there for a warforged. They've got to figure it out as they go. Not only that, but they're pretty much tossed right away into the war, so not only do they lack a stable emotional base, they're also put into a high-stress situation. Or what would be a high stress situation for a normal person. To this end, a warforged's emotional newness could very well be to its advantage. Dangerous, stressful situations ... arn't, to a warforged. They're normal. Serious, definitly, but not stressful.

The way I sort of envision it, would be that during downtime your average warforges would be alot like Leon, or Roy, or Priss - still on shakey legs on dealing with emotional issues. Still figuring out how to cope. But when the **** hit the fan, something in them just clicks into place, and they're all buisness. Calm, analytical, tactical, smooth and efficient, all because -this- is something that they're used to. They cut their teeth on war, and as such keeping a level head in battle isn't something they had to learn thru training and drill. It's not even second nature to them. It's first.

 

[darklight]

Sejs that sounds perfectly reasonable, plus roleplaying a warforged who is uncomfortable and unsure of himself in social situations could be rather fun

darklight

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Sonny from I, Robot, seems a good example of a warforged, at least when it comes to personality. Data couldn't feel (initially, anyway); Warforged can - as shown by their capability at having morality (good showing ability to have compassion, mercy, chaos for impulse and whimsy and so on), the Warforged Juggernaut's own in-built disadvantage of slowly growing aloof from people as more levels are taken as well as the piece of artwork with the warforged being insult by the half-orc when the orc says he's obsolete. Or, heck, their ability to be barbarians - rage is certainly an emotion.

They feel, but don't always understand it. I wouldn't say they're passionate, tending more towards subdued emotions, but there nonetheless. Not necessarily something that looks natural, something others might question, something the warforged themselves might question, but there nonetheless.

Does morality imply emotion/feeling? I'm not convinced it does. An unemotional being of pure logic could possibly conclude that acting by the precepts of "good" is the most logical way to proceed -- no feeling involved.

Similarly, rage doesn't need to be an emotion -- it could be a purely physical response like pumping super adrenaline (or 100 octane fuel) in response to a flight-or-fight scenario. Just because we've named the game mechanic after an emotion doesn't necessarily mean it must be one.

If warforged do feel, but are emontionally unevolved, it could mean that the majority of them aren't quite stable, given that their first experiences were to be thrown into a major war. That sort of experience can have severe, long-lasting psychological effects on perfectly stable humans; imagine taking a five-year-old emotional intellect and subjecting it to that kind of strain.

There's a plot hook for you: the warforged are all suffering from extreme PTSD to the point of psychosis. Imagine a thousand Rambos, all with construct immunity.

 

[Reynard]

The only thing that bothers me about the Warforged is that from their discription they should have to take their first level in fighter, since they were build as fighters and have already served in a war.

Well, they were built to fight in the war, but that doesn't mean they were build as fighters. I figure that each creation forge created a different sort of Warforged, so you would have a Fighter Forge, a Sorcerer Forge, a Rogue Force, and so on. What would be neat is to have it (with your player's permission*) be that in order to multiclass, a warforged has to make it to the right kind of forge and "upload" the right information for the new class.

* As a side note, screwing with level progression in the base classes is not something a DM should do without talking to a player first. In this case, the DM could give an XP bonus to the player and the PC could "hold" any level progressions from the time the quest starts to the time he plugs in and gain whatever number of levels he would have simultaneously.

 

[Sejs]

I disagree with you on some points, Oglar, and agree with you on others.

Does morality imply emotion/feeling? I'm not convinced it does.

It does. If a person is completely without empathy, then they have no basis from which to form a morality. The closest a competely disempathic person could come would be to approximate a moral system based on consequence. You don't do X, because if you do X it has Y reprocussions. However, the completely disempathic person would have no inherrant sense of right and wrong as they applied to anyone that wasn't them. If faced with a moral decision that was outside of their realm of experience and to which they couldn't draw inference from a different but similar situation with which they were familiar, they would have an equal chance of making the "wrong" decision versus the "right" one. Assuming no other factors, of course.

Similarly, rage doesn't need to be an emotion -- it could be a purely physical response like pumping super adrenaline (or 100 octane fuel) in response to a flight-or-fight scenario. Just because we've named the game mechanic after an emotion doesn't necessarily mean it must be one.

This one I agree with you on, 100%. What is Rage in a human barbarian could just as easily (and just as reasonably, if not more so) be Overdrive in a warforged barbarian. A built-in mechanism, maybe inherrant to all warforged, though only some know how to access it, that can redirect power from certain systems (primarily mental ones) to others (primarily physical ones), but its use puts stress on the warforged's systems as a whole.

The warforged barbarian doesn't Get Mad, he activates a subsystem. The warforged Frenzied Berzerker, on the other hand, crosses that line. He's already had access to his overdrive (the rage pre-requisite for the class), but now he no longer has full control over when and where it activates. FBs can involentarily go nuts when they get hit, or insulted, or frustrated and have to make a will save to hold themselves back. There are now irrational triggers to his overdrive that he has no control over, and has to fight against if he wants to keep in check. The warforged barb and FB are still using the same subsystem - it's just that the FB lets it run absolutly rampant when it activates. Ignores safety measures such as where and how much energy is redirected. Purposefully overloads certain breakers, blows them, and then intentionally leaves them unrepaired. Things like that.

