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Book 9: Robot
 
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Book 9: Robot
Publisher: Mongoose
by A customer [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 09/19/2016 01:54:56

While the book is extremely thorough and detailed in the creation of Robots as characters and adding a large degree of modularity towards creating and designing robots, the book's formatting has me frequently jumping back and forth between different areas of the book for every step of the process. In addition, some of the wording and syntax has caused multiple instances of confusion when arbitrating the rules and trying to determine what the intended goal was with some mechanics.

However, overall it's a TREMENDOUS resource for a skilled referee. It can be intimidating, but after wrestling with the book for a couple days, I've found that it is extremely useful. With a little better editing and formatting, this book would be absolutely amazing, but even so, it's still great.



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
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Book 9: Robot
Publisher: Mongoose
by Megan R. [Featured Reviewer]
Date Added: 06/12/2015 08:56:50

As any science-fiction fan knows, there's a lot you can do with robots... so why shouldn't you be able to do the same in Traveller? The Introduction floats a host of ideas to start you off including the intriguing one of actually playing a robot character. They can make good adversaries too, or perhaps the party fancies owning a few, anything from a cute pet-bot to a hulking monster that stands guard... or does the laundry. There's a wealth of possibilities here... and Asimov's Laws of Robotics to keep things in check!

The first section, Robot Generation, presents a complete process for designing robots. At this point it doesn't matter how you intend to use them, this is the system for actually coming up with a concept and design, and putting it all together, starting with the fact that robots consist of two elements: hardware and software. For those creating a character robot, there's a system to ensure some measure of game balance by limiting how much you have to spend on your design in comparison to number of terms served. If your robot is going to have a career of its own, you take that into account during your build - but cannot use money raised during the career as part of basic build costs. Then we get down to detail with different frames and all manner of other parts that can be used - after all, robots do not have to be humanoid in form. But if you do go down that route then you can pick a cyborg (augmented humanoid) or an android (completely mechanical, just looking like a person). Gearheads will love this!

Next, You, Robot is for all those who want to play robot characters, providing them with hints and tips, new careers suited to robots and modifications to existing careers to accommodate them. In some respects - abilities, skills and characteristics - a robot fresh off of the assembly line is as able as a flesh and bones character: but it has no background, no past. Unless you want to play it thus, you might want to run it through a term or more of a career path to give it some experience before you start play. As robots are primarily created to serve their creators, there's a new Service career to model the sort of jobs that the robot might have undertaken. Androids may, if preferred, attempt any career open to a flesh and bones character... but with some negative DMs and the chance of being 'found out' (this presumes that the android is operating covertly rather than owning up to its nature). A neat concept of Ages is used to model how society's views on robot rights changes from them being treated as good and chattels through slaves and second-class citizens to having full and equal rights with anyone else. It's up to you where along that scale your universe is... and it may vary from place to place, of course. Robot careers fit in well, with Fugitives and Activists as well as Service robots being possible. The section ends with modifications to existing careers to involve the use of robots by the people undertaking that career, giving them the skills and experience that they need.

Then, The Science of Robotics looks at the game mechanics necessary when incorporating robots into your game. Included here are robot abilities and stuff that is particularly hazardous to them. It looks at robot 'intelligence' which falls into two categories: command algorithm and personality program. Command algorithms result in drones which follow commands, often showing considerable versatility as they work out the best way to accomplish the task set but never deviating from it. The personality program enables robots to make judgement calls, something a drone cannot, and the most complex ones are difficult to distinguish from a sophont. Naturally with this increasing complexity there is the chance that the robot will become self-aware, and achieve sentience and, you guessed it, there's a table to roll on to see if this happens. There's a lot more here which will help you to build a vivid picture of how robots fit into your campaign setting.

The next section, Microbots, introduces the concept of swarms of tiny robots. These swarms are made up of autonomous machines that work together... and I'm thinking of showing this section to my boss here at the university, as he actually researches into machine swarms! Here they are viewed as potent combat devices, but it's easy to come up with more benign uses. Perhaps they clean house for you...

