Outsiders Thoughts About OA

[Drashner1]

This is an interesting comment;
"I could never rp there"
Of course the earliest parts of OA were originally set up as a roleplaying scenario; Big Ideas, Grand Vision by Anders Sandberg. That was more open-ended because it only really went up to the start of OA's First Federation.
If anyone was serious about open-ended roleplaying in OA, they should set up a scenario at the edge of the Outer Volumes, preferably interacting with unpredictable aliens or some bizarre blight. The fact that the Archailects are around to save the day is problematic for open-ended play. But bear in mind that just about every xenosophont empire that has ever existed in the Milky Way galaxy has vanished for one reason or another, and not even the Terragens are certain to persist.

The thing is is that the Archai aren't around to save the day in huge swaths of the setting. It seems to me that you could fit a lot of open-ended role play into a portion of the setting where the nearest archailect will take decades to ever show up, assuming it even bothers to do so.

I somewhat wonder if part of the issue (maybe a big part) is that people want all the cool tech toys that the transapients and archai either provide or have for themselves - but don't want any of the things that come with that in the setting - like the presence of transapients and archai that make humans seem like impotent bugs in comparison.

In this scenario, it's not literally the case that they can't RP in the setting - but that they can't do whatever they please with no limits or consequences. Although, I find it hard to believe that other RP universes don't have limits or consequences of their own.

Todd