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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TwinBahamut" data-source="post: 4354215" data-attributes="member: 32536">I know I am not the person you addressed this to, but let me answer anyways.Star Wars is a classic fairy-tale set in a Sci-Fi setting.Honestly, I think a very large number of people out there, probably the vast majoirty, consider Sci-Fi to be a type of setting rather than a type of story, and under that definition Star Wars is unquestionably Science Fiction. Star Wars is defined as a Science fiction re-imagining of a classic Arthurian fairy-tale, and falls completely outside the realm of Fantasy as a type of setting.Overall, I have never agreed with any kind of definition of "science fiction" that would exclude Star Wars. At the same time, I wouldn't ever claim that Science Fiction and Fantasy have ever been anything but two different "flavors" for the exact same genre, two settings which tend to have a lot of overlap. Trying to make any kind of distinction between the two, other than a generic "Science Fiction has spaceship and robots, while fantasy has armored knights, castles, and wizards" can be a very messy process, particularly when you run into a setting built around artificially created cyborgs who use magic and fight alongside knights in order to defeat computer viruses, robots, and dragons (I'm not making this up, it actually exists, and it includes Dragonborn-like dragon people, too). I guess, the only important thing is "what is the setting trying to present itself as", rather than anything else. Star Wars presents itself as Science Fiction, not Fantasy or an explicit blend of the two, so it is Science Fiction.To get back to the original subject of the thread, I don't think anything in 4E is "far out" at all. Honestly, 4E's basic setting is incredibly tame and perhaps overly traditional compared to most of the stuff I run into in videogames and anime. In fact, I would say that there is nothing "far out" about Tielfings and Dragonborn at all, at least not when compared to even half of the "classic" D&D monsters. Compared to a Dragonborn, which is essentially just an anthropomorphized dragon (neither half of that is uncommon in the least, and even the specific combination is common enough in of itself), bizarre creatures like Beholders and Githyanki are the ones that are out of place.As a comparison... How would a talking animal as a default player race rank on the "far out" spectrum? If 4E included talking animals as a default PHB character option, there would probably be a number of people accusing it as "weird", "untraditional", and "anime", and lament the loss of a "traditional" race they might have replaced (lets use Half-Elves). However, talking animals (and anthropomorphized animals) are probably the single most common form of non-human creature in the entire history of human storytelling, vastly outranking elves by several orders of magnitude, and half-elves by several more. Someone claiming that talking animals are "untraditional" or "far out" would be making a severe mistake; primarily mistaking a single, extremely limited fantasy tradition (previous editions of D&D), for the entirety of the fantasy tradition and fantasy fandom. I think complaints about how "far out" 4E is are based in similar poor logic.</blockquote>

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