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Message: <blockquote data-quote="prosfilaes" data-source="post: 6416676" data-attributes="member: 40166">It's pretty much straight up heroic fantasy; a magical society spends a millennium working towards the birth of the Chosen One, whose his family gets killed and who is exiled to the savages, where he rides the wild animals to impress them and learns the gift of prophecy, then leads them swords in hand back to defeat those who killed his family and deposed him from his rightful place. And yet, I suspect most of the people who would blithely label Star Wars fantasy would object to my labeling Dune fantasy.Wizards are pretty common in science fiction, from Star Trek's Q to The Rowan's T1s to E. E. Smith's Lensmen. You're cutting out a lot of what's understood as the genre by that definition. And it's a little suspicious that the statement is always about Star Wars, a popular piece, instead the more thought provoking discussion of stuff like Dune.and Stranger in a Strange Land. In the Dewey Decimal System, cookbooks covering Mediterranean cultures go in 641.591 and African in 641.596. That distinction was made because there are sufficient differences to warrant a different classification, and yet somehow it was done without defining one set or the other to not be cookbooks.It's fine to classify works. The problem is when you then want to take a term that has a general understanding and attach a category to that term that excludes much of what's understood to be in that category. It's easy to say that Star Wars isn't hard science fiction, and uncontroversial, because the phrase "hard science fiction" actually is a decent fit to the concept you're offering.I don't understand. You seem to be stating as objective fact the comparison of two incomparables. If we're talking by size, roleplaying games as a group are hardly anywhere near speculative fiction; on LibraryThing, the top 8 books are speculative fiction (all fantasy), whereas the most held RPG book (PHB 3.5) is in position 8,317, and there are 1.5 million uses of the tag "fantasy" and 74,000 for RPG.  I don't know that I can claim that Monopoly has always outsold roleplaying games, but I bet there haven't been more then four months in the last 40 years where RPGs beat that one board game for gross sales. Including storygames takes a tiny genre of games and makes it a bit larger.</blockquote>

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