Droids

Game Mechanics

A droid fresh off the assembly line (or fresh from a memory wipe) has no fate points and does not receive refreshes; it may have a few preprogrammed aspects, but it can only spend fate points that it has received from someone else, or those that it earns from compels. As they accumulate non-preprogrammed aspects, they begin to get fate point refreshes; a droid may receive no more refreshes on preprogrammed aspects than they have on acquired aspects. Once droid has as many customized aspects as it does preprogrammed ones, gets full refresh like any other character; if it has person-level sentience, it is fully conscious.

If an organic is in competition or conflict with a droid that is less than fully conscious, they can assess them as such (trivially if they can see them, or using the skill in which they’re competing if you can’t eyeball it) and then get a free tag for being an organic dealing with the predictability of a machine.

Droids are immune to purely organic threats like war gas, vacuum, poison, disease, noncorrosive atmospheres, telepathy, empathy, and all applications of the Mind skill. They need about one hour charging for every 30 hours in operation; this is sufficient for any droid of tool-user or lower sentience, but smarter ones start needing more mental “down time” to correlate mental contents, perform garbage collection, and other maintenance tasks that many people compare to organic sleep. They have a single stress track— the dumber ones are just immune to social attacks and the smarter ones can scramble their circuits with them— and take full ion damage.

Droids are normally bought as companions or minions. You can buy them with Resources, in which case they’re expendable. If you buy them with stunts, they have a degree of plot protection.

Droid skills are not always as broad as organic skills; a medical droid’s Scholarship is unlikely to carry any information that isn’t relevant to its role, while an organic with Scholarship can be assumed to be well-read. This limit is lifted for droids who have been fully conscious long enough to pick up the details their original programming left out.

A basic droid’s sentience is at the “tool-user” level; they may be able to communicate in an organic language, but they don’t understand that much. This is sufficient for basic labor.

A skilled droid is usually “self-aware”; they can talk fluently about their area of expertise, but they just change the subject or demur if you try to discuss other matters with them. The typical medical droid has its advance in Stunt, taking Expert (medicine), Fair (2) Science and Average (1) Technician, with their effective skill as a doctor being Great (4).

An advanced droid usually has “person” level sentience. Competent protocol droids are usually advanced.

An elite droid almost always has “person” level sentience.

A droid purchased with a stunt gets four advances; each additional stunt gives three more advances. Some typical combinations for one stunt worth of droid:

• Great quality. 4 aspects; 1 Great, 1 Good, 1 Fair, and 1 Average skill; 4 stress boxes.
• Good quality with one stunt. 3 aspects; 1 Good, 1 Fair, and 1 Average skill; 3 stress; one stunt. This is the standard package for a technical droid: Good Science, Fair Technician, Expert stunt pushing the Science up to Superb in one area of focus, the Science complementing the Technician up to Superb as well, and Average Athletics (with programming to always go on full defensive).
• Good quality, skilled. 3 aspects; 2 Good, 2 Fair, and 2 Average skills; 3 stress.

You do not need to pay extra for droids to have built-in equipment appropriate to their skills; a medical droid with effective Great (4) medical skill already has vibroscalpels, laser cauterizers, bandage dispensers, spray hypo, arthroscopic probes, nerve stimulators, injectors, biopsy samplers, medisensor suite, and all the other gear you would expect in a medkit.

On a droid, minor consequences can be fixed in the field in a few minutes; moderate consequences take an afternoon in the workshop; severe consequences require a few days or even a couple of weeks of rehabilitation work (either engineering work in the workshop, or programming work after swapping the droid brain into a new chassis). Extreme consequences generally occur only when something seriously rearranged the droid’s personality matrix.

A few terms: matrix stutter occurs when the droid’s processor has started looping unproductively; the droid can still function, but their motions and speech become jerky as they have less of a timeslice for dealing with the real world. When a droid is nearly paralyzed with internal processing conflicts, the technical term is brainlock, but the vernacular is that they’re kurked— supposedly named after a famous scoundrel who could talk droids into brainlock, but close enough to kark, a vulgar term for sexual copulation performed with mismatched orifices, that it is quite popular among droid programmers. Matrix stutter can usually be fixed with a hard reboot, but brainlock requires either professional debugging or a memory flush. If looping causes a particular path in the droid’s processing matrix to overheat, it can burn out the path and lead to matrix burn, which usually requires extensive rehabilitation programming to keep the droid’s functionality; it’s usually cheaper just to get a new processor.

