Island of Lost Games: Droids

(Sorry for the hiatus. Events happened.)

No, it has nothing to do with Star Wars. Droids is a fascinating and unique little roleplaying game which came out in 1982 from a company called Integral Games, in Arlington, Texas. The lead designer was Neil Patrick Moore, and according to the RPGGeek Web site Droids is his only title.

The game itself looks like a Traveller supplement: it's an 80-page stapled 5 1/2" by 8 1/2" black book, using the same clean interior layout format that Game Designers' Workshop used, and maybe five illustrations total. (In fact, my copy spent the past 35 years in the box of Traveller books.) It cost $7.95 new, at a time when a paperback novel was about a dollar cheaper.

So what's it about? Well, droids, mostly. In Droids, all the characters are intelligent robots in a post-apocalyptic world after a revolt of the machines wiped out humanity. Instead of rolling up a character with dice, you design one with a starting budget of twenty "Construction Points" (CP), which can be spent on things like locomotion systems, manipulating arms, weapons, powerplants, sensors, armor, and so forth.

There are some fun options in those lists of components: your locomotion can be wheels or legs — but can also be exotica like a helium balloon, a boat hull with a sail, or a tunnelling drill! Weapons include guns, lasers, and energy beams, as well as torpedo tubes for boat droids, and the "Fluid Gun," which is a giant Super-Soaker loaded with acid, freon, or glue.

So, yes, you can play The Terminator, marching around with a machine-gun arm, but you can just as easily be a glue-spraying balloonist droid, or a tunnelling mine-layer.

The characters exist in a lawless wasteland, and must cope with other droids, robot drones controlled by large computerized factories, natural and artificial hazards, and maybe a few deathtraps left behind by the long-gone humans. Combat is pretty straightforward, with a hit location system based on the size of the droid's components. So if your biggest module is a powerplant, that powerplant's going to get hit more often than smaller parts will. There's also a system to track wear and tear on components, which get more likely to break down if not properly maintained. It's all very clean and intuitive.

Droids does have the most unusual character advancement and/or treasure mechanic I've ever seen in a roleplaying game. When your character wins a fight against another droid, you can loot the wrecked body of your foe, detaching usable parts and bolting them onto yourself (or just carrying them to trade later). In D&D terms, the "monsters" become both the "treasure" and the "experience points" in a very direct and literal fashion. That right there makes this game something special. You're not just playing humans in robot costumes, you're playing machines, with a very different sense of identity than living organisms would have.

The game didn't include much gamemastering advice. There's maybe a page about possible droid societies, another page about random encounters, and a very simple three-page "dungeon" adventure set in a derelict factory. But in conjunction with something like Gamma World (or Metamorphosis Alpha . . .) it wouldn't be hard to create a much more elaborate setting in which the droids can explore, discover and solve mysteries, and perhaps build a society of their own.

As with so many relics from the Island of Lost Games, I never got the chance to play Droids. I did, however, include a tip of that hat to this obscure pioneer in an article I wrote for Steve Jackson Games's Pyramid magazine, called "CybEarth." It was about a distant planet inhabited entirely by robots after the human colonists were wiped out in a mysterious disaster. Most of the robots had created weird variations on the defunct human societies on their world, so I had Musketeer robots and Victorian robots and giant transforming-mecha Samurai robots. But one part of the planet was an anarchic wasteland where lawless feral robots roamed, fighting each other to survive. As in Droids, the survivors in that harsh part of the world were made of salvaged bits and pieces from defeated enemies. It was an homage that maybe half a dozen people could have noticed. 

Once again I ask the teeming millions out there: has anyone ever played Droids? It always seemed as though it would be a fun game, especially for a one-shot at a convention or the game store. Perhaps I'll make up some enemies and run a session some time.

(If you like stories featuring interesting nonhuman perspectives, buy my ebook Outlaws and Aliens!)

Comments

[Eric in Santa Fe]

I remember us playing Droids once or twice in Chicago, but we did not put the effort into it to form a real storyline. We really just exercised the game mechanics to see if it might be worth exploring more deeply.

I've returned to this game a few times to see if it would work as a casual camping iPhone app, but I haven't given it the effort it would require. It has a lot of originality, and I respect that.

[garrrrrrett]

This sounds like a cool game. Makes me want more of the Moravecs from Ilium/Olympos books by Dan Simmons.