Can a Warforged suffer from magical exhaustion?
The Warforged Resilience trait (WGtE, p. 68) states:
You were created to have remarkable fortitude, represented by the following benefits.
- You have advantage on saving throws against being poisoned, and you
have resistance to poison damage.- You are immune to disease.
- You don’t need to eat, drink, or breathe.
- You don’t need to sleep and don’t suffer the effects of exhaustion
due to lack of rest, and magic can’t put you to sleep.
Is the Warforged just immune to exhaustion due to not taking a long rest? Or can magic cause it to receive levels of exhaustion, even though it cannot put it to sleep?
Best Answer
They can suffer exhaustion, just not due to lack of rest.
"Exhaustion due to lack of rest" is carefully qualified. There are creatures that are immune to "exhaustion" (such as the Ghost). This is different. Lack of rest is just one of many ways to become exhausted; there's also starvation (though Warforged are immune to that too), exposure to extreme weather, forced marching, etc. Magic that directly inflicts exhaustion is separate from any of those.
(Forced marching is a gray area, in that it's caused by traveling for more than 8 hours in a day. At a normal travel pace, you travel 8 hours and then stop and rest, so the cause of your exhaustion is that you're continuing to walk instead of resting. Is that "exhaustion due to lack of rest"? I'd likely rule that it is, just because marching hundreds of miles without stopping seems like exactly the kind of thing Warforged should be good at.)
The protection from being magically forced to sleep is mechanically separate but conceptually related. What this paragraph is telling us is that Warforged physiology doesn't include a need for sleep. This means they don't suffer harm from not sleeping, but it also means that magic that reaches into people and hotwires the "time to sleep now" circuit will be ineffective, because they don't have that circuit.