Hello again, everybody! Had to take a long break from RPGs on account of life being rough to me. /harvests tears

So, I was watching the robot-vaganzas of Neill Blomkamp (Chappie, District 9, Elysium), and a thought occurred to me: Humanoid cop-bots look and feel awesome! Then another one: Why isn't (humanoid-shaped) drones a more prevalent part of the 6th world?

The Otomo and Tomino both look like they'd make decent robocops, but they don't come with Pilot, and the blurbs mentioned that they're tailored for cyborgs only. That's a drag. I'm guessing the prohibitive cost of a good man-bot (the Tomino alone runs a bill of 350,000 NY, and that's not counting maintenance) makes operators reluctanct to run dog brains on them..

What are your takes? Are Pilot options simply not good enough to operate a human form convincingly? Have the arcology disasters convinced people to can human-like war drones for good?

I want to spring this on players so badly.. Ah well, I'm guessing most AA/AAA-level securi-corps can afford a 'borg team leader or two

Don't forget the Manservant III, a butler-bot for people. Read its description and I think you'll get a little bit of insight into why there aren't so many humanoid drones.

The meta-game reason is that if robots can do as well as runners, then you don't send runners. You send deniable robots.
"Robots blew up our competitor's factory? We have no idea who programmed them to do it, these robots aren't even registered they come from an undeclared robot building factory."

The in-game explanation is that Deus/the arcology incident and the Crash 2.0 scared people and they wouldn't be very receptive to human-like drones.

Sure, but from a more practical perspective the two-legged walker with an upright torso and just two manipulators isn't the best solution for a lot of tasks.

And then there is the economic aspect: In a world of early 20th century labor conditions, you'll always find a human who is cheaper and just as replaceable.

Ahhh, but what of the latter part of the 21st Century, where Shadowrun actually takes place?

his point is that the labour conditions are like the early 20th century, ie labour is cheap, and you don't need to provide good work conditions.

or, in other words, sure you could build a 50,000 nuyen robot to do the job (likely more). but the robot is likely to need regular maintenance, you need to repair or replace them if they break, etc.

or, you could just hire a human, pay them next to nothing, and get most of that money back because the human will spend it on services you provide. and if the human ever needs "maintenance" (ie gets seriously sick, injured, nervous breakdown, etc), you just fire them and hire a new one instead of paying for expensive repairs, since they just make more of themselves without you needing to lift a finger to create them.

have you looked at the drones prices and life style cost lately?

A low lifestyle costs 12k (after taxes and social stuff) a year getting you about 8h work a day (assuming not a single free day, which will never be the case, even in hard core systems).
A drone in Shadowrun performs equally well as a low level worker, and will work maybe 20h a day and thus can cost about 30k a year to be competitive. Drones in SR cost much, much less a year (assume a very conservative 3 year lifetime and add 100% maintainacne coot, you end up with list price/2).

First of all, there's slavery / human trafficking.

With so many SINless around, it's not hard to either get some to work under a threat/promise of some sorts. If you really want to pay them, you can go for a pay that will let them have a squatter lifestyle, which is an improvement over the street lifestyle they'd get otherwise. This is far less than the low lifestyle (which in SR4 is 2k a month, not 1k).

Second, some corps probably want to keep (meta)humans workers, because they're a source of wealth. Many corps probably use indenture contracts: in exchange for (x years/lifetime) servitude of the corporation, the employee gets housing, food, clothing, entertainment, etc. This might not be these terms for all corps, other corps will use a mechanism of loans to give the impression that the employee is free to pay for what he wants. The idea is that as soon as the employee starts working for the corps, he already owes it what he'll pay the corp for goods and services for the next few years. The corp can consider that they already have that money (it's the way our economy already work: we consider that we currently have the money we'll expect to have later).
This way, a corp will actually get more money the more workers it has (in some limits, as long as the market trusts the corp to actually be able to sell products to its workers, and the workers to buy them).

Exactly.

Wage slaves living on company property, paid with "scrip" that is worthless outside company stores (but feel free to leave if you don't like it), and controlled by private police isn't something invented by cyberpunk authors, it's the very real situation of workers back then.

8 hours a day? You can work 12 or you can make room for somebody who is sufficiently desperate.
12,000 a year? Maybe you'll nominally earn that, but in Scrip only redeemable at our store, where we set the prices.
Need a loan? Sure thing, just sign on the dotted line in your own blood.
And what is that "social stuff" you are talking about?

I think Shadowrun can be contradictory on that point, as sources both tell about drones replacing humans on account of cost cutting, but also about humans taking up drone work because of horrible labor conditions. If I were to guess, I'd say that they just go with what seems appropriate to tell a suitably dystopic story.



Yeah, IRL we know this to be the case, but the Otomi is a pretty damn slick machine when piloted by a cyborg containment unit - why not give it a program and see what it could do with it?

There's nothing stopping you from adding Rigger Adaption (and a Pilot) to an Otomo. Did that for a Missions 4th Edition character. Devastatingly effective. Also had a doll sized Rigger Cocoon in the chest. Just because I could.

The semi-satirical Rigger 4 PDF has a couple of nice anthroform drones in there, one looks almost human.

-k

Drones replace humans because they are cheaper, the resulting huge oversupply of human labor leads to a race to the bottom until humans become cheaper than drones. In general, "whatever screws people over the most" seems like a good yardstick


No real reason why not to do it, except budget problems. You can install Pilot programs on drones, the cyborg bodies are classified as drones, knock yourself out. Even better (or worse, depending on your perspective), drones are fitted with a Rigger Adaption by default, so ordinary riggers can simply jump into an Otomo and not even suffer the -1 to physical actions jarheads get because $REASONS.

Exactly




Ah, good old 4E RAW, you're crazier than a sack of clown poo <3

Um... Vehicles, Drones, and Agents. Section 4: Theoretical Application. They're pretty cheap, actually. That's a five year old thread too.

The age of the post doesn't make it any easier to find, does it now Thanks!

E: It seems like the Drone Soldier would need an adaptability upgrade of some kind, though. The Manservants pilot program is not designed for combat, and so would be at a loss to identify and neutralize enemies on its own.

Similar Model: the Drone Soldier simply uses the other statistics of the Manservant, not an actual Manservant drone itself.

As someone who uses cheese tactics and builds on a regular basis...

I will say that Neraph's guide uses a fair bit of cheese in it, so make sure anything you pull from the guide is okay with your GM ahead of time. In the middle of a run is not the time to find out your character build isn't acceptable to the guy running the game.

Other than that, it's an excellent guide and has been of help to me in the past. Jack the Pixie Rigger would not have been the same without it.





-k

Sharp Cheddar or none. Gimme that good, aged cheese or don't even bother.

wait... jack the rigger?

....

was that deliberate?

As a short aside. Can we mention what a great street Sami name Jack the Ripper is.

...

It is now.






-k