If warforged do feel, but are emontionally unevolved, it could mean that the majority of them aren't quite stable, given that their first experiences were to be thrown into a major war. That sort of experience can have severe, long-lasting psychological effects on perfectly stable humans; imagine taking a five-year-old emotional intellect and subjecting it to that kind of strain.

As I mentioned above, I'm not so sure it would neccessarily work the same way with the psychology of a warforged versus the psychology of a human. If you had a human that was drilled from the moment of his birth for battle situations, you would end up with something approximating a warforged's psychology. Battle wouldn't be stressful in the same way for them, because they didn't develop mentally in a peace-time situation. It's not alien to them; it's not outside their norm like it would be for some human who grew up with a mom and a dad in some villiage, and then signed up for military service when the call came down.

The Rambo analogy is still a good one, though, but for different reasons. The Rambo character was left dysfunctional after his military service - he found it damn near impossible to go back to being John instead of staying the course and still being Rambo. His mind just had one hell of a time wrapping itself around the concept of not being a soldier any more; it wasn't a switch he could flip, it now sat at the core of how he defined his identity as a human being. I could easily see warforged being the same way, if not more so. Being a soldier is who and what they are. It's the whole reason they exist in the first place. And now, the war's over and they're not needed any longer. Here's your discharge papers - good luck. Drop us a line some day and tell us how things worked out.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

What about in a moral system based on "greatest good"? Weigh the balance, and whichever course of action provides the greatest benefit to the greatest number is the course followed. No emotion required -- it's a cost/benefit equation. It would be different than what we traditionally think of as morality -- it redefines right and wrong in some circumstances. In many cases "right" decisions made under that system are what we call "good" or "moral", but many right decisions could also be equally "evil".

- Do I derail the speeding lightning train to save a child in its path? No -- save the passengers, smear the child. Probably a "good" or "right" decision in both the traditional and this alternate morality.

- Do I try to cure the plague, knowing that it will continue to spread and kill people while I work on the cure, or just kill off those infected, knwing that by doing so I'll stop the plague? Probably "right" or "good" to kill the infected in this alternate morality, but "evil" in traditional morality.

The directions you can take with the concept are interesting if you've willing to be a bit flexible. (What I've proposed is a version of the moral system Heinlein discussed in Starship Troopers, which can be quite thought provoking, if also a bit disturbing.)

----

The warforged-as-Rambo thing had me thinking all day. I'm tempted to write an adventure around it -- like First Blood, but with the PCs as the cops ...

 

[Sejs]

Touche. However, without any empathy Greatest Good is defined Greatest Good For You, which may or may not affect other people - you don't know (or necessarily care), because they're not you. Without any empathy the concept of "I like this, so other people might like this, too" is just beyond your ability to fathom. Heh, social creatures are -supposed- to have some form of empathy. It's a survival trait. Not having any is a serious dysfunction, and a species that relies on interrelation and cooperation to thrive (like humans or ants), that also is devoid of empathy is a species that's doomed to extinction.

The cost/benefit equation doesn't quite work without emotion, because without it you don't any motivation to benefit anyone that either isnt you, or whose benefit doesn't directly influence you. Why should you assist someone if doing so will in no way generate a positive feedback? It just makes no sense. All you're doing then is wasting resources pointlessly, like throwing money into the ocean.

It would be a much smaller, more centralized system, and the larger it gets, the more it breaks down. Why should I pay into welfare if I'm never going to need it? Why repair a road if I never drive on it? Why should I have to pay for any education other than mine? Why should I pay for infrastructure that I'm never going to benefit from?


The rock/hard place type moral questions don't always work, primarily because they're not always good vs evil decisions. Child on the Tracks vs Train Full of Passengers is a no-brainer: paste the child, both from a traditional morality, and our alternate that we're working with. What it comes down to is that the child's death is equal to a single death of a passenger on that train, and a packed, speeding train bailing off the tracks at full clip, pounding into the earth and grinding to a halt in which not a single person dies would be a miracle so grand it would border on direct divine intervention. Choosing the one death over the many deaths isn't an evil decision. It's lamentable that you were forced to make that decision, and it's tragic that it had to happen, but it is not evil. Train > Child is Good vs Neutral, Child > Train is Stupid vs Good. Even if you choose the child over the train, you're not making the decision with evil intent, you're hoping againt hope to play that margin, and that it'll pay off. Foolish. Amazingly so. But not evil.

It's pretty much the same with the plague example, just without the numbers being as clear-cut. Lamentable, but with honestly good intent.



-Interesting bit on the First Blood adventure thing, by the way. Mind if I steal it?

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Is the "greatest good for you" immoral? Traditionally, yes, but if you hold to a certain level of moral relativism, I think you could define a morality system based on me-first that might work.

---

Steal away! (I reserve publishing rights )

My idea is Rambo-the-warforged still thinks he's fighting the Last War -- maybe deep in the forest, against an invasion of demons (or something -- think the Japanese soldier still holed up in a cave on Saipan thinking WWII was still going on ten years later). He's set up all manner of traps and tricks for his enemy. In doing so, he's inadvertantly protecting some nearby settlement from a greater evil. All the villagers know, however, is that there's some evil in the forest, some of the locals have vanished inexplicably, and they blame the deranged construct that has been occasionally encountered. The PCs get hired to take him out (penetrate defenses to his lair, as he snipes at them all the while) -- but if they shoot first and ask questions after, they end up bringing down a demonic invasion (or some similar disaster). If they're clever and can diagnose/manage the psychosis, they can save the settlement and put Rambo at peace.