[Ultra-Tech] How to decide what tech to allow?

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

And by complexity you mean the transhumanism, or what? You can have just about any tech without necessarily turning everyone into infomorphs.
.

If you've got good robots, there's no reason to use people for anything in space. And the only reason to use people for anything dangerous on the ground is that you live in some nightmarish dystopia where people are regarded as disposable because they present less of a capital investment.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

If you've got good robots, there's no reason to use people for anything in space. And the only reason to use people for anything dangerous on the ground is that you live in some nightmarish dystopia where people are regarded as disposable because they present less of a capital investment.

If you define "good robots" as "functionally at least as good as humans in all respects but at the same time not people"...yes, I suppose that would fall within the set of tech that you can't have without either impinging on PC adventure space or structuring your setting so that it doesn't fully exploit its potential.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

If you define "good robots" as "functionally at least as good as humans in all respects but at the same time not people".

For most application you don't need 'as good as humans' to displace humans, you need communications ability, not-horrible DX, and not too expensive (bearing in mind that the actuarial cost of a human life is around $10M).

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Anthony

For most application you don't need 'as good as humans' to displace humans, you need communications ability, not-horrible DX, and not too expensive (bearing in mind that the actuarial cost of a human life is around $10M).

You probably do need "as good as humans" to replace them in every dangerous job (as David Johnston2 suggested). Police officers come to mind as something you'd likely need a human-level replacement for, as is probably anything where rapidly and accurately making your way through a complex situation's OODA loop is crucial to success. Then again, you did say "most applications."

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Anthony

For most application you don't need 'as good as humans' to displace humans, you need communications ability, not-horrible DX, and not too expensive (bearing in mind that the actuarial cost of a human life is around $10M).

Robots that only displace the humans back to effective teleoperation distance won't take the humans out of space, at a minimum because of communications lag.

In space the robot or robots that can do everything a human could also needs to compare reasonably well to the mass of the human plus life support and equipment.


Groundside, many 'adventuring' activities may be hindered by teleoperation signals, or by your field agent being obviously a robot. (Though certainly there are plenty of things that you could do as well or better with remote robots.)

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Robots that only displace the humans back to effective teleoperation distance won't take the humans out of space, at a minimum because of communications lag.

<looks at mars rovers>
I wasn't talking about teleoperation, I was talking about decision-making. Not-horrible DX implies the ability to maneuver on its own.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Anthony

<looks at mars rovers>
.

The farther along you get in your robotic explorations the more capability you need.

The mission of the first rover was to roll up to a rock and touch it with a sensor. It averaged about a rock per day. An astronaut could have done in a single day what took the rover weeks or months.

We could send that very simple rover when we couldn't send a man and it did very good work but every rover since then had to be bigger and smarter than the one before. There's no guarantee that you won't reach a point where sending humans won't make more sense.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Anthony

<looks at mars rovers>
I wasn't talking about teleoperation, I was talking about decision-making. Not-horrible DX implies the ability to maneuver on its own.

It doesn't imply any ability to decide what maneuver to undertake.

Rovers (and probes) do good science, but what they can do is extremely constrained not only by the mechanical limitations of the robotics, but by the fact that all their judgement is sourced from several minutes away. (And may have less bandwidth than they'd like too.)

[Inky]

If it's only teleoperation rather than robots intelligent enough to do the work by themselves, that doesn't necessarily mean no adventure. You could play a crew of humans on the spaceship or at ground control remotely piloting the robots that are doing the work in the dangerous place (doing the thing properly VR-style, not piloting them by pressing buttons on a console), so in effect you're playing the robots. It would mean an adventure with no PC death, the possible consequences are limited to "your mission has failed and you're in trouble for writing off the expensive robot" - but sometimes you want a cartoony mission where nobody's going to die. It would also be a good excuse to play weirdly shaped things, three inches long, helicopter blades, six legs, whatever.

[weby]

Yes, technology assumptions play a large role in how a scifi setting feels and thus they are a critical part of designing such.

Of course what you want to make the setting feel like I have found it good to note at least most below to make it a gameable setting:
* Do not let tech overshadow player character abilities.
->thus in my current setting AIs are forbidden because of past problems with such, thus people need to at minimum do all the decisions, all science and are superior in combat to automatons.
* Have a tech growth path. Like in a traditional fantasy game the players will get more and more powerful magic items, it is fun for them to get more and more powerful tech. Thus planning the progression path is good to do before the campaign as to not give out too powerful tech to start with.
->Thus in my current campaign the characters started at a lower than average tech planet in the setting.
*Think of the implications of all fields of very advanced tech you introduce. Things to specially think about are fields like:
* Healing: Too much and damage becomes meaningless, too little and any damage is too annoying.
->Thus in my current settung there are super tech healing things, but they are of limited avalability so players have to hoard them and conserbe them.
* Travel: Both local and long distance. In general actual travel can be nice if it presewnts some challenges, so making there to be some travel time instead of very fast travel is generally better. Also there should be preferably large areas where travel is for some reason very hard or dangerous, so you can send the players to such areas to make it a specific challenge.
-> thus in my current setting space travel is (mostly) very slow and many of the planets do not have much infrastructure for planetary transportation.
* communication/information. Having something like Google avaible and full cell phone coverage to experts migth cause player abilities to be less meningful as they can ask the computer/an expert instead of using own skills.
->thus in my setting computer nets are more segmented and global commucations is not a normal thing on most planets.
* Weapons and defenses. How to avoid killing players instantly if theor armor is penetrated and to not have impenetrable armor. In general that is best done as weapons doing less damage but have high penetration multiples.
-> Thus in my setting things like firearms with hyperdense ammo, grav guns and similar weapons are the normal weapons in use.

And so on. You do not have to come to the same conclusions as I do, but should preferably think about the issues at least.