WIki Showcase: ARC Robots

Last week I discussed robots in general.  Today, I have two new Wiki posts available for you.  One discusses robots in general (which I probably should have launched last week) and one detailing ARC robots.

I wanted to showcase both because just discussing robots would probably repeat a lot of last week's material. Instead, I wanted to discuss the "rubber-meets-the-road" reality of how I put last week's ideas into practice, and use ARC as an example.

ARC

For those who need a refresher, Psi-Wars has several corporations, and ARC is the Alliance Resource Cooperative, a company that manages all the various industrial assets of the noble houses of the Alliance, so as to maximize their utility.  This means that they primarily focus their attention on the needs and interests of the nobility.  We've gone through all of their vehicles, now we're looking at their robots.

I designed these robots with military utility in mind. "Military robots" immediately brings combat robots to mind, naturally, but robots can serve a lot of other purposes militarily, and to understand these, one must understand the primacy of the Space Knight in the Maradonian mindset, and thus the monomaniacal focus of ARC technology on the singular, elite warrior.  Thus, we have robots who:

• Fix and maintain the noble's ship (Hobnob)
• Tend to the injuries of the noble (Nightingale)
• Tend to the armor of the noble (Squire)
• Act as a bodyguard for the noble (Sentinel)

ARC lacks broad, generalist robots, and instead focuses on specific niches and does those well.  I've not yet discussed "civilian" or "law enforcement" or "espionage" robots, though naturally there's some crossover here, but that's to head off "What do you mean ARC doesn't have a protocol droid?" We'll tackle those in another cycle.

After settling on the basic ideas for what sorts of robots ARC had, I needed to decide what made them stand out as a cohesive whole, and how robots would function.

Building an ARC Robot

People will want to play robots, this much is true, but most people will play as humans or aliens and want their robots as allies or background hirelings.  They don't really care about robotic details. This realization drove a lot of my design.

In principle, I wanted to be able to offer GMs the opportunity to grab a chassis and a personality and know how the robot worked without knowing anything more than that.  For this, I created the personality packages.  They have specific skills and disadvantages as well as common disadvantages, but first and foremost, you have a sense as to how each one will play.  A "Gallant Hobnob" tells you everything you need to know to run one, and it clocks in immediately at 125 points, perfectly fitting into the ally slot.

But for those who want to know their robots in greater detail, whether because they're playing them or they want a lot of detail on their NPC, I've included additional information on what sort of common disadvantages and quirks such robots might have.  Going into detail about quirks might be overkill, but the idea behind it is to both help the PC build his character, and to give a larger sense of how the robot might behave and/or evolve over time.  I hope it begins to give you a sense of what an old and weird robot might look like, vs a factory fresh one.  They're not meant to be limiting (you can ignore the recommendations), rather, they're meant to inspire, especially if you get stuck.  They're a default mode of personality for the robot.

Next, I wanted to show how most nobles use their robots, as well as to give additional options to eat up your points for a PC robot, or a 100% point robot (or a 50% robot on a higher budget, such as 300 points).  I thought this was a great moment to remind players what the obsessions of the Alliance might be, such as realizing that other nobles might seek to undermine your robot to get at your secrets (Security Failsafe, Counter Surveillance), that nobles tend to be deeply concerned with marriage and breeding (Matchmaker), regularly deal with other psychics (psychotronic detector), need to keep a populace pacified (Silvertongue, Neurolash Stunner) and tend to be deeply concerned with the wealthy buyer and thus want to make him happy (Adaptive Countermanagement).

Taken together, and paired with some of the personality suggestions and common traits, we begin see the larger picture of an industrial base of robots biased towards their own technology and their own houses, who look down on the robots of other industrial bases the way their masters look down on everyone else, and who are dedicated to the advancement of their house (Hence why Sense of Duty (House) is resilient and Sense of Duty (Master) isn't).