That doesn't seem like a very deep difference - just slightly different mechanics for character improvement.
What is distinctive about fantasy RPGing? Or sci fi?
Tony Vargas
Legend
Contrasting D&D and Traveller, sure D&D characters advance in personal power - exp, magic items - Traveler characters just get older, and, maybe, richer.
In fantasy, personal power is, well, personal. In science-fiction, it's not. A central tennet of science is universality. In fantasy, it's exceptionalism.
Although the D&D magic items aren't personal. Only Arthur can wield Excalibur; only Conan can use the Heart of Ahriman; but in D&D anyone can use the firebrand sword, or the periapt of life protection, provided they're of the right class.
This seems to be a consequence of the "looting" aspect of D&D; another respect in which D&D departs from both "epic/romantic" and S&S fantasy tropes (if you count Hour of the Dragon as S&S).
Aenghus
Explorer
Both science fiction and fantasy are huge bodies of work embracing multitudes, with a vast plethora of subgenres within each. Neither has a hard border and there are works of fiction nestled within their squishy intersection.
Subjectively I tend to have higher standards for science fiction, which in it's convention form explains it's own setting rules implicitly or explicitly. I consider works that keep their own rules while successfully telling a story as "better" than those who bend or ignore their own rules in favour of their plot.
It depends on the medium as well. I prefer written works of SF to be self-consistent. Fantasy often doesn't explain it's setting rules, or implies but doesn't come out and state them. This makes it easier to parachute in arbitrary stories into fantasy, at the potential cost of damaging the setting for those who care about such details.
Detective fiction is another strong genre, where there are rules/guidelines that fans expect to be followed.
I've come to accept that on-screen spaceships will move at the speed of plot, as on TV and in cinemas the primary goal is to entertain the audience, consistency is a much lower priority.
Bodysnatcher/Doppelganger/NuCylon/Replicants is another issue that tends to bug me, as while they tend to be framed as science fiction, horror tropes take over as they are one at the same time impossible to difficult to distinguish from humans *and* physically and/or mentally superior to them. PICK ONE. The more different they are to baseline humans the easier they are to pick out and the easier a definitive test would be. If they can tolerate liquid nitrogen without freezing their fingers solid, that's a big baseline difference.
Characters with signature items are common in pulp media, it's a quick and easy way to thumbnail a character, from Indiana Jones to Luke Skywalker. It's not universal, Conan isn't sentimental about his weapons and uses a great variety of them, fancy or improvised.
Subjectively I tend to have higher standards for science fiction, which in it's convention form explains it's own setting rules implicitly or explicitly. I consider works that keep their own rules while successfully telling a story as "better" than those who bend or ignore their own rules in favour of their plot.
It depends on the medium as well. I prefer written works of SF to be self-consistent. Fantasy often doesn't explain it's setting rules, or implies but doesn't come out and state them. This makes it easier to parachute in arbitrary stories into fantasy, at the potential cost of damaging the setting for those who care about such details.
Detective fiction is another strong genre, where there are rules/guidelines that fans expect to be followed.
I've come to accept that on-screen spaceships will move at the speed of plot, as on TV and in cinemas the primary goal is to entertain the audience, consistency is a much lower priority.
Bodysnatcher/Doppelganger/NuCylon/Replicants is another issue that tends to bug me, as while they tend to be framed as science fiction, horror tropes take over as they are one at the same time impossible to difficult to distinguish from humans *and* physically and/or mentally superior to them. PICK ONE. The more different they are to baseline humans the easier they are to pick out and the easier a definitive test would be. If they can tolerate liquid nitrogen without freezing their fingers solid, that's a big baseline difference.
Characters with signature items are common in pulp media, it's a quick and easy way to thumbnail a character, from Indiana Jones to Luke Skywalker. It's not universal, Conan isn't sentimental about his weapons and uses a great variety of them, fancy or improvised.
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For me, Mission Impossible (TV series) is an important reference from my youth. (I know not Sci-Fi) A party feel with tension about whether the plot works - will they be discovered? The characters are definitely vulnerable in a way that, say, the A-team never were (not that I watched it much).
This thread has got me thinking about doing a Sci-Fi version of LotR...
Time for a Babylon 5 rewatch then!
Considering that ST:TOS was sold to the network as a "Wagon train to the Stars", and the Firefly crew would have been very much at home in a western, yes.
