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January 04, 2004

Robots in D&D Land

I like to analyze things, but just as the oyster needs a grain of sand around which to produce a pearl, I need some structure to focus my ramblings.

When I was a kid I played Dungeons and Dragons. The game was okay, but the parts I enjoyed were coming up with characters and drawing maps.



Appropos of nothing, how would a robot do if it landed in D&D land?
Characters in D&D have six attributes that define their health, strength, etc. The values can range from 3 to 18, by rolling a die three times.

Below is a chart that shows what would happen if a robot and I (as an exemplar human being) were placed in that world. The values are somewhere between averages and potentials for both humans and humanoid robots.

	Human	Robot
Strength	11	16
Intelligence	12	5
Wisdom	12	3
Dexterity	9	3
Constitution	10	18
Charisma	10	5

• Strength: Robots can be pretty strong, what with their pistons and motots and such. Not all robots are strong, but given enough power, they could crush us.
• Intelligence: Robots are dang stupid. They have more intelligence than rocks, but not much.
• Wisdom: Here's the one. Wisdom, as a simplified definition, means generalizing about past experiences to come up with lessons of life. Robots can't do squat here, and this is probably one of the most interesting areas of AI now.
• Dexterity: There are robots that can crack eggs now, but they're still pretty clumsy. Have you ever seen a mountain goat traipsing across the side of a cliff? Robots have a long way to go.
• Constitution: Now, I'm going to die, but a robot doesn't ever have to. They can be 'healed' indefinitely, and their metal skin merely dents whereas mine bleeds.
• Charisma: I claimed rather average values for myself, but a robot is as charming as a tinker toy, which is saying something, but not much. Some people would rather hang out with robots than people.

So, the robot, if treated like a person or monster, would be the equivalent of some kind of brute, perhaps an autistic football player

There are also values for things like 'hit points' but that doesn't seem necessary to include here.

Although, the issue of 'alignment' is interesting. D&D characters have, if I remember correctly, two values to indicate their moral stance: Lawful/Neutral/Chaotic and Good/Neutral/Evil.

Most people would be neutral-neutral, I suppose, but what about robots? Can they even have a sense of ethics, provided their wisdom is so low? On the one hand, they're not selfish, but they don't have a sense of the greater good either.

If we could actually make the proverbial 'evil robot' (I wish there were an actual proverb that had evil robots in it) then that would be cool.

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Posted by mslaybau at January 4, 2004 06:38 AM

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