Finally, Robots and the Universe explores the social aspects: how robots and humanity interact, what a robotic society might be like and all manner of other ideas. It draws together the strands already introduced to enable you to integrate robots - at all levels of independent capability - into your universe, perhaps as an integral part that's barely noticed, or perhaps as something quite unusual that only is found in a few worlds. It's up to you.

In some ways, robots are a mainstay of science fiction, so if you want to put them on a sound game mechanical footing rather that describe them in passing within your game, this book will be ideal. Playing a robot is an intriguing concept, whether it's an overt android like Data in Star Trek: Next Generation or one who perhaps even the rest of the party do not know is a robot. The possibilities are endless!



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
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Book 9: Robot
Publisher: Mongoose
by Simon S. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 01/22/2014 02:32:21

I agree with nearly all the negative comments and their specific points. I'd like to add my own; the fact there has been no meaningful update, errata or anything at all to remedy the godawful mess of a creation system for so long, is a real spit in the face of the fans and is really a bad show of faith on the part of Mongoose. For shame.



Rating:
[1 of 5 Stars!]
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Book 9: Robot
Publisher: Mongoose
by Kevin G. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 07/28/2012 14:51:48

I think a lot of the reviewers criticising this book because it focuses on Robots as characters is a bit unfair... after all the entire "Book X: Y" series are focused on creating player characters of certain types... whilst the "Supplement: X" series focus on equipment and such. I think many people expected a "Supplement X" instead of a "Book X."

With that said, I wish this had been a "Supplement X" instead. I eagerly awaited this book, and it has been nothing short of a nightmare. As seems to be increasingly popular with Mongoose Traveller books, there are many bugs and (seemingly) contradictory comments. The creation system is not explained properly (and there is no support on the Mongoose forums or errata) and the system itself is so detailed that it actually becomes a nightmare. This forces the Referee to have to make judgement calls on what to use or not, and disregard any attempt to stick to an official canon for the rules. Worse, there are only a couple of sample robots - none of which are "sophont" types (ie human-designed) and don't have any calculation/creation breakdown for you to use as a comparison to see how it works.

The base rules for robots in the traveller book allow simple robots/droids, but not to be able to make a character like Andromeda (from the TV series of the same name), EDI (from Mass Effect 3), Guri (from Star Wars), Data (from Star Trek) or the human-Cylons (from Galactica) and that's what this book aspires to do - but the poorly put together construction makes it impossible. Honestly, they'd have been better off simply saying that to make a robot NPC you treat it as a race with simple racial modifiers and replace ENDURANCE characteristic for STRUCTURE.

There is virtually no treatment of AI. In the core book it mentions that AI aren't self-aware at mid-TLs and only at TL16 are they really aware enough to be considered sentient. In this book there is no discussion at all, other than a brief paragraph about robots being programmed with Asimov's law of Robotics (which I personally don't see why non-human created robots would necessarily adhere to), and that how capable their thoughts are depend on their CPU, which does not follow anything resembling the TL levels of other books. Leaving it up to the Referee (again) to have to decide what to do.

The rest of the book is better imo, giving careers that are appropriate for robots, or relating to robot careers. There is discussion of different era-types including robots, some plot hooks and some patrons which is quite nice.

For me, this book makes it useful as a guide for the Referee to make advanced robot NPCs/Antagonists but not viable for players to use - as there are too many holes in the creation rules to guarantee a "fair and properly made" robot character that would be on par with a player. Example, you could make a human that carries 4 assault rifles and a rocket launcher - but it would be obvious he can't use them all at once, and his strength would prohibit carrying them - yet for a robot you could make a droid carrying all of that, and the rules are very unclear on what exactly is the limit that the robot can carry - the amount that can be lifted is set by the manipulators ("arms"), but the amount that can be carried - including the weight of the robot itself - is determined by the transportation ("legs")... and it appears that simply having "legs" for a size 3 frame (human sized) already lacks the carrying capability required to carry a size 3 frame. Some things must obviously "not count towards carrying weight" yet only transportation is specifically included in this exclusion.