Some of the perceived differences are due to the rules systems used. A lot of fantasy games use character classes and level because D&D did. Traveller set the SciFi tone with a mostly class-less system where characters fill roles based on skills acquired during the pre-game character development system. GURPS uses the same character system for all the genres.
Joerg Baumgartner
Explorer
While I don't think that entitities like the Christian god should interact with a SF setting, an equivalent of polytheistic divinities like the elves of Iceland or the spirits of Japanese stories might be feasible in a soft SF setting which has distinct but overlapping realities, and entities reaching or even passing through these realities.
In a setting where most matter is made up by nanomachines controlled by a collective command, artificial or downloaded intelligences may act like such divinities. In a setting allowing magic (e.g. psi-talents), those who have those talents may interact with the programming. The Force in Star Wars is something like a collective network of nano-machines or symbiotic organisms that may offer perception or even affect phsyical change in the world around them. There is no personalized god, but an impersonal one.
There are quite a few settings which equate the unknown risks of FTL space with Lovecraftesque monsters, even settings like Alan Dean Foster's Homanx, or more common in various space fantasy games.
They aren't shown as having a tangible physical effect, although they are acknowledged as powerful memes or philosophies that control their adherents. Which isn't that dissimilar from former military believing in clear hierarchies and execution of received commands to the limits of the doctrine.
The Mindjammer setting with its technologically created mind collective uses this meme effect as major plot point. The feedback from adherents to such memes must be vetted to preserve the mind collective, and at least in the sample novel, that is the job of the player characters.
Some of the exiled and isolated memes include high virtues of our society...
If the gods were powerful entities with super-technology or capable of altering the reality through instinctive means feeding off something provided by their adherents, would you still say that this is fantasy, or can this retain the SF label?
I don't claim to understand polytheism, but some divinities there may be as mortal and flawed as the people looking up to them for guidance. A meme which can make its adherents into suicidal or at least fatalistic fighters doesn't have to be a religion - think various warriors' codes of honor, or ordinary soldiers commanded to make a last stand to cover some other military effort - basically is indistinguishable from a religion, and if the meme has a group controlling its distribution, you might call them its priesthood, or you might call them its pantheon.
If you use other species than humans or near-humans, other such concepts may come into play. As soon as there is the possibility of bleeding the core of one's individuality into a hive sapience, or to establish a back-up or blueprint of oneself in such an institution, the regard for the individual existence may change significantly. You may call this transhumanism, or you may call this the wood-elves one-ness with the song of the forest. The Navee of Pandora sit pretty much in this transition from fantasy or religion to modestly hard SF. The Edenist culture in Hamilton's Night's Dawn trilogy is rather close to that, too, and allows expeditions into the hive mind encountering mind copies of lost family described pretty much the same way as Cabell's Jürgen.
A lot of tropes can be deconstructed and re-clad to serve in a different kind of setting. The minimum law frontier trope is typically associated with the Wild West, but applies just the same to Viking Age adventuring and settling. This is a typical trope in various forms of Space Opera without the need to include colts or stetsons.
David Weber's Honorverse is basically taking the tropes of Napoleonic era naval warfare into space, and then flanges on various other tropes, leaving the stories of C.S. Forester behind for themes like religious fanaticism, oppressive creeds, slavery and toxic transhumanism.
The world-changing stuff in SF rarely has absolute morality, but then quite a lot of the more nuanced fantasy doesn't have clear-cut good or evil. While we find forces of seemingly mindless or thoughtless destruction objectionable, we can easily put ourselves into the mindset of a farmer applying pesticides to promote growth only of those crops he finds desirable. When your perspective is on the receiving side, such a procedure is pure evil. When your perspective is on the side of the farmer desperately trying to avoid a famine, there is nothing evil about this.
Knowing the motivation of the farmer doesn't make his actions any less harmful to you if you are playing the vermin. It might not be absolute evil any more, but still your survival and that of your community depends on stopping the farmer.
As much as I prefer nuanced fantasy settings without moral absolutes, I prefer SF settings that allow exploration of various different ideas. I would love to play in Bujold's Vorkosigan universe, and I wouldn't mind the militarism of Weber's Honorverse of Elizabeth Moon's Serrano setting much for some adventuring in those sandboxes.
I still have to play in the Mindjammer setting. It isn't a setting I would run, but I'd like to experience it a bit.
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