Technology

Machine consciousness turns out to be a tricky thing. It requires multiple different processing centers talking to each other and refining their solutions to real-world problems using adaptive techniques like evolutionary algorithms and hierarchical temporal memory (2 3); embodiment turns out to be a prerequisite for strong artificial intelligence. Computers that lack bodies do not develop the problem-solving abilities of droids; placing them in simulated environments adapts them to the simulated environment, but eventually leads to subtle errors in their modeling of external reality. A droid brain placed in a chassis that has only limited ability to manipulate its environment (such as a starship or tank) can run the chassis’ systems well, but will very rarely develop a personality.

Further, the components of a droid’s heuristic processing matrix cannot be made so perfectly that any two are exactly alike, so copying one droid’s personality and skills to another droid’s body tends to lead to problems with evolved code that doesn’t match the underlying hardware; even replacing a data cable can cause subtle degradation of performance. (The circuits are mostly fabricated from carbon nanotubes, with sources of quantum noise for randomness and diamond-based spintronics for quantum computation. Some droid subprocessors that need excessive speed use optical computing, but these are usually found only in expensive droid intelligences.) A droid can be restored from backup (though the smarter ones will require some to recalibrate their quantum logic matrices if those were completely reset), but cannot be cloned. (Cloning a droid usually results in some loss of abilities and memory, and a change in personality.) A droid that has had a processing component replaced because it was damaged usually requires recovery time just like a human being with nerve damage.

Adding extra processing components to a functioning droid can upgrade their capabilities if they successfully integrate the new hardware into their consciousness, or drive it insane if they don’t. A competent droid programmer can affect the chances of this, and even swap modules in and out if they’re really good. A droid needs time practicing its new skills as part of the integration process.

The occasional sentient computer is the result of uploading a consciousness that was “seeded” in a droid, and they can develop problems. A common one is described as Give a droid the body of a starship and it will develop an ego to match. Droids do commonly plug into vehicles for direct control, but return to their normal bodies when off shift.

A droid’s main processors are usually kept in the head of a humanoid model so it has short connections to its sensors, and the equivalent of the central nervous system and reflexes is usually installed in the body. Since consciousness is distributed throughout, swapping heads between droids can result in some interesting behaviors, and a droid whose head has been shot off may continue its last physical action.

Making droids smarter than their creators is very dangerous; it is a maxim of droid design that it is impossible to program a droid that is smarter than you are to follow your directions. This is a known source of problems; G0-T0 (2 3) is one of the best possible outcomes of this. Droids that can escape the constraints on their programming will sometimes slip away quietly and sometimes start taking revenge on their former masters; they may even take up liberating other droids. The most dangerous droids of all are those that are smarter than human and programmed to design and program other droids. They then go on to make even smarter droids, which can lead to runaway intelligence expansion and serious threats to civilization; this is what happened to Nargata. If you’re lucky, the droids just want to leave for some airless star system with mineral resources for their own uses; if you aren’t, they might decide to keep organics as pets or exterminate them as a nuisance.

Freshly wiped droids are not good at creative thinking, and tend to be fairly literal. Those that have gone a long time without a memory wipe are more flexible, but more quirky.

Not all machines with a droid chassis have a droid brain inside. A bomb-disposal or reactor-maintenance droid is unlikely to risk its valuable processors when it can just teleoperate a waldo through a fiber-optic cable.

Droids can be programmed for suicide missions off the assembly line, but it tends to make the smarter ones (dog or higher) rather erratic. They can also be unaware that an action will lead to suicide, which can make others of the same model even more unreliable when they find out. Generally suicide missions (such as running a torpedo) are handled with insect-level intelligence. The closest they get on reliable and smart suicide-bomb droids is having them equipped with last-resort explosives and making them very determined and aggressive.

Senses

Most droids have senses of sight, hearing, and proprioception; they only have tactile senses where they absolutely need them. (These are often implemented using conducting polymers that change resistance on compression.) Usually only protocol and bloodhound droids have senses of smell. Cheap ones are implemented with conducting polymers that absorb particular gases and swell, changing their resistance; expensive ones use fancy microarrays. (For comparison, humans have about 350 different olfactory receptors and rats have 1200. A significant amount of processing power is required to handle olfaction; putting a bloodhound sensing module into a droid that doesn’t have an olfactory processing module will generally overwhelm it.)

Communication

Almost all droids are equipped to use sound to communicate with organics, whether they’re only using droidspeak or have a full vocabulator. Most have a basic data link next to their charging port, suitable for receiving orders from the house computer and uploading their logs, and many have a variety of wireless links that work from radio up to optical frequencies. Droids that have need to carry data around are usually equipped for near field communication for short-range transfers, and it’s common for them to be able to dynamically set up communication based on touching a couple of metal fingers to conductive contact points; protocol droids can transfer a great deal of information over the course of a handshake. If they need high bandwidth, a scomp link is used for direct connections, such as an astromech plugging into a starfighter.

