Tips on role playing as a robot

[khorboth]

There could be a lot of variation.
Some good candidates are:

Low Empathy
Callous
Oblivious
High Pain threshold (advantage, I know)
Reprogrammable
Hidebound
Incurious
Cannot Speak
Cannot Learn
Very Clumsy (for really dumb ones)
Any restricted senses (colorblind, one eye, numb, etc.)
Combat Paralysis
Electrical
Unhealing
Maintenance
Restricted Diet
Social Stigma (Property)

Several of the templates on B263 provide some good ideas.

[Boomerang]

Thanks for the tip. I will make sure I check B263. I had forgotten about that stuff.

[Gedrin]

Originally Posted by khorboth

There could be a lot of variation.
Some good candidates are:

Low Empathy
Callous
Oblivious
High Pain threshold (advantage, I know)
Reprogrammable
Hidebound
Incurious
Cannot Speak
Cannot Learn
Very Clumsy (for really dumb ones)
Any restricted senses (colorblind, one eye, numb, etc.)
Combat Paralysis
Electrical
Unhealing
Maintenance
Restricted Diet
Social Stigma (Property)

Several of the templates on B263 provide some good ideas.

When I look at this list, and think about the Zones, I see a few missing Disads. Most of them are psychosis of some sort. A surprising percentage of the Zones have psychology we'd think of as defective. A variety of PTSD effects seem reasonable tool. Oblivious with occasional bouts of paranoid genocide.

These may just be afflictions that the Zones have, but I'm betting their less sophisticated lieutenants have similar issues. We always assume that machine people will have behavioral traits of machines, rather than people. I generally think that early AI will have mechanical abilities of machines built by people with 50 generations or more of experience building machines, and the mental stability of minds built by people with only a few generations of experience building minds.

[johndallman]

Try to avoid metaphors that rely on having a human body, or are based on human activities that robots don't do, like sports. Robots will know of these things, they need to if they're to use human languages properly, but such figures of speech won't be natural to them. They'll also tend to be sarcastic about humans' biological needs.

[starslayer]

As long as a robot is not being built to emulate human emotions there are some things that they just won't do:

1. Use sexually charged/body function language/swears; they may use near equivalent functions in certain circumstance (when a robot stubs there toe they might shout out 'defragment'; but more likely they would just upset about it).

2. Barring an eccentricity of AI that prevents them from altering there body (see Data) they will have no attachment to physical form; and thus have minimal concept of gender of physical attraction (This is not to say they are necessarily immune to social skills, or even skills like sex appeal- its just that it will be a mental/personality thing rather than a physical thing)

3. Again, due to the impermanence of there bodies while robots may feel pain in exactly the same way as humans- they would have minimal fear of it- parts can always be replaced, no injury is perpetual, and will not have lasting effects.

4. While extremely difficult to role play, a machine intelligence WOULD have an innate understanding of risk/reward and statistics- which means that even with only rudimentary intelligence an AI would behave in a downright brilliant manner with respect to long term planning and risk taking- but in some instantaneous situations even a brilliant AI would behave in what appears to be a dumb way without good knowledge of satistics (IE- there are three boxes, two will explode, and the last one contains a treasure- you enemies are coming; the frog on the rock starts explaining the riddle to get the correct box. Robot just grabs one box in each hand, knowing it has a 66% chance of being correct and can replace the lost arm later- if it looses both arms it can open the remaining box with its mouth and run off with the treasure)

[RogerBW]

Five-Three - ZAIXAU-08-NOU-53, whom you met in Chapter Three of Will to Live - is a Tarantula, designed to be able to understand and interact productively with humans (granted, mostly in the context of hunting and interrogation). It talks mostly in an entirely normal way, but occasionally pops up with something to remind the PCs of how alien it is; it puts absolutely no value on human life. ("But why don't we just kill everyone in the room? Then we'll know the traitor is dead.")

[Boomerang]

Five Three was an interesting character, surprisingly so. I liked reading the adventure logs. I think Stevie was by favourite character.

Edit: sorry meant Franks was my favourite, had a brain fade there, not even sure who Stevie is.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by johndallman

They'll also tend to be sarcastic about humans' biological needs.

This seems to be something that was popular in your THS group, if I recall correctly. But I don't get why.
Robots have flaws. Humans have flaws. Robots should probably have a matter-off-fact/utilitarian approach to tradeoffs and necessities: yes, the oil needs to be replaced at such-and-such an inconvenient frequency, but there were reasons why the design ended up the way it did; likewise, humans are built by a hard-to-micromanage process of evolution and bioduplication, which resulted in some flaws. Scarcastising about that seems like a pettily human thing to do.

[RogerBW]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

This seems to be something that was popular in your THS group, if I recall correctly. But I don't get why.
Robots have flaws. Humans have flaws. Robots should probably have a matter-off-fact/utilitarian approach to tradeoffs and necessities: yes, the oil needs to be replaced at such-and-such an inconvenient frequency, but there were reasons why the design ended up the way it did; likewise, humans are built by a hard-to-micromanage process of evolution and bioduplication, which resulted in some flaws. Scarcastising about that seems like a pettily human thing to do.

Some of this may have been the natural tendencies of the players (waves hand guiltily).

But actually it does make sense in TS, where there is such an easy alternative to hauling around all those bags of water and oxygen and other corrosive substances: just upload, get all the same experiences, live forever and travel much more cheaply, not to mention very much faster.

(Not interested in the philosophical arguments - this is a valid position to hold in the setting, though of course not the only one.)