D&D General The Tyranny of Rarity

[Older Beholder]

Just a quick idea on adding Warforged to a campaign...

Have the players go on an adventure back a few hundred years in time and stop the assassination of a tinker gnome (or cleric of Gond, or whatever). If successful it turns out the tinker goes on to invent the first Warforged, and when the characters return to the present day they find the construct race filling out the ranks of the nation's army.

So, when it next comes time to make up a character in a new campaign using the same setting, Warforged are now an option and the players can feel some sense of accomplishment that it was their doing that made it possible.

Time travel/changing the past is a good way to add, or remove anything you want from a campaign.

 

[JiffyPopTart]

I don't think anything being discussed in this thread is universal... few things in life are... but the framing of the example was clearly one where a group vote allowed the players to advocate for themselves by overriding the DM's decision using pure numbers... a situation that will, due to pure numbers, always be the case in this type of situation.

Not really....it's not two teams....players versus GM. It's individuals all forming their own answer on how something would/could/should work and giving their thoughts. All of us are players and GMs depending on the day so we have all been behind the screen. It is very rare at my table for a player to call "foul", and even rarer that all the other players would agree with them rather than a mixed vote.

 

[Scars Unseen]

When I DM (though it's been a while), I generally do curated races and somewhat curated classes(usually more for balance reasons than worldbuilding for the latter), with the addendum that I am open to discussion provided that both the character and the party as a whole fit into the world I'm running. So I could maybe go with an edge case, but I wouldn't go with a party consisting of nothing but edge cases, because that just tells me that the players aren't interested in my world and someone else needs to DM. The player would also have to be open to reinterpretations and maybe even house rules over their character depending on how far afield from the curated list they were trying to go.

For example, someone in this thread brought up the idea of a warforged character being a relic from an ancient ruin. I could probably roll with that, but I reject the 5E interpretation of them just being a humanoid like any other race. Off the cuff, I'd say something like no ability to wear armor, no magical healing, but they get a natural armor bonus due to their construction, maybe bonus HP depending on how things balance out in play, and they can be repaired by anyone with proficiency with smith's tools and access to a forge(even a portable one is fine) on a long rest, with the magic that sustains the character integrating the patch seamlessly into the overall form over the course of the long rest.

 

[Imaro]

Not really....it's not two teams....players versus GM. It's individuals all forming their own answer on how something would/could/should work and giving their thoughts. All of us are players and GMs depending on the day so we have all been behind the screen. It is very rare at my table for a player to call "foul", and even rarer that all the other players would agree with them rather than a mixed vote.

I guess experiences differ... IME players tend to advocate for their characters and since a ruling on another character tends to mean that is the way it will go for their character if the situation arises again... they tend (though not always) to vote similarly... and that vote tends to favor their characters.

I am curious was there an actual argument for why the levitating shield would support the weight of a PC without setting off the traps?

 

[Vaalingrade]

For example, someone in this thread brought up the idea of a warforged character being a relic from an ancient ruin. I could probably roll with that, but I reject the 5E interpretation of them just being a humanoid like any other race. Off the cuff, I'd say something like no ability to wear armor, no magical healing, but they get a natural armor bonus due to their construction, maybe bonus HP depending on how things balance out in play, and they can be repaired by anyone with proficiency with smith's tools and access to a forge(even a portable one is fine) on a long rest, with the magic that sustains the character integrating the patch seamlessly into the overall form over the course of the long rest.

So the compromise is to make them basically unplayable?

I'd be like me saying people can play gnomes, but since I hate them, all spells a gnome cast have full round (spell goes off on the next turn) casting time.

 

[Mort]

When I DM (though it's been a while), I generally do curated races and somewhat curated classes(usually more for balance reasons than worldbuilding for the latter), with the addendum that I am open to discussion provided that both the character and the party as a whole fit into the world I'm running. So I could maybe go with an edge case, but I wouldn't go with a party consisting of nothing but edge cases, because that just tells me that the players aren't interested in my world and someone else needs to DM. The player would also have to be open to reinterpretations and maybe even house rules over their character depending on how far afield from the curated list they were trying to go.

For example, someone in this thread brought up the idea of a warforged character being a relic from an ancient ruin. I could probably roll with that, but I reject the 5E interpretation of them just being a humanoid like any other race. Off the cuff, I'd say something like no ability to wear armor, no magical healing, but they get a natural armor bonus due to their construction, maybe bonus HP depending on how things balance out in play, and they can be repaired by anyone with proficiency with smith's tools and access to a forge(even a portable one is fine) on a long rest, with the magic that sustains the character integrating the patch seamlessly into the overall form over the course of the long rest.

I don't mind banning something (be it race, class, whatever) if it doesn't fit with the concept/theme of the campaign I'm running/planning to run. Though I'm quite open to player preference, so there is always a discussion.

One thing I don't like? Soft banning something: as in houseruling something I don't want to basically ensure no one takes it. And I'd much rather simply be told no than have a DM soft ban something in that manor.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I don't think anything being discussed in this thread is universal... few things in life are... but the framing of the example was clearly one where a group vote allowed the players to advocate for themselves by overriding the DM's decision using pure numbers... a situation that will, due to pure numbers, always be the case in this type of situation.

Yeah, why should four people get what they want instead of just one?

 

[JiffyPopTart]

I guess experiences differ... IME players tend to advocate for their characters and since a ruling on another character tends to mean that is the way it will go for their character if the situation arises again... they tend (though not always) to vote similarly... and that vote tends to favor their characters.

