Collaborative Worldbuilding Threads

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by tshiggins

It also makes it less "space-opera-ish," which may not be a bad thing. However, if one includes uplifts, as well as variant human types, then those can substitute. I've already started to push for uplifts, myself.

Well, uplifts and parahumans are too familiar. They basically mean no First Contact stories, no xenoanthropologists trying to meld into huge foreign cultures which aren't listed in our libraries and nets, no surprising lifeforms.

As for being space-operatic:
In a way, I think the idea of a non-operatic, THS-related setting (while we're at it) with close alien contact has been underexplored in gaming. Eclipse Phase aliens seem to be too distant, Orion's Arm is doesn't seem very gameable due to the main movers and shakers being all transapient of several orders.

But I do have to admit that I'm (for not sure how long) in a stance which is very sympathetic to space-operatic elements in new settings.

Originally Posted by tshiggins

Same, here. If we wind up with single-government planets, I'll bail. Fortunately, that doesn't seem to be the trend.

I agree with this whole statement, and it's why I think 2300AD (despite its dated origins and other problems) offers the best space sci-fi setting ever created. It was so wide-open, and the frontier planets felt, well, like frontiers.

The shared space setting still has a ways to go, though, and it could result in some good things. If the colony planets are widely dispersed, have competing (and conflicting) multiple colonizers for each one, and the gate networks provide connections only between them (and Earth), with plenty of habitat systems only reachable with ships, then it could be okay.

Gate control was going towards a joint-force monopoly of some sort, wasn't it?