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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mearls" data-source="post: 1429295" data-attributes="member: 697">Sure, no problem. It's a bit vague, and I didn't have time to fully explain last night/this morning.The guiding principle of 3e is that anything goes. If you want to play a wizard who fights with a sword, you can do that. You might suffer penalties, but it's possible. There's a lot of places where a designer has to step back and allow a DM or gamer to do whatever he wants, rather than what the designer wants.Under 2e, the opposite was true. Everything was strongly driven by what the designers wanted to happen. In the 2e PHB, there was a long section at the start of character creation that came out and said that anyone who liked high stats was a munchkin. "Good" players enjoyed having lots of 7's and 8's. I didn't like that tone at all back in 1989. My attitude was, I paid $20 for this book, I'm going to do whatever I want with it.The 2e settings had a similar approach. Most of the races had a limited niche. If you wanted a dwarf wizard, you just couldn't do it. Darksun had a massive plot that completely altered the world. The designers were very upfront about forcing their vision of a game on to the audience.So, what does this have to do with the warforged? I'm not saying that it goes as far as 2e, but I get a sense of it in the design. Here's what it boils down to:* Their natural armor isn't natural armor. Look at the picture on page 89 of Dragon 318. We see a warforged ranger wearing what looks like a chain shirt and a leather helmet. But, according to the rules, he can't do that. If you look at the picture on page 86, it doesn't really look like the warforged is wearing bulky armor or anything that would stop him from putting on a chainshirt or wizard's robes.There's also a question of consistency. If you look at the MM, there are monsters that are far more heavily armored that have natural AC bonuses, not armor ones. Compare the warforged to the gorgon, iron golem, and so on.I understand why they gave the warforged an armor rather than a natural AC bonus - the designers want you to take the warforged feats. IMO, that's not a strong enough reason to make that design decision. I'd rather leave that choice up to the player, not take it away from him.Furthermore, it leads to a bit of dissonance between Eberron as depicted in the art previews, and Eberron as depicted in the rules. It would be as if dwarves were always drawn as tall as humans, with long, slender legs, and then the rules said they had a 20 ft. speed because they were short and had stumpy legs.To me, that strikes me as 2e because we saw that all the time back then. Gandalf, the iconic wizard, runs around with a sword, but he couldn't do that in the game. It's one of those common sense things that the rules go directly against.There's also a question of balance - at low levels, an arcane caster warforged has a +2 bonus to AC at the cost of a 5% spell failure rate. At around 10th level, that AC bonus essentially becomes worthless. The creatures you fight have good enough attack bonuses that they're going to hit a warforged mage all the time. Nevermind that mage armor provides a better AC bonus without a drawback. Yet, the warforged caster is stuck with that penalty all the way through his career. OTOH, a character with a -2 starting penalty to his casting class's attribute can eventually overcome that  with magic items, stat improvements, or even a lucky roll at character creation.* The warforged's other abilities are all passive in nature. You get a ton of immunities to stuff that may or may not come up in the game. Light fortification is nice, but it isn't particularly exciting. You ignore 1 out of every 4 critical hits - that might come up once every 2 or 3 adventures. The other races receive more active benefits, stuff they can use to do cool stuff - the elf's proficiencies, dwarf's stonecunning, halfling's bonus to attacks and skill checks, gnome's spells, half-orc's Str bonus.* The warforged are essentially built around a selection  of feats that you need to take to make them viable. If you want to play a warforged fighter, you HAVE to take one of the armor feats to have a viable character. Again, that comes down to the designers dictating what you can do, rather than the other way around.So, that's why I see it as 2e. FWIW, my warforged get a natural bonus, they don't get most of the immunities or light fortification, and they suffer a divine caster failure chance. In return, they gain martial weapon proficiency, light armor proficiency, faster natural healing, player selected ability modifiers (you pick what gets a penalty, what gets a bonus), and choices from list of minor design benefits (combat spikes, concealed compartments, other stuff you might expect to see in a robot.)The divine caster failure chance is an artifact of my campaign - the warforged are seen as an abomination by the gods. There's a feat you can take to remove it. To get it in the game, a warforged must be submerged in holy (or unholy) molten metal and have religious symbols etched all over its body, purifying it and making it holy/unholy.I'm also toying with the idea of using a random table to determine a warforged's designer and creator, and introducing minor effects based on that. That's another foible of my plans for my next campaign - the players each roll on tables to see who their old masters, friends, and rivals were while they trained, and they gain minor bonuses and a reputation based on that.</blockquote>

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