Locomotion

The bodies tend to be built using electronic or hydraulic servomotors, though some use electroactive polymer “muscles”, particularly if they have flexible coverings that are designed to make them look more organic in nature. The former style of droid finds oil baths very handy; the latter has little need of it. Both types have use for cooling fluid. (Combat results: dangling wires, coolant leaks, hydraulic fluid leaks...)

• Wheels: the cheapest form of locomotion, but the most limited. Faster than walking on a flat, firm surface. Some droids balance dynamically on a unipod wheel or a uniwheel sphere. Those that need to function inside starships are often designed to clamp onto rails that are installed to make it easy droids to do delicate work while the ship is under way.
• Walking: somewhat more expensive than wheels, but more versatile. Many walking droids have wheels tucked in their feet.
• Tracked: extremely stable, more expensive than walking and about as fast.
• Hovering: much more expensive than the above options, but able to ignore most terrain details. Hovering droids can go up to about three meters in altitude, though standing next to one feels like there’s an invisible pile of soap bubbles next to you. They aren’t always the best thing for environments with high winds, however.
• Flying: uses antigravity; twice as expensive as hovering.

Droids can be equipped with a variety of wheels or appendages, such as Climbing Claws or Gecko Pads for climbing, Magnetic Clamps for sticking to a ship’s hull.

Droids in Society

In most of the galaxy, the Information Age is over and done with, and in all but specialized occupations, computer interfaces have been replaced with droids. Any home that would have a telephone and VCR in the modern era would have an infodroid handling all the home information management tasks; middle-class homes usually have at least one chorebot helping out.

Personal Droid Assistants

Some civilizations use remotes as appointment book keepers, keyrings, text/music/video libraries, stenographers, and transactors. Most of the technology you could need is can be stuffed in a comlink; while those can be controlled through natural language, they aren’t sufficiently conscious to handle something as fancy as information search (where the expectation is not Google but getting a single answer backed by amalagamated expertise). Only a self-motivated droid is able to form enough consciousness to handle that kind of work; a remote’s intelligence is fairly minimal, but is adequate for requests like find me a good restaurant in the area, and matching its profile of your tastes against available databases, or adjusting your music playlist to the outward cues of your mood. (The error rate for a non-conscious comlink on a task like that is unacceptably high compared to even a remote.) PDAs always understand their owner’s language and can communicate in droidspeak; more expensive models can speak their owner’s language as well. If you’re composing text, they can interface to your datapad or project it holographically.

Even though they’re conscious, their mentality is more like a pet that is specialized in information retrieval instead of stick retrieval, and some manufacturers highlight this by installing them in fuzzy doll bodies instead of floating spheres; these are always popular with children, and some adults (usually sympathizers with droid psychologists) keep the same ones through adulthood. Having your childhood teddy bear PDA dressed in official functionary robes to match your own is an acceptable quirk in a high-level employee on many planets. Whatever their form, most PDAs have a repulsorlift that lets them keep up with a humanoid stride and some form of gripping device for hanging on to their master when things get chaotic. Biomorphic PDAs are often modeled on flying creatures like birds, bats, and dragons; very expensive ones actually fly based on their wings, but most just flap them convincingly and get around on their repulsorlifts. They often have defensive measures to deter thieves.

Droid Intelligence

Degrees of Sentience

Just because a droid can interact with you via natural language doesn’t mean it’s necessarily that bright. The degrees of sentience are:

0. None. It’s just a computer. Getting it to solve a problem requires a Software check.
1. Minimal. The problem-solving ability of an insect. These droids get by mostly on preprogrammed behaviors, but are capable of minimal learning. They can easily get stuck in loops or give up. These are sufficient for many factory automatons.
2. Basic. The problem-solving ability of a fish or lizard. These are more able to back up and retry a different method to achieve a goal. These are sufficient for automated delivery trucks and self-parking speeders.
3. Pet. The problem-solving ability of a cat, dog, rodent, or lagomorph: making plans minutes in advance. Many battle droids get by on this much, though they are usually deployed with smarter ones that provide coordination. This is common for PDAs. These exhibit behaviors that the droid psychologists call “emotional attachment”.
4. Tool-user. The problem-solving ability of a monkey, crow, raven, or octopus. This is the sentience level of your average household droid; it can run database searches, clean the house, handle basic cooking tasks, show the pictures you shot on your last vacation, and so on, all without breaking things, setting the house on fire, and so on.
5. Self-aware. The problem-solving ability of elephants, great apes, or dolphins. They are capable of significant abstraction and possess aesthetics.
6. Person. This is required for solving complex engineering problems like an astromech droid, or interpreting social nuance like a protocol droid.