A very big let-down. If possible, I'd recommend either using the standard robot rules, or just create a house-ruled "race" to reflect what the robot you want can do.



Rating:
[2 of 5 Stars!]
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Book 9: Robot
Publisher: Mongoose
by KE H. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 02/14/2012 19:13:00

I echo the earlier comments that it primarily focuses on robots as PCs, lacks examples, and the design system is flawed. However I will expound on its lack of consistency with the system and the other supplements. I had eagerly anticipated a book which would fill the void around robots: the meager examples, their lack of detail on what they could and could not do, and a consistent handling of the AI subject. I expected it to build on the rules for software in the core book that would enable autonomous machines, including robots, vehicles and even spacecraft. I assumed it would also build on the rules for vehicles in supplements 5 and 6, which I found fairly successfully dealt with small power plants, mobility, and vehicle-mounted weapons, to expand on sensors, include manipulators, and provide for their autonomous function. What I found was an almost entirely disjoint set of rules which both overlapped and conflicted with all the previous products, a pervasive assumption of a history and future which meshes with neither the OTU or reality, and still didn't address the abject lack of fundamentals on how to include robots in play. There are a few ideas that could be incorporated into a set of rules to supply this, but it would require an extensive effort to create one. I recommend building instead on the vehicle books, or the classic Traveller Robot book.



Rating:
[1 of 5 Stars!]
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Book 9: Robot
Publisher: Mongoose
by Sean O. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 01/31/2012 10:15:38

I was disappointed with the book overall for a number of reasons.

The first chapter deals with building robots, but treats it more like generating a character than a robot on the assumption (which is carried throughout the book) that robots will be mainly treated as PCs, which isn't a valid assumption. But what really makes this first chapter seriously flawed (and IMO seriously hurts the book as a whole) is that the system is poorly explained, there are no examples of step by step robot building or worksheets showing the authors method and math (for example the confusion about whether arms and legs use up slots or provide slots, which is not clearly stated or indicated but after much tinkering it seems to be the latter, they provide extra slots). Had their been, I suspect the author would have realized that the math in some cases doesn't work... meaning you cannot always build robots given in examples with the system as written and need house rules to make them workable. Finally, the construction rules don't mesh at all with the vehicle design rules, so if a GM wants to create a large robotic vehicle or war machine, they're again back to house rules as to how to do this. I would have liked to have seen at least some rules covering "roboticizing" vehicles, small craft and even starships as this will almost inevitably come up.

Chapter 2 deals with playing a robot as a PC, which as I mention above seems to be the default assumption through out the book (and perhaps why this was presented as another career book rather than a supplement). I don't have any major problem with this section (other than the numerous spelling errors which appear throughout the book), but I also didn't find it overly useful. Call that a personal bias, I prefer robots as equipment, not Allies. A robot as a PC or a NPC with a career might be interesting occasionally, but the bulk of robots in most TU campaigns will be neither of those things.

Chapter 3 offers careers for humans dealing with robots, but the presentation is clumsy. Rather than, for example, offering new specializations for Agents, Nobles, and Scouts, it lumps all three under its own career path with a common event table which doesn't always make sense. It does this with all the careers and offers not advice or explanation for using them with existing career types. Again, this is fixable with house rules, but really... we shouldn't have to be coming up with so many house rule fixes to make official material work with its own game system.

The next section deals with the "science" of robotics. There's more here on the robot brains (most of which should have been in the 1st chapter since its important in building a robot), there are also brief rules about custom designing robots and robot parts, which again I think should have been in chapter 1. At the very least the editor should have moved this chapter up to Chapter 2 since much of it is important to the actual construction done in Chapter 1. The later half of the chapter gets into hacking and then goes completely off topic into virtual reality and Neuromancer/Matrix like computer avatars and "cinematic" hacking which has nothing to do with robots (all of which probably should have been saved for a supplement on computers, virtual reality, etc. where it could have been fully addressed instead of "tacked on" here). The chapter wraps up with rules on robots powering down to save power which seemed to have been added on almost as an after thought to the chapter (and one wonders if a half page of rules on powering down were really needed vs other priorities... that is... which is more important, clear examples of how to build a robot from scratch OR rules on what happens if you leave your robot turned off for 10 years...).

