Playing a Robot [Fate Core]

[drawingfreak]

I'm not sure if this is the right forum, or even the right prefix as I am the GM posting for the player's character, so apologies in advance.

We are about to dive into a science fiction Fate Core game Saturday, and one of my players expressed an interest in exploring what it means to be a sentient/sapient/whatever robot. He wants to be able to have a spaceship body that he can transfer into as well as be able to make copies of his mind --or files--, giving him express permission to essentially clone himself if he has access to additional bodies. The whole character concept is about exploring identity if he is capable to doing such things.

How in the [EXPLETIVE DELETED] is this going to be expressed mechanically!? (I'm seeing a LOT of stunts and refresh here.)

[Eisenheim]

I think you'll mostly want to do this with aspects. To start with, only one body should be able to act at any given time 'in scene', unless he spends a fate point for another narratively present body to do something as well. He probably should have a high concept that speaks to his robotic/AI nature, possibly another that speaks to his ability to transfer consciousness into other bodies, and, if he really wants to explore that, a trouble dealing with identity problems.

One effect of this concept that I'm sure seems scary is that he will essentially be immortal, but that's not really a problem in fate. Player characters really only die when they choose to, since they can concede to avoid death.

I think the best way to make this work is to establish that his various bodies are not constantly linked, but rather synch themselves periodically, that way he can have the narrative of a distributed consequence, but still be one PC among others in each scene.

Then, let him take stunts for whatever benefits he wants his being a robot to have in conflicts and challenges.

The spaceship body could probably be stunt that declares he doesn't need a vehicle for space travel, as long as mechanically detailed space travel or combat isn't going to be part of the game. If spaceships have stats, that may need to be more expensive.

As long as the rest of your players have powerful aspects that come with similarly fantastic narrative permissions, you don't need to charge him any refresh simply for being a robot/spaceship/AI thing

[Beta Centauri]

Apart from issues of scale, this should work like anything else in Fate: it's primarily made up of Aspects, and the power of Invokes is balanced by Compels and other downsides required to power those Invokes.

Just because it's a spaceship doesn't mean that it has to have a huge amount of things it can do. Serenity, for example, is just a truck in space, really. It moves people around, but it doesn't do things like travel through time, or shoot things, or aid research.

The other characters should be required for the ship to achieve its full potential, enabling it to do more things, but not giving one player particular power.

I like to give players whatever they want, but if I don't see how to do it, I ask them to help me. Have you tried that?

[woodlandkammao]

Sorry, i think my post is glitching

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