by Joshua A.C. Newman » Tue Jun 26, 2012 3:54 pm
Hey, do you guys remember how to win in the original Battletech? The answer was, "Field tanks!"
The Solar Calendar is a set of creative constraints. We use them to make sure we've got the same expectations so we all come to the table with giant robots and not airplanes or dudes in Cricket outfits*. If you want different creative constraints, make sure everyone's agreed to them. So far, there's the occasional drone or hover vehicle, but we operate on the assumption that most of the time we don't use these for practical reasons, most of which we don't explore. "Muscle cylinders!" are about as deep as we wanted to go — "They're cheaper than internal combustion and give additional benefits in most situations. So most of the time, you want humanoid robots. We good here? OK, let's move on."
Soren and I have deliberately reeled in a lot of our science fiction tendencies for this setting in favor of particular enjoyable creative constraints. If you want to fully explore the world-changing nature of a given technology, I invite you to play one of my RPGs, particularly (What happens if you have a post-scarcity, rational, starfaring society but current levels of understanding of human nature?) or (a way of asking these questions and establishing your own constraints). In Human Contact terms, if you want to see drones, that's barely even a meaningful category in the society of the Academy; an Academic's perceptual field can cover an entire planet if they need to. They can look from orbit as readily as they can look around a corner. And their understanding of information theory (from digital to interpersonal and political) is as advanced as their starcraft.
To quote Soren, "Weaponized sociology will beat giant robots any day." At one point, we saw a game where a dozen Academics, confused, wounded, exhausted and largely untrained in violence, held off a small army for an hour by obeying a flocking algorithm with inputs from the surveillance haze that surrounded the field of battle.
So, hey, look, if you want to add AI drones, I'll play the crap out of that game with you, but you'll have a hard time fitting it into the rules for Mobile Frame Zero. You come to these rules to fight giant fighty robots.
So, think about this: is it cheaper to use AI than a trained and cunning human? More effective than using a human who wants to live? If so, why isn't everyone using them? And if everyone is using autonomous AI frames, why are they humanoid (or ghanatoid)? If they leave behind the need to expand on human abilities, why giant? Let's say the AI is based on digital computers, and let's say that, at this point centuries in the future, that's the size of the iPad I'm typing this on. I'd guess that we could make a "frame" about the size of a shoe. I'm gonna say that I'll field something tiny, armed and smart over something giant, armed and smart anyday.
So now we have swarms of AI robots doing our fighting for us.
And we wind up with Ghost in the Shell instead of VOTOMS. And I wouldn't mind that game at all, not one little bit, but it's not this one. We don't have rules for distributed consciousness, hacking each other's units to alter their personality, massive swarms, or any other implicit features of such a setting.
When we have a setting, it's something we share.
As for the definition of robot, we're drawing on the popular Japanese understanding of the word: a humanoid machine controlled, for some reason, by someone typically too young to drive a car. The word "mecha" actually covers all sorts of genre mechanical design.
*I really want to field a company Cricket-equipped giant robots now. I sure love those pads.