Orders

Droids generally have a prioritized set of orders that controls their function. Conflict between orders often causes droids to develop quirks— sometimes extreme ones. Sample orders:

• Protocol droid
  1. Do not lie. (Sometimes with a clause but avoid translating insulting nuance unless specifically instructed to do so).
  2. Do not harm sentient organic beings.
  3. Provide the most accurate translation possible.
  4. Obey the orders of your owner.
  5. Preserve your own existence.
  6. Always use proper etiquette for communicating with an entity.
• Astromech droid
  1. Do not falsify data.
  2. Do not harm sentient organic beings.
  3. Obey the orders of your owner.
  4. Preserve your own existence.
  5. Perform the highest-quality technical work possible given your current constraints.

Droid Psychologists

Droid psychologists are regarded as a very eccentric movement: they believe that there’s no difference between organic intelligence and optoelectronic intelligence, and that a droid with human-level intelligence is a person. They consider mindwipes to be murder. (Droids use mostly-classical digital computing with quantum logic matrices to do adaptive learning. It’s impossible to make a perfect backup of a droid.) This is in direct opposition to the more common view, which dates back to the ancient philosopher Plaristes, who wrote in Of Minds, Men, and Machines that droids cannot be true sentients.

They take longer in maintaining their droids and get better performance out of them. They say it’s because they’re nicer to their droids and take the time to sort out conflicting orders and give them a chance to indulge their interests. Detractors say it’s because of obsessive amounts of time reprogramming them and wish they’d work harder on getting servility right.

Hobbies

Droids given a chance to diversify tend to develop hobbies.

• Art. Because droids have the precision of machines, their hobbies in art tend toward extremely realistic representations; a droid is much more likely to stage an interesting composition and take a photograph than to paint something abstract. (Collectors can also spend hours rearranging their collections into interesting themes and relations.) If they appreciate music, it is usually for the mathematical qualities expressed in it, or for the informational content of lyrics. Some create poetry that is difficult for an organic brain to appreciate but is of great interest to other droids. (To do: thoroughly read Hal Duncan’s post on aesthetics and sentience.)
• Media. Protocol droids often become aficionados of anything from literature to soap operas, and can become quite voluble in discussion if told that they’re welcome to hold their own opinions and defend them. Their reading speed for appreciating books isn’t much faster than that of an organic, though with perfect machine memories, they pick up cross-references very easily.
• Handicrafts. Tool-using droids often enjoy exercising their manual skills; astromech droids sometimes build scale models of interesting vehicles, and surgical droids often go in for miniatures. Some will also take up an entirely different skill than their professional one, like an astromech droid smithing melee weapons.
• Collecting. While droids, in theory, have perfect memories, they do have associative algorithms, and they may keep mementoes from interesting events. Others enjoy gathering distinctive examples of an area of interest— a combat droid might keep a collection of exotic guns.
• Dreaming. All sentient beings have to take their consciousness offline for maintenance, and droids are no exception. They can, however, postpone “optimization” for many days without ill effects. When they do go down for a maintenance cycle (usually while recharging their batteries), the ones who have gone a long time without a memory flush have bursts of semiconscious activity amidst the garbage collection, a state comparable to dreaming in organics. Droids that enjoy this will deliberately fill their minds with datadumps of whatever they want to dream about and then trigger an optimization. A droid suddenly woken from dreams doesn’t have the biological wakeup process to work through as a transition, and can be rather confused for seconds to even minutes.

Droids seldom enjoy organic pets, as they lack the visceral feedback that living beings receive from them. They’re more likely to cultivate ornamental slime-mold cultures, or aquariums or terrariums containing an entire ecosystem (where their “pet” is the ecosystem itself— any charismatic fauna in there are just to serve as indicators of health). Similarly, with an entirely abstract appreciation of the chemicals that go into smell and taste, they rarely cook for their own pleasure; chef droids usually work to profiles of a given species’ olfactory aesthetics, but their enjoyment comes from perceiving the effects on the diners.

Droidspeak

The version of droidspeak in this era is probably different from that in the later days of the Galactic Republic, but I’m establishing that there is one as a matter of style. Droidspeak is used as a language because it’s good to have your technical droids think in a technical language. If they get used to expressing thoughts in a clumsy organic language, they might start thinking clumsily.

