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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Grendel_Khan" data-source="post: 8447092" data-attributes="member: 7028554">Apologies if this has been discussed in detail in past threads, but something I've wondered about for years is the prominence of fantasy as a genre in the TTRPG hobby.I think this directly ties into what we're talking about re: D&D's popularity, but I could be wrong. And maybe there are easy answers I'm just missing. But I can't work it out, because, with very rare exceptions (Game of Thrones, the LotR movies) fantasy barely registers in pop culture, and yet it's the overwhelming default in RPGs. It feels to me like there's a chicken-and-egg dilemma here.Is it the case that:-People who are super into fantasy are drawn to D&D, which has become synonymous with fantasy, feeding its popularity?-D&D's popularity draws people to fantasy, because D&D is synonymous with the genre?It could be both at once, obviously, but I wonder