Why do you think warforged = robots?

[Rystil Arden]

They're constructs, with the "living construct" subtype. And healing is a hassle.

They never heal naturally. (Which doesn't sound like a big deal, with all the various spells, but it can be.)

They gain half benefit from cure spells.

They gain full benefit from repair spells (basically arcane cure spells for constructs, and constructs only).

Well, they don't heal naturally, but they can just fix themselves quite easily during the time they spend not sleeping while the rest of the party must sleep, at least if they have taken a Craft skill.

 

[Ghendar]

To me Warforged have always been more like androids than robots.

 

[jdrakeh]

Nope. For me, Warforged = Sentient Golems. And, yeah, it's funny that nobody ever screamed about Frankenstein's Monster (or the various D&D creatures based on him) being a robot, as they only differ from Warforged in purely cosemetic ways. Odd.

 

[Rystil Arden]

Nope. For me, Warforged = Sentient Golems. And, yeah, it's funny that nobody ever screamed about Frankenstein's Monster (or the various D&D creatures based on him) being a robot, as they only differ from Warforged in purely cosemetic ways. Odd.

I could make a character who is a humanoid that perfected herself and detached herself from her own mortality in such a way to become immune to many effects that work on others, gaining eternal youth and the ability to be restored by arcane magic at the price that since she detached herself from her mortality, healing spells only worked half as well. Also, she doesn't heal naturally but can meditate on the way the universe was crafted, using the craft skill, to recover. It would be mechanically identical to Warforged but have different cosmetics and flavour. One would be much more like a robot than the other.

In other words--of course an analogy to robots depends on cosmetics!

 

[Delta]

Constructs have been around, in some form or fashion, since Basic D&D. I never heard anybody calling golems "robots."

OD&D Book 2, p. 22, under "OTHER MONSTERS":

Robots, Golems, Androids: Self-explanatory monsters which are totally subjective as far as characteristics are concerned.

 

[Drowbane]

Nope. For me, Warforged = Sentient Golems. And, yeah, it's funny that nobody ever screamed about Frankenstein's Monster (or the various D&D creatures based on him) being a robot, as they only differ from Warforged in purely cosemetic ways. Odd.

QFT

 

[Mark Hope]

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

I played some Eberron and they seemed to fit right in - worked well in the setting. Where I really thought that they would work well would be in a Spelljammer game, actually. Fits the fantasy/sf mix and they would do really well in airless environments. I had visions of squadrons of warforged hurling themselves from ship to ship, like the clone troopers do in the Clone Wars cartoon. A whole "machine empire" with golems, warforged, steamjacks and those ironborn things from Monte Cook's Book of Iron Might. I could quite dig that.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I happen to actually like Warforged, but I didn't like them initially. I think part of the Robot analogy comes from much of the source material that describes them 'searching for their place in society', or 'understanding life', in a rather Star Trek Data way. They were also described as being sorta mass produced to be the warriors in armies...

... with these aspects as part of the cannon literature, I can see why many see them as ROBOTS.

That just makes me think more of those folks need to read Shelley's Frankenstein, though.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, best bet it is a duck.

Warforged are constructed beings, generally of humanoid form, able to do all the stuff you expect a humanoid to be able to do. An "android" is a mechanism designed to emulate a human in looks in behavior. Seems a good fit to me. The only difference is the 'technology" that allows them to operate. The end result is the same.

So the terra cotta soldiers found in Chinese tombs are robots? That seems a rather extreme reductionism.

Not liking warforged is fine, and is obviously a matter of taste, but living constructs go back to Greek myth and Galatea and Pygmallion.

 

[James Heard]

I don't think about it:

Just like I don't think about all the reasons why a several tons heavy black dragon can't fly or why it's hanging out in swamps where it can get stuck in the muck, or where elves poop while they're living in trees, or what the world smells like to halflings stuck in fartspace lurking around smelly "I live on Iron Rations" adventurers all the time.

It's all just stuff easily glazed over because the interesting bits are "how can this be?" but playing the game and just accepting that a lot of things don't need a lot of scrutiny.