Why does fantasy dominate RPGs?

[tomBitonti]

[MENTION=4937]Celebrim[/MENTION] That matches what I've seen over the last decade. Hard SF seems definitely to have waned. While there are exceptions, they seem but a few.

There has been a large growth in the Young Adult area. A lot which is not SF, but there are strong SF gems scattered among the books. YA seems have relatively more interesting idea stories.

Do you think the same trends apply to short stories and novels? The quality of stories in "The Year's Best" anothologies (edited by Gardner Dozois) has been consistently high.

Thx!
TomB

 

[dbm]

WWGS was arguably a headspace leader in the industry there, for a while, even if it never 'won' in a $$$ sense, and didn't break into the mainstream.

It didn't become mainstream as a game, but arguably is spawned a new twist on the tropes in mainstream media, with the Underworld franchise and the TV series Being Human being examples of mixing different kinds of supernatural beings existing together in ways you hadn't seen before (shlok black-and-white comedies don't count...). And here was a short-lived official TV series about Vampire.

 

[CydKnight]

My uneducated guess is that it has something to do with Fantasy settings being completely different worlds/universes from our own while Sci-Fi may largely be considered the same world/universe and therefore at least remotely possible at sometime in the future. You can make up whatever you want in a Fantasy setting and it won't be wrong so literally anything is possible. This seems less true of Sci-Fi because we have theoretical sciences which many authors/creators will use as the basis of their creations resulting in more fact based criticism. This means Sci Fi may be more work because it seems like the typical audience wants Sci-Fi to be as realistic as possible. In a Fantasy Setting you can make up any old goofy story you want and it doesn't have to hold up to conventional wisdom, theoretical science, or even sanity.

 

[Tony Vargas]

It didn't become mainstream as a game, but arguably is spawned a new twist on the tropes in mainstream media, with the Underworld franchise and the TV series Being Human being examples of mixing different kinds of supernatural beings existing together in ways you hadn't seen before (shlok black-and-white comedies don't count...). And here was a short-lived official TV series about Vampire.

Kindred the Embraced flopped pretty horribly, yeah. But the paranormal-romance genre, that arguably started with Anne Rice's The Vampire Lestat, (though there had been more sympathetic and/or romantic portrayals of vampires before that, too - heck it had been an undercurrent since Bela Lugosi) has certainly full-on mainstreamed in the 21st century, if not jumped the shark with Twilight.

 

[dbm]

Sure. I was thinking more the melting pot, urban fantasy seen in WoD, Underworld, Dresden Files and so on.

WW sued over Underworld (though I don't think they won...)

 

[Jester David]

Why are fantasy RPGs more popular than science fiction?

As has been mentioned above, I think the range of technology and having to explain more of how things work is the big factor.
In fantasy you have magic, but explaining how that works is often explained in a class-specific "spellcasting" section. It's all self-contained in classes that want to opt in to how things are different. Everything else operates normally and matches both the fiction and history.

With science fiction you need to explain so much more. Off the top of my head you need to know:

• Projectile weapons or energy?
• FTL or not?
• If FTL, then warp engines or jump drives or hyperspace gates or wormholes? And is it just travel or is there FTL communication?
• If no FTL, then generational ships, cryofreeze, or are people limited to the solar system?
• Artificial gravity?
• Artificial intelligence?
• Genetic modification?
• Brain implants?
• ESP/ psionics?
• Time Travel?
• Teraforming?

I ran a game of FATE Eclipse Phase a while back and there was this huge learning curve as that's a much harder science fiction. No FTL, no scanning for life signs, no artificial gravity, and the like.

Artificial gravity is a big one. It's so common in television, but that's for budgetary reasons. But it'd really be super hard to do without massive spinning ships. Something like Firefly, which was pretty low tech, probably should have been a zero-g ship.

Licenced settings tend to be the easiest. You know what's possible in Star Trek. But that's subject to the tropes of that franchise. And not everyone likes those settings.

At the end of the day, players are the problem here. Every DM here knows the pains of getting players to read the damn handouts and world lore. Getting them to learn of the world. It never happens. But that's okay, as you can just start in a small village and slowly expand out to the rest of the universe.
That's harder with sci-fi. You want to begin with the ship. You can't start in a small space station solving local problems. The narrative equivalent is starting on the small mining vessel. But then you need to explain all this tech...

 

[Morrus]

You can't start in a small space station solving local problems.

Sure you can! I literally just did start on a space station solving local problems.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Every DM here knows the pains of getting players to read the damn handouts and world lore. Getting them to learn of the world. It never happens.

Pretty much never.

I ran 2 campaigns set in the same world, in 2 different RPG systems, for 2 different groups separated by a few hundred miles and a decade of time.

Almost everyone in the first group read the setting info, and had a blast. It was one of the best campaigns I ever ran, and it lasted a few years. The fun my players and I had was a big reason why I chose to revisit it with the second group.

Few players in the second group familiarized themselves with the setting, and that was a major factor in why the game folded after just a handful of sessions.

 

[Jester David]

Sure you can! I literally just did start on a space station solving local problems.

Yeah... I kinda regretted that as soon as I finished typing. I just couldn't think of a better example.

Starting small is trickier though. If things are too mundane, you're just doing a modern world reskinned. But you can't assume too much world lore either or make those elements essential to the plot.
It's much more being like a novelist, where you need to purposely build the world rather than assume knowledge of the conventions.

This or you just say "Star Trek rules with my own races and universe".

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

The Expanse actually started off with one character's plot line involving looking into some unusual occurrences on a small base on Ceres.

(Things escalated quickly.)