Why do you think warforged = robots?

[Umbran]

You have clearly been duped by the Technocracy. Iteration X laughs at your Sleeper foolishness. Although, perhaps not as much as everyone else laughs at Iteration X

Our Garou ate HIT Marks for breakfast. But honestly, our issues were more with Nephandi than the technocracy...

 

[Delta]

Acting like there's some major and obvious distinction between "robots" and "golems" is a pretty uniquely, geek-oriented argument to have.

Consider the origin of the word "robot", from Karel Čapek's 1921 stage play "R.U.R" (Rossum's Universal Robots)... the robots therein look just like people, and are created as artificial human servant replacements:

After having finished the manuscript, Čapek realized that he had created a modern version of the old Golem legend.

And that's the guy who invented the word "robot"!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.U.R.

 

[jdrakeh]

Maybe I'm just cynical, but I figure a fair percentage (though not all) of the people doing the "warforged=robots" stuff are using 'robot' as an easy pejorative term, just like the use of 'computer game' or 'anime' in "D&D is becoming too anime/much like a computer game".

I think that is an accurate assessment of the situation.

 

[Desdichado]

No, that would be an inanimate statue that became a human. Galatea was at no point a construct with some lifelike qualities--she went from '0' to '1' on the inanimate object vs living scale without stopping at any fractional point (let's say the Warforged are '.5' or whatever fraction you prefer).

Why would you say their .5? That makes absolutely no sense. Pinocchio is a better analogy of a character that's at .5. Yet nobody calls him a robot.

Claiming 'debunked' or 'proved' is a pretty strong claim--as far as I know (and I heard it from a PhD in history who has been teaching history for many years, so I tend to trust him over someone random on the internet) I don't think anyone has enough info to prove it one way or the other, so I am intrinsically sceptical of anyone who makes a hard claim like that. You may well be right, of course, but you're going to have to back it up with primary sources before I believe it.

Ahah! Appeal to random expertise! As a matter of fact, the theory was widely accepted (at least as an urban myth; I don't know if actual learned literati believed it very often) even though there was never a shred of evidence to really support it. It's lost credit for the most part in the literary community because nobody could find any evidence that really supported it.

However, instead of posting some half-remembered conversation with some expert vs. "some random guy on the internet" why don't you just look it up and form your own opinion? It's not like finding the arguments on both sides is hard to do.

 

[Desdichado]

Strangely enough, I do think that is a touch cynical, shil. 'Robot' is a just a far more common term/conceptualization. 'Robot' is the 'Xerox' of simulacra terms. Even to an audience of gamers who ought to up on all that old-time Golem of Prague lore and it's like.

On the other hand, I don't think it's cynical enough. In almost every case where I've seen robot applied to warforged, it's in a "OH NOEZ, THEY GOTS SUM SCI-FI INZ MY FATNASY!!!11" type of tirade.

I've also heard that shifters and changelings are the X-men, for what it's worth. That's why someone didn't like Eberron, because it was all robots and X-men. :\

 

[Puggins]

Hmm, a few comments:

(1) Warforged do not suffer from the "who am I?" quandry of data and other robots. They know who and what they are, but they don't know their place in society. Think less Data and more Jason Bourne

(2) Actually, I lied. Warforged don't really know what they are because, frankly, no one does. The backstory of the rediscovery of the Warforged is fairly murky, and what little we know is deeply sinister and somewhat disturbing. We know they were "manufactured" using Cannith Creation Forges, but even house Cannith doesn't know how Warforged gain sentience. We then find out where House Cannith got the original idea- they very likely discovered schema for creation of the warforged on the continent of Xen'Drik, the home of Giant civilization eons ago, laid low by armies of creatures from beyond space and time (Xoriat, the plane of madness- think of Lovecraft's Far Realms and you've got the idea). Then we find out why the schema were there- it turns out that the Lords of Xoriat, the Great Old On.... excuse me... the Daelkyr.... created the original Warforged to fight for them.

So you have creations of ancient and unfathomable evil being replicated today and being allowed to walk the land freely. It's really creepy and potentially brilliant stuff.

 

[Rystil Arden]

Why would you say their .5? That makes absolutely no sense. Pinocchio is a better analogy of a character that's at .5. Yet nobody calls him a robot.

Sure, that works for me. I picked .5 because it's my favourite fraction. I said in the parenthetical that you can pick your favourite fraction that works better for you.

Ahah! Appeal to random expertise! As a matter of fact, the theory was widely accepted (at least as an urban myth; I don't know if actual learned literati believed it very often) even though there was never a shred of evidence to really support it. It's lost credit for the most part in the literary community because nobody could find any evidence that really supported it.

However, instead of posting some half-remembered conversation with some expert vs. "some random guy on the internet" why don't you just look it up and form your own opinion? It's not like finding the arguments on both sides is hard to do.

Ah, but not quite--it would be an appeal to random expertise if I tried to use that as an argument for why someone else should think my idea is right, and it would be especially weak since no one else knows my expert, so it's just a random guy on the internet to them.

The actual case is a little bit subtler here because I'm not in a debate that anyone else should follow the POV I expressed, I'm just explaining why I personally trust my info more than 'random guy on the internet'. And since, conversely, I'm the 'random guy on the internet' to all you guys, I fully expect (and hope, actually!) that you won't just take the other side from me either

 

[GreatLemur]

So, out of curiosity, does the middle one meet the criteria of a "robot" or "android"?

The Tinman's a cyborg. It's the Scarecrow who's the full-on construct.

Why do I think warforged=robots? Because they are robots. Magic robots, to be precise.

Yeah, I completely agree with that. It doesn't seem quite accurate to say that a construct is only a robot if it runs on familiar technology.

That said, the central objection most folks seem to have for the warforged ("Something that weird shouldn't be common enough to be a PC race.") doesn't work for me at all. Unless there's some big news about 4e that I haven't heard, warforged were only ever presented as being part of one specific campaign setting. And the idea that new campaign settings should avoid straying from the bland, Tolkien-derived PC races we've been dragging around for decades is not something I can have any respect for.

And, frankly, I wouldn't mind if they did include warforged in the 4e PHB. They're more worth their page space than gnomes, and anyone who doesn't like 'em is free to houserule 'em out. Hell, I houseruled out everything but humans in my current campaign.

 

[Doug McCrae]

Robots don't have a place in fantasy*. But magic robots do.


*Well, in the strict sense of fantasy.

 

[Doug McCrae]

The Tinman's a cyborg.

He was a cyborg for a while. By the time Dorothy meets him he's all metal. He lost his limbs, then his head, and finally his body in separate incidents, and had them all replaced, if you go by the book.