I am curious was there an actual argument for why the levitating shield would support the weight of a PC without setting off the traps?

From a physics perspective, if levitation worked by applying an actual force to the ground then things like a levitating person or a Tensors Floating Disc would be doing things like getting stuck in the mud, falling into bodies of water, or plummeting you into a chasm you are trying to cross because the "ground" you have to push again at would be out of range.

Similarly if it did have a force I could use a levitating rock as a weapon not by dropping it on someone but just moving it over them. What kind of damage would a 1000lb rock do skating down a corridor of enemies being pulped under it?

Ultimately the argument wasn't as much about the force being applied (if we knew it worked that way we could have just levitated something heavy down and trigger all the traps from afar) but that the GM ruled it as a GOTCHA moment. A wizard would know that was how a spell worked and known it wouldn't work to bypass traps ... if that was the decision the GM wants to go with. If he had said upfront before we doomed the rogue to an early death we would have accepted it and moved on.

 

[Micah Sweet]

What's wrong with just...generalizing "warforged" to artificial life overall? Like, yes, I get that the name "warforged" comes from their Eberron origin. But clearly the creators don't have any problem with "warforged" not actually forged for war (otherwise they wouldn't have even considered the "envoy" version), and names are literally THE easiest thing to change.

In one proto-setting idea I came up with some time ago, I called them "mekka" (though these days I'd probably use the Greek mekhane instead), and said they were the creations of a long-disappeared culture. In the original idea for this setting, humans don't exist on the main continent, they've only just begun to arrive within the past generation or two as refugees from a faraway place suffering some kind of ill-defined cataclysm. For some mekka, this is the Creators finally returning to them after centuries away; for others, humans are just a curiosity, a coincidental physical resemblance; a few find humans blasphemous (since they clearly don't have the wisdom the Creators would have to have, obviously!); and there's even a small group that see humans as the "updated model," being fully organic creations of the long-absent Creators, so they hope to find some way to gain truly flesh-and-blood bodies of their own.

And if you want more artificial life...it's not like it's that hard to homebrew a race for 5e (or D&D in general). Perhaps something like this (literally spitballing; will count up the time spent writing it):

Spoiler: Spoilered for length

.
Droida
Abilities. +2 Intelligence, +1 Strength: The droida are calculating and cunning, and their constructed bodies pack quite a punch.
Age. Droida are constructed, not born, so they neither mature nor age in the usual sense. Delicate internal components can collect damage over time, but whether or not they die of old age is unknown. You are immune to magical aging effects.
Alignment. Due to their constructed, pre-programmed nature, droida tend to favor lawful alignments, particularly lawful neutral, but some have had a flash of insight or defining personal experience which pushes them in other directions.
Size. Your size is Medium.
Constructed Resilience.You were built by the great droida-construction engine, represented by the following benefits:

• You have advantage on saving throws against being poisoned, and you have resistance to poison damage.
• You don't need to eat, drink, or breathe.
• You are immune to disease.
• You don't need to sleep, and magic can't put you to sleep.

Sentry's Rest. When you take a long rest, you must spend at least six hours in an inactive, motionless state, rather than sleeping. In this state, you appear inert, but it doesn't render you unconscious, and you can see and hear as normal.
Archived Knowledge. Each of the droida are constructed with innate understanding collected from prior iterations. Select one of the following skills: Arcana, History, Medicine, Nature, Religion. You gain proficiency with this skill, and your proficiency bonus is doubled for any ability check you make using this skill. This benefit does not stack with any other benefit which allows you to double your proficiency bonus.
Calculated Brilliance. Choose any skill with which you do not have proficiency. For the next ten minutes, you can add your proficiency bonus to ability checks made using that skill, as if you were proficient with it, so long as performing the check does not take longer than ten minutes. If a task would require more than ten minutes to complete, but less than the total amount of remaining time you could benefit from this feature, you may expend multiple uses of this feature, up to your full proficiency bonus, for consecutive durations up to one hour total. You can use this ability a number of times equal to your proficiency bonus, and regain all uses of it when you finish a long rest.

There. All of ~22 minutes (much of which was "hmm, I should check against the official stuff to see what is explicitly okay.") A droida (singular and plural) is thus far more intellectual and knowledge-oriented, fitting closer to the idea of the machine pseudo-hive-mind constantly striving to improve itself (something like V'ger, but made up of many independent units that report back to the central creation-engine-mind.) They can actually be decent physical combatants as well, but their main focus is being really skilled and adaptable to changing circumstances.

Like I said, it's not just the name. I dont like the metal/stone/wood construction, which always felt to me to be an excuse for them to be mostly like other PCs. I prefer my robots to be robots, generally. I have several artificial races for 5e I use, but the visibility of warforged as the only official constructed race makes them the standard.

 

[JiffyPopTart]

So the compromise is to make them basically unplayable?

I'd be like me saying people can play gnomes, but since I hate them, all spells a gnome cast have full round (spell goes off on the next turn) casting time.

I am assuming they were just spitballing and if it happens IRL would come up with something fair and balanced....

But yes, if you let me begrudgingly play a warforged but only if mangled like that it would be worse than just hard limiting it to a NO.

I once came to a table with a GM that was the worst example of power trippy you are playing MY world I've ever played under. My character concept was "A woodsman guy with a giant axe" and no other expectations. He started me off in the campaign by giving me a really cool magic longsword he had come up with as my starting weapon.