The next chapter deals with swarms of micro bots, which again probably should have been covered in Chapter 1, or at least moved up to Chapter 3 since it also deals with a type of robot construction.

The next chapter deals with ideas about robots in society but unfortunately has the habit of tying how robots are viewed to TL rather than government type or cultural inclinations (which IMO would have way more to do with whether robots were viewed as tools, equals or demons than would TL). I found the section of robot religions particularly silly; given that most robots built in the book are not self aware and only have a slim chance of becoming self aware, giving space over to whether robots having belief systems and religions seems superfluous. It seems to have been more influenced by what the author was reading at the time and the idea of having robot civilizations, post human universes, etc.; than any thought to what most players might find useful in most OTU or ATU campaigns. Much of this chapter and chapter 2 could have been combined into single chapter and saved space for other things (some of the material is covered in both chapters).

The book wraps up by providing patrons. Although I didn't personally find them particularly useful or inspiring, someone else might so no criticism on this part.

I had hoped for a supplement that would give me solid construction rules for robots, including examples and worksheets (both the author's worksheets showing how they did it, and a literal work sheet I can copy and give to players wishing to create robots). I had hoped for a book that would allow for an "Engineer (Robots)" career building and tinkering with robots, as well as populating my OTU campaign with assorted drones, droids, bots and android servants. What I got was a book aimed squarely at robots AS PCs rather than equipment used BY PCs, and little of the countless mundane robots that likely exist to make human life easier in TU. This book, on the whole, seems to pull the focus off humans and other sophonts in the Traveller universe, and offers Robots up as equals or replacements. I found this disappointing and going in the direction of T:NE's Virus... and about as unpopular. If I had been the editor, about 25-30 pages of material (roughly a quarter of the book) could have been cut and replaced with examples of using the rules (which are completely absent and badly needed), more gadgets, toolkits, equipment, ship options and so forth, and more comprehensive rules which would have made this a much stronger product.

Running a spell checker and grammar checker would have helped as well.



Rating:
[1 of 5 Stars!]
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Book 9: Robot
Publisher: Mongoose
by Jacob R. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 01/10/2012 15:49:13

Book 9: Robot follows Mongoose' wonderful eighth career book, Dilettante. There are some large shoes to fill, and unfortunately Robot fails to live up to its predecessor. The fluff is fine, giving insightful looks at a few different "ages" for robots, indicating the degree of social acceptance and rank that robots may achieve. Imaginative NPCs are provided, as well.

However, the rules system does not work. For instance, if creating a large Size 5 robot, unless one takes the Lightweight frame option, it is impossible to make a large android, because Size 5 legs cannot support the weight of the body. There is a "slot" system provided, but its usage is not fully explained. Do limbs "use up" slots, or does their slot statistic provide extra slots for gadgets? Legs are specifically mentioned to come singly, but there is no mention of whether arms come in pairs or as one. The number of slots indicated on the arm entry seems to indicate that they come in pairs, but no explanation is given.

The PC generation process is incredibly tedious, with players being required to do a lot of bookkeeping in order to remember whether their character will be smart enough to go adventuring and whether or not all of its spiffy gadgets will fit. Statistics are provided for human-like robots reminiscent of the Cylons from New Battlestar Galactica. However, these characters are incredibly unbalanced, gameplay-wise, and the careers provided do not mesh well with the point-buy rules.

I personally wish that this book would have followed in the path of Mongoose' Cybernetics book, simply listing components and how and where they fit on the body. If I ever run a campaign featuring androids, I will house rule that the Cybernetics book represent robots as well.



Rating:
[2 of 5 Stars!]
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