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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9293805" data-attributes="member: 4937">It's not an accident you end up with fantasy grounded in a past that never happened.Running a game in a future or even modern setting is much more difficult.The first problem is the scale of information.  Setting the story before media, before even the printing press, keeps the scale of the information in the setting manageable.  You want books to be rare.  Books are problematic in an RPG because each one contains more content than your game.  What is in the library or even what is on the bookshelf is an unmanageable question.  Things get worse when you are always answering, "What is in the computer?" and "What is on the internet?"  Closely related to this is the speed of travel.  How far can a PC conceivably go?  In a fantasy setting you are generally confined to about 20 miles until teleport comes on line and starts to create problems.  In even a modern setting, anyone could conceivably be anywhere in the world in 24 hours.  In a setting like Star Wars, expand that to hundreds of inhabited worlds in 24 hours.  The scale of information needed by the GM to cope with this is just so much greater than in a fantasy setting.The other problem is that RPGs really need to be set in heroic ages, whereby heroic ages I mean times in which defensive technology tends to out weight offensive technology and narrative intervention to protect a hero is rare.  You want to set a game in a setting where a trained warrior with good equipment can believably defeat a dozen foes in battle - early bronze age or the Middle Ages are good.  Not only can you plausibly tell that story but the literature of the period will be infused with that idea.  Telling the same story in an age with 155mm artillery landing with ear shattering whoomps is a good deal harder both narratively and to game.  Artillery means random death, just like the muskets do in Karasawa's Seven Samurai.  If you are in any way trying to model weaponry, it's easier to imagine dodging the swing of an axe or blocking the thrust of a sword or armor turning aside an arrow other doing anything about being in range of a machine gun.  Plot protection is less baked into the system and more easily overlooked (in the form of hit points) than in a system with guns - which is the reason guns have always felt awkward in D&D.Of course, you can deal with this.  Star Wars deals with this by being a fantasy with blasters working more like crossbows, military technology being both advanced and yet less effective than WWII weaponry, and wizard-warriors using magic to defy all attacks.  It works fine in a don't think about it too hard manner.  Even then, it creates irritation as shown by the trope that the Storm Troopers can't hit their targets.  We see the plot protection and it bugs us.But the point is that it's all easier to deal with in a vaguely medieval fantasy.</blockquote>

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