[Robots] 4e Conversion

[Jachra]

GURPS Robots 4e Conversion
A friend of mine and I took some time to do a conversion of Robots. I was hopeful to do some stuff for vehicles as well, but he kind of gave me a frosty glare and I backed off.

We designed this as a replacement for the rules for building robots by character points found in Ultra Tech.

[Schilcote]

A wise man once said, "it is better to ask forgiveness than permission." Well, maybe not so wise.

But I don't see why anyone would have a problem with asking for comments on it, as long as you're not just posting it for its own sake.

[Jachra]

Yeah, looking for comments on it.

[The_Ryujin]

While I'm gonna need a bit to fully go over everything and let it settle in my brain meats I got to say that so for it's looking pretty good. Outside of a few typos (such as as having "A smart tool" written twice under dedicated AI) abut the only thing off I've seen so far is that your sheet is still using 3rd editions way of handling ST and HP.

For ST, 3rd treated it as liner, that is a ST 20 was twice as strong as a ST 10 but in 4th ST is quadratic which means that a ST of 20 is now four(!) times as strong as ST 10. This means that weight, cost and power would scale with the square of your robots ST.

Maybe refigure the chart so weight and what not is per pound of basic lift instead, ST would then be calculated as the square root of basic lift * 5.

Also while a machines HP was based on surface area in 3rd, HP for all things in 4th is figured by the cube root of the objects weight in pounds (at 1G) time a factor based on how structurally sound the object is, a 2 if it's soft and squishy like us, 4 if it's a complex machine or a mostly hollow tube or box of something hard like metal or wood and times 8 if it's just a solid lump of matter. Course this tends to short change machines somewhat since in all reality you have more options on how much you can reinforce one.

One way to handle this would be to take the robots unloaded weight, multiply it's weight by the frame strength modifier you want (that is times 0,25 if ultra light, 0.5 if light and so on) then take the cube root of that and multiply it by 2 if it's a flimsy robot (made out of softer plastics and the like) or 4 if it's made out of more impact resistant stuff.

Alright, that's all I got for now but I gotta say that I like the idea behind this; since it's gonna be god knows when till we get the 4th edition version of Vehicles we might as well make use of what we have for now.

[Jachra]

Made the fix, rather quickly. Arm ST is now squared before you multiply the cost, and HP is now based off the robot's Empty Weight.

If anyone has an idea for how to expand these into Vehicle Rules, I'd love to lend a hand.

[apoc527]

I'll also point out, while saying "amazing job, this might be a great quick fix for a THS cybershell design system" that you left a 1/2 point skill on the Skills chart. There are no 1/2 point skills in 4E.