How do you do android robots well?

[Mastikator]

Let's say you want to DM a homebrew scifi setting.
And let's say you want you players to have the option of playing an android robot in a 2300+ year hard sci fi campaing setting.
But it's a relatively hard sci fi that stains suspension of disbelief as much as possible,

How do I balance the stats between humans and robots in a reasonable way?

[Nifft]

The questions you can answer to help with this issue are:

- Why do individuals exist at all?
-- Was the Singularity cancelled? Did it just not happen?
--- Did something horrific happen instead? (Eclipse Phase has a useful take on this.)

- Who builds androids, and why?
-- Is the android's intelligence supposed to be human-level (i.e. caretaker or comfort droids), or sub-human (i.e. labor droids), or maybe even super-human in some aspect (i.e. military assault droids)?
--- What did the android start out as, and how can it upgrade itself?


If the only playable android background is "escaped pleasure droid", then you're probably not going to be breaking rocks with your fingers until you get some serious upgrades.

[Sacrieur]

+Intelligence Stats.
-Social Stats.

[Fouredged Sword]

Personally I gaming choices to be all about options rather than flat bonuses. Here is how I would play it.

Give Robots a flat bonus set for being inorganic. This would be a large bonus to physical stats. They then access large amounts of interesting equipment though adding components to their bodies.

Now, how to balance that VS humans. Well, humans can become cyborgs and access all the same components that Androids can access. On top of this, humans can access fully biotic modifications that need biology to run. This basically breaks adventurer society down into three groups, robots, cyborgs, and bio-modified humans..

[ThinkMinty]

But it's a relatively hard sci fi that stains suspension of disbelief as much as possible,

Strains the suspension of disbelief as little as possible. The suspension of disbelief is when your brain stops telling you dragons aren't real so you can enjoy things. You want that violated as infrequently as possible when taking in anything SF styled. I'm nitpicking, but it's a very important nitpick.

As to the question itself...Warforged for Tin Can robots, port in Pathfinder's Androids for Replicants. Work's already been done, and that saves you so much time, and that's what robots are for in the first place.

Kidding, robots are there to be awesome.