Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="mearls" data-source="post: 2155862" data-attributes="member: 697">IME, warforged work out pretty well. I've played a warforged barbarian and had a warforged artificer in a campaign that went from 3rd to 10th level.Warforged do get lots of cool toys, but those abilities are passive in nature. A warforged fighter might be immune to poison gas, but the rest of the party still suffers its effects. A 1st-level warforged can get DR, but he does so at the cost of a feat. A non-warforged fighter, particularly a human or half-orc, has superior offensive abilities.The real key, I think, is that warforged make it a bit harder on the DM. There are a lot of story elements that you have to worry about if a warforged is in the game. For instance, water stops being an effective barrier - the warforged can just walk through it. I've been thinking about this issue a lot. I think there are a number of mechanics that make it harder for a DM to create a fun story, and that's something that gets overlooked in design.As I mentioned above, I didn't have any problems with the warforged as a DM. The artificer was more durable than the typical spellcaster, and since he didn't need to sleep he could spend a lot of time working on creating items. The Wisdom penalty turned out to be a big deal, owing to the malevolent AI that ended up infecting and controlling the warforged.As a player, it was fun soaking up poisoned attacks, or wading through water, or staying up all night to guard the rest of the party. OTOH, there were times when I wished I had an extra feat or two to help me in a fight. In particular, the build I was going for (barbarian wielding two component weapons, battlefist and the sword arm one) was a bit harder to make. A human or half-orc two-weapon fighting barbarian with the same build could dish out more damage and hit more often, but I think my character's superior AC and warforged abilities balanced that. Overall, I felt like it was a fair trade.</blockquote>

Verification