Reynard wrote: ↑Sun Apr 30, 2017 2:22 am
We have this fantasy that robots must automatically be superior to a sophont in nearly every way. They do not. They are designed for a task or several tasks ad have the tools and abilities to perform without waste. A robot floor sweeper cleans floors and probably is relatively fragile and limited but, as a robot, can scour a building top to bottom and look for things to clean but otherwise is not tough, strong or bright. Robots that are stronger than humans while built to walk your dog are for cinematics. Scary robot. R2 is a great pilot and engineer and had a taser but it and other R2s were often easily disabled or destroyed. A certain protocol droid was a walking library and wiz as a steward but couldn't kill a fly. Same should be true with Traveller robots unless you have the mentality of the uber starship designers maxing out the craft.
A robot and robot characters should not have to be paranoid combat behemoths for play, they should be designed to fulfill a role and a role play opportunity. Some of course will want their tank with legs but think about a robot as a unique character adding a unique aspect to the game that a player can handle and display the robot in the character.

K2 from Rogue One was a bit of a tougher robot that either R2D2 or C3P0 it is taller and more physically imposing than either, and I only seen C3P0 engage in combat once, and that was in episode II, when its head was attached to a combat droid. C3P0 was not designed to be a combatant, R2D2 could pilot a ship when plugged into a socket, it also had superior sensory capability than C3P0. One has to consider why the robot was built. A sweeping robot wouldn't be designed for combat, but would you as a player want to play one? A combat robot can be built deliberately tougher than a human being, there being lots of materials that are stronger than flesh and bone. One of the easiest things for a robot to have would be quicker combat reflexes, their electronics carry signals at nearly the speed of light, a biological neural impulse does not. Robots also typically have better memory than humans and their brains are built to crunch numbers as they are computers. Think of a robot as an autonomous vehicle because that is what they are, some autonomous vehicles are tougher than others. If you are going to disguise a robot as a human, you are limited to what's in the volume of a human frame, though certain things which kill a human won't necessarily affect them. A robot might not need an atmosphere with oxygen in it, since no one wants to build a spacesuit for a robot, most will probably be designed to operate in a vacuum or in some atmospheres which would kill a human.