Warforged
by Prince Phantom
Do you want to play as a robot? Because this is how you play as a robot. For some of you, you are already sold and I don’t need to say anything more. For others, you’ve already decided that any science in your fantasy world is too much science, even though the Warforged are specifically stated to be created and animated by magic, not electricity. For the rest of you who actually want to learn about the mechanics (get it?) of the race, keep reading.
Warforged Features
Age: I don’t normally make mention of how long a race can live, but Warforged are theoretically immortal, and can’t be effected by magical aging. That last part might come up exactly once during a campaign, but it’s not likely to matter much.
Constructed Resilience: Okay, this is a whole bunch of features wrapped up into one. Let’s go over them individually.
We get the standard poison resistance and advantage against the poisoned condition that many races get, and I’m always happy to have it.
Not needing to eat or drink will only come up in the most dedicated of survival games, but if your DM rules that you can’t eat, that’s actually a big downside, as you can’t benefit from the Goodberry spell. Not needing to breathe is actually pretty great, and can come up quite a lot.
Immunity to disease will probably never come up, but if it does and your DM remembers that diseases exist, you’ll be happy to have this.
Not needing to sleep is a bit misleading, as we have a feature that replaces sleeping, and immunity to magical sleep doesn’t come up hardly ever.
Sentry’s Rest: This is the feature that replaces sleep for us, and is similar to the Elf’s Trance feature. This makes us the party’s default night watch, so investing in a good Perception is recommended. This does not reduce the length of a long rest for us, it just allows us to stay alert during it. This means we can’t take advantage of extra time during the day like an Elf can, but it also means that when combined with our lack of a need to sleep, we suffer no exhaustion from skipping a long rest. This won’t come up as a benefit very often, as the same won’t be true for the rest of your party, but if you find yourself not needing the benefits of a long rest when your party decides to take one, you can stay up and work on scribing scrolls, crafting magic items, casting long casting time spells, or any number of other tasks. It also basically adds 8 extra hours to downtime days, seriously increasing your productivity during downtime. You’ll have to get creative to make the most use out of this, but there are big rewards in store for you if you do.
Specialized Design: One skill and tool proficiency of our choice isn’t a lot, but I’ll take it. This is a great place to pick up Perception to help with our night watch, and thieves tools are a good choice if your party lacks someone with that proficiency.
Integrated Protection: This is another bundle of features wrapped up into one, so let’s go over them individually again.
+1 AC from our race is almost unheard of, and is honestly reason enough by itself to select the Warforged. The only other race that can provide this is the Beasthide Shifter, and only while they are shifted. This is always on, no matter our build or class. I absolutely love this.
It takes us an hour to don and doff armor, but that’s not much of a downside considering the strange nature of how we take a long rest. Sleeping in armor has some major disadvantages, but we don’t sleep, meaning we can live in our armor forever with no downsides. That makes this more of a flavor thing to explain how Warforged wear armor in the first place.
Armor isn’t forcibly removed from characters very often, so this won’t come up frequently. Still nice to have I suppose.
The Warforged is absolutely packed with features, and there’s a lot to love here. This has an argument for being the best race for defense in the game, so if that’s what you’re looking for then I can’t recommend this enough. Spellcasters will be able to make better use of the extra downtime provided, so this race is definitely better for those with magic. Still, you’d struggle to find a build that wouldn’t love to be a Warforged, making them a personal favorite race of mine.
Final Rating: 5/5
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