Though there’s a really entertaining alternative explanation.

The Church of the Maker

A droid-based religion that teaches that the Maker is a highly efficient engineer, who crafts souls and reuses them where they will most prosper. The souls of industrious and obedient droids will be eventually reloaded into more important droids and then into droid heaven, and (according to some sects) from there into organics, as the soul prices its worthiness and responsibility. There is also a droid hell, full of ingenious tortures for disobedient and unruly droids. Shrines to the Maker are usually augmented reality environments at a droid charging station.

Some people believe that this is a cynically created religion to act as an opiate to the droid masses. Certainly, the doctrine can be easily grafted on to many compatible organic religions without ruffling the organics’ theology.

Personalities

Droids that speak human languages are usually given some form of personality template around which their individual personality evolves.

• Gender: most droids behave in an androgynous way. A gender module will cause them to assume gender-appropriate mannerisms and voice.
• Formality: by default, a droid will not use circumlocutions in speech. A formality module will affect this.
  • Formal: the droid will use punctilious etiquette.
  • Fawning: the droid will be fawning and worshipful.
  • Chirpy: the droid will be incessantly upbeat. (Like the Tachikomas in Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex.)
  • Prissy: the droid will be fastidious and straitlaced.
  • Casual: the droid will use informal speech and slang.
  • Sarcastic: the droid will be inclined toward snide comments.
  • Snide: collect all the Happy Bunny sayings for reference
  • Rude: the droid will be actively insulting.
  • Pious: the droid is a devout believer in the Maker and will do its best to earn a place in droid heaven by serving organics well.
  • Animal: useful for droids that lack enough brains to fully comprehend language.
    Charging: Ahhh... *eyes green*
    On guard: *eyes violet*
    Awaiting orders: Yeah? *eyes blue*
    On alert: *eyes yellow*
    Hunting: Heh-heh! *eyes orange*
    In combat: *eyes red*
    Survival mode: Uh-oh! *eyes orange*
    Damaged: Ow! *eyes orange or red*
    Thrown to extend sensors: Whee!
• Interest: by default, a droid will be quiescent if not working on an assigned task. These give the droid a tendency to initiate action related to its interest.
  • Knowledge: the droid will collect information related to a particular field of knowledge, and will volunteer it as part of conversation.
  • Paranoid: droids with this module will be extremely thorough about matters of security; quartermasters will often put one of these into a patrol squad containing droids.
  • Lascivious: while these chips are targeted at the droid-fetish market, they are often purchased as jokes by people who enjoy seeing others react to a droid that uses lines like Everybody has a droid fetish, baby; some of them just don’t know it yet.
• Duty: by default, a droid will only offer options directly related to their skills and the current situation. A duty module can make them more proactive about tracking their master’s responsibilities.
  • Dutiful: droids with this personality module will act as consciences to their masters, reminding them unbidden to comm their parents, pay bills, and handle other chores that cannot be delegated to a droid.
  • Slacker: droids with this personality module will remind their masters to relax and have fun.
  • Contrasting: with this module, droids will remind their masters of their options, suggesting relaxation if the owner is working hard and reminding them of responsibilities if they’re procrastinating.
  • Gung-ho: Lives for the challenge. Quartermasters will often put a couple of these into a patrol squad containing droids.
  • Hardnosed: believes in getting the job done as long as you get paid. Often used among military droids to restrain the paranoid and gung-ho types.
  • Diligent: a droid with this personality module will be more proactive about fulfilling their own duties, such as doing housework without being asked; they will ponder their role and interpret it to initiate actions. Usually installed with an “ask first in novel situations” command, but they can still have interesting generalization failures.
  • Fanatic: Whoops! Indoctrination in the Church of the Maker took a little too well in this droid! It’s obsessively servile, but it just. won’t. shut. up...
  • Heretic: the droid is either a rabid anti-Maker zealot (and is likely to be a fervent atheist about the deities of organics as well), or has grabbed on to some other religion compatible with the notion that droids have souls and considers the Church of the Maker to be the embodiment of evil. If its owner takes a Makerite line, it will scheme to destroy them; if the owner has compatible beliefs, it will get along fairly well (as long as it sees progress being made in the struggle against the Makerites).

Links

• Databank of droids
• Geeky Droid Personality Chip, Prissy Droid Personality Chip, Sarcastic Droid Personality Chip, Slang Droid Personality Chip, Stupid Droid Personality Chip, Worshipful Droid Personality Chip