wimlach wrote:
To make them easier to play by a real person, you could propose that androids where designed not only to look like humans, but to also act like them, requiring complex artificial brains. Minds of such complexity would eventually develop self awareness and free will, so originally androids would have been 'factory reset' periodically to maintain their original programming.
But those times are long past. Any androids that still exist have long since evolved mentally, with full faculties of emotion and personality, though perhaps with a undertone of a deeper, colder logic.
Those that still exist are terribly ancient, but have long since lost the memory of their past - like humans, they were never designed to store much data, so their memories only go back a few hundred years at most, new experiences eventually overwriting the old.
Occasionally you'll find androids with little or no experience - juveniles in some respects. Typically these are units that needed to reset their systems due to damage or unrecoverable error, being reborn as a new consciousness in an old body.
That's another good thought. Such characters are most certainly possible, and therefore likely to exist to some degree or another, in the world I'm developing.
My original concept was more along the lines of DW's automatons, though with a much wider range of designs, incorporating things along the lines of R2D2 (though probably not the "super powered" version seen outside of Episodes 4 and 5), the robots in
Silent Running and
Interstellar, and Gerdy from
Moon. It seems to me that we (humans) are likely to be more comfortable with such plainly artificial creations than with things like the replicants from
Blade Runner,
A.I., and the
Alien franchise of movies. But I'm interested in hearing other takes on that.
Another thing that I'm not sure about with androids, speaking from a strictly mechanical standpoint, is how much they differentiate themselves from human characters. Conventional robots, as outlined above, are obviously very distinctive from the other races. What makes androids mechanically distinct from a human, elf, or dwarf?