Have you ever seen one used in a game or story? Are they a cool worldbuilding idea for a fantasy setting or are they completely retarded? Surprised these things aren’t used more often for large-scale worlds since they give you metric fuckload of landmass to work with and no singular civilization is ever gonna hope to map out and explore all several billion square miles of habitable land on it
>>98438726Nobody really puts too much thought into the galactic scale of fantasy settings since land travel is usually so slow campaigns don't exist outside of a single country sized location anyway.It would be one of those things where you reveal it and your players would just go "Huh that's pretty cool I guess" and then never think about it ever again.
>>98438726>Are they a cool worldbuilding idea for a fantasy setting or are they completely retarded?Megastructures as a setting seem cool but they're kind of gimmicky and shitty when you think it through in a story perspective.Are we in a setting where we can travel other worlds? Well then the megastructure is just another world, albeit quirkier than most, amidst an infinite expanse.Are we locked to the world?Well now we're just playing a normal low-tech game with the background knowledge that the world isn't a sphere.It's just kind of a nothingburger, Discworld taking place on a Disc isn't what made it interesting.Not an Alderson disc btw but the original Ringworld is probably the closest to what you're thinking of. If anything, probably better too because something like an alderson disc is kind of retarded as far as megastructures go.
>>98438726Fantasy story Worth the Candle used something vaguely similar. (There was also a mirror universe on the other face of the disk, but it never got fleshed out in the story.)
>>98438747fpbp. Ringworld spends chapter upon chapter reinforcing this exact thing.
>>98438726Why not just have an infinite flat earth? Will the protagonists ever venture out into the uninhabitable zone?
>>98438726Megastructures are bullshit. We, who live on a planet, imagine the sci-fi future as "planet, but bigger." But that's nonsense, because between now and then, we'd necessarily have to develop the technology to be an interstellar spacefaring civilization. Once you've got the means to produce breathable air and food in a closed loop on a ship, what further use do you have for dwelling in open-air settings on planets, whether natural or artificial? The future is fleets of self-sustaining ships that strip-mine star systems.
>>98441349Or, you know, as plasma computation substrates living inside the stars themselves.
>>98438726A TTRPG doesn't need a world this big, the cultural and geographical breadth of an average campaign is smaller than a single country.
>>98441349living on spaceships is gay, give me habitable planets or fuck off
>>98441349>once you can seal yourself into your gamer pod forever, what use will you have for an open sky?
>>98441349It's pretty stupid to declare what future will be like with such confidence. Even if your view on the future in itself is sensible enough, smart people with a solid base of knowledge by the standards of their time have made grossly mistaken - but also sensible in the context of their time - predictions about future throghout history.
>>98438726must be hell to keep away shit flying through it
>>98441349It gets more interesting when you consider the effects of relativistic speeds. If you can reach 99.9% the speed of light you're halfway to everywhere in the universe. From your perspective, you'll have made it across the whole galaxy in a few years (mostly during the acceleration and deceleration periods), even as your point of origin experiences tens of thousands of years. So the galactic society will have a cadence and rhythm based on life at relativistic speeds, individual planets might have very high populations but they're ultimately just a sideshow.
alderson disks are so retarded they make me angry
