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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 3247945" data-attributes="member: 2067">Your reduction doesn't hold. I can have a breadth of challenges face the characters, and if that breadth just happens to include a plurality of a certain kind of encounter (e.g.: has a theme), the warforged will seem too powerful, and the player won't experience the same adventure as the rest of the people at the table.Fer'instance, one of my first 3e campaigns was going for a Columbian-age-Americas feel, with the PC's being emissaries of a vast imperial monarchy, searching for the city of gold, etc., etc. Thematically, warforged would work okay -- they're pretty much a walking, talking industrial complex, and this makes the whole "civilization vs. savegry" motif really evident. Researching the era and the mythos, you come accross countless talks of the "green hell" of the mesoamerican (and south american) jungles. Disease is big (I adopted the Nyambe rules which give diseases an SR to make them bigger). Poisonous vermin are big (giant spiders and scorpions fit well, and checking your boots for the smaller cousins is like checking for traps in a dungeon). Poisons in general are pretty big (stereotypical angry natives with venomous blowguns). Psychotropic drugs are big (drink some tobacco, wig out, reach transcendance). Water is omnipresent (rivers, estuaries, swamps, and constant, constant rain), making aquatic challenges (like monstrous crocs or sea hags) a constant part of the environment. Undead don't have much of a hold, but mummies (with mummy rot) and lycanthropes (with...uhm...lycanthropy) are very popular. Sewage systems exist, and are ripe for the lairing of monstrosities. Bugs are big -- mosuitos and spiders especially. All in all, it's a great typical jungle campaign. Something you might even find somewhere on Xen'drik!For any of the races from the Core and the ECS, except the warforged, this is an ideal environment for adventure. Face challenges, overcome them, and win great treasure and fame. The warforged, however, are outright immune to most of what makes this campaign different and special -- the rampant disease, the infestation of creepy crawlies that can kill you if you're not observant, the experience of drugs (drugs being a kind of poison), the threat of floods or the risk of falling into the water and being eaten all up, disappearing into the muck ('cuz no giant alligator eats up a construct, it's got no food on it!), catching a disease from an errant mosuito and having to seek out native remedies in a hostile environment...they waltz through the campaign with none of this, and that's kind of a shame. After all, jungle adventures are *fun*! It's sad that the warforged character's "jungle experience" doesn't really differ from any other experience except that his friends and companions are getting sick.It's not that they'll be totally immune to every challenge, it's that they'll have a significant advantage that will remove some of the core threats from the campaign. I don't need EVERY challenge to be a poisonous spider to have the warforged be fairly unwelcome. Just as part of the fun of dungeon delving is the possibility of traps, part of the fun of jungle-delving is the possibility of a hungry croc in the water or a scorpion hiding in your shoe. It's part of the theme, part of the motif...and this makes warforged miss out on some of the *point* of having the adventure in the jungle, rather than in Merry Olde Greyhawk City again. First off, don't assume that people are bad GM's just because they think the warforged are problematic. That way lies petty bickering and further madness. You can have a diversity of threats and still have the warforged be very problematic.The big bugs can't poison him, the pigmys can't hunt him (especially not with their poisoned darts), the monsters don't want to eat him, and the cultists can't invade his dreams and give him nightmares or spread a cursed plague upon him. If he can't die from mummy rot, how's the encounter with the mummy any different from the encounter with the guy dressed up in a halloween costume who just happens to get to his friends first? He's constantly a special case, and his weirdness, according to WotC's own rules, would seem to warrant a +1 ECL, just like any creature without opposable thumbs or who cannot speak or heal (note that's not what I actually advise doing, that's just pointing out yet another situation where they're a special case). There's a few issues with this argument, from what I can see. #1 is the suggestion that a warforged without full construct abilities at ECL +0 makes them "crappy." I'd just have to respond with "no, it doesn't." Obviously full construct immunities are way too powerful for ECL +0, so they have to take a hit. That's like saying that dwarves are crappy because they get a +4 bonus to AC vs. giants rather than a +8. It's still a big bonus. Heh, come to think of it, do you think it would be unbalanced to make dwarves immune to attacks from giants? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />#2 is related: you can't judge the warforged based on what they DO NOT have that other constructs DO. That's only gonna reveal how balanced they are in comparison to other constructs, things which aren't PC races. To judge the warforged as a PC race, you have to compare it with other PC races. The only one that gets immunity at all is the elf, and it gets immunity to sleep. A single first-level spell effect that appears in...how many enemy stat blocks? Compared to poison? Level drain? Clearly, the WF has more powerful immunities than the elf. I agree, it's not really an ECL issue (laying aside WotC's own rules on the thing). It's an issue of the specific binary nature of the warforged -- namely, the immunities. It would be similar if we said, that, for instance, dwarves were immune to spells (rather than gaining a +2 bonus), or attacks from giants (rather than gaining +4 AC), or that halflings were invisible (rather than giving them massive stacking Hide bonuses). In all cases, there are still challenges they can contribute to -- dwarves can still be wacked with a stick (even a magically treated stick!), or can still be attacked by anything OTHER than giants. Halflings can still be heard, smelled, and felt (and there's low-level magic and mundane techniques a plenty that disrupt invisibility).It doesn't need to be "such a great solitary focus" for it to be a problem. If halflings were invisible, it would be a constant problem, and while it would be great for some campaigns (such as a spy-oriented thriller-style campaign!) it would outright suck for other campaigns (such as...well...most others. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />). If dwarves were immune to giants attacking, it would be a nice little bone to throw them in some campaigns (where giants are not a regular threat),  but it would be way, way too powerful in others (where the ancient giant kingdom is acquiring dominance over the little folk!).There's plenty of threats a jungle can hurl at an adventuring party, but a warforged is immune to a lot of the threats that make the jungle itself a special challenge. They don't have to be immune to ALL of them to make them ill-suited. Again, to re-phrase it, I'm not saying it's impossible (or even particularly difficult) to challenge a warforged in the jungle. I'm saying that their immunities mean that they make poor PC's in jungle-focused campaigns. This is because their immunities make them immune to many of the challenges of the jungle itself, meaning the player misses out on the fun of overcoming them (which ends up making threats look the same after a while), and because in being immune, the character may overshadow those who must constantly struggle against these forces.Could you have Warforged and have fun in a jungle exploration campaign? Sure, probably. Just like you can play Farty McCrablegs in a grim n' gritty survival game and have fun. But I'd  say in both cases, the characters are very poor PC's because of the obvious conflict of intentions.</blockquote>

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