Quote from: MGuy;581312More like thinking golem. There's no reason I can think of that people would balk at a golem character you can play as without being OP but not balk at the existence of other golems or even inevitables.

Well, it's different tastes for everyone, certainly, but then, I've never been a fan of the modern broadly-defined Golem, preffering my golems to actually be souless creatures sculpted out of clay animated by a secret name of god inscribed on their foreheads, rather than the "fantasy cyborgs/frankensteins" they've become in recent years.

But for me, personally, it's akin to running a game of Warhammer Fantasy and a player wanting to play a Warrior of Chaos, or running a superhero game and someone wanting to play ...I dunno, Venom, spouting some excuse like "he's an anti-hero!", which I've never understood as an excuse for a character who is supposed to be playing a hero. It's just all twinky to me.

Quote from: TristramEvans;581325Well, it's different tastes for everyone, certainly, but then, I've never been a fan of the modern broadly-defined Golem, preffering my golems to actually be souless creatures sculpted out of clay animated by a secret name of god inscribed on their foreheads, rather than the "fantasy cyborgs/frankensteins" they've become in recent years.

But for me, personally, it's akin to running a game of Warhammer Fantasy and a player wanting to play a Warrior of Chaos, or running a superhero game and someone wanting to play ...I dunno, Venom, spouting some excuse like "he's an anti-hero!", which I've never understood as an excuse for a character who is supposed to be playing a hero. It's just all twinky to me.

That's an odd definition of "twinky" you're speaking about. However people do indeed have their tastes. I believe that as far as Eberron is concerned people aren't sure whether Warforged have souls or not and personally I don't really find them any more harmful to the fantasy setting than any other golem existing at all.

The big, non-PC warforged are basically golems or automatons and if you like those things - I do - then they're pretty much ok. The PC race is stupid because, why would you go through the extraordinary expense and arcana of making a surrogate soldier when, once you've finally crafted it, it still loses when outnumbered 2 to 1 or so by cheapass town levies, or the cheapass skeletons the one nation uses, or hell, large, trained, cheapass dogs? Whatever nation came up with the bright idea to put their military resources into warforged ought to have been stomped off the continent. And it wouldn't even be a conceptual problem except you need little dinky warforged guys for the players who want to be robots! You could just have the big battlefield horrors sitting around here and there powering water pumps in peacetime or berserking across the countryside or whatever.

Quote from: TristramEvans;581325Well, it's different tastes for everyone, certainly, but then, I've never been a fan of the modern broadly-defined Golem, preffering my golems to actually be souless creatures sculpted out of clay animated by a secret name of god inscribed on their foreheads, rather than the "fantasy cyborgs/frankensteins" they've become in recent years.

You can't beat the belated look of surprise on a high level priest's face as he tries to turn an inbound flesh golem though.

If it fits the setting, I am cool with stuff like warforged. I ran two seperate home brew settings for 3E. One of them had a place for warforged characters, the other really didn't. They fit in just fine in the former but were not allowed in the later.

My issue is, if you are going to play a warforged, that is fine, but play a warforged. Don't forget that you are playing something very different from a human or an elf.

Quote from: Imp;581382The big, non-PC warforged are basically golems or automatons and if you like those things - I do - then they're pretty much ok. The PC race is stupid because, why would you go through the extraordinary expense and arcana of making a surrogate soldier when, once you've finally crafted it, it still loses when outnumbered 2 to 1 or so by cheapass town levies, or the cheapass skeletons the one nation uses, or hell, large, trained, cheapass dogs? Whatever nation came up with the bright idea to put their military resources into warforged ought to have been stomped off the continent. And it wouldn't even be a conceptual problem except you need little dinky warforged guys for the players who want to be robots! You could just have the big battlefield horrors sitting around here and there powering water pumps in peacetime or berserking across the countryside or whatever.

There's a free rpg I saw somewhere which had what were basically warforged, but with the explanation that they were machine bodies used as receptacles for the souls of warriors who were dying, which I thought was interesting.

Unrelatedly, in the same way, 3.x got away with dragonboobs OK, IMHO since dragonborn were normal humans or demihumans that had gone through some sort of dodgy ritual, and still kept some of the features of their original race.

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;581399There's a free rpg I saw somewhere which had what were basically warforged, but with the explanation that they were machine bodies used as receptacles for the souls of warriors who were dying, which I thought was interesting.

That's similar to Warhammer 40k - the space marines have Dreadnoughts - giant mechs piloted by the broken body of a near-dead Space Marine hero.  

Warforged certainly don't make sense for every setting - I wouldn't want to see them walking through Middle Earth, for instance.  But they're integral to the Eberron setting, so if you like Eberron, but you don't like Warforged, you're doing it wrong.    

They're very different from other races, but I think that was really effective in making Eberron 'feel' different from other settings.  More dramatic than cannibalistic halflings in Dark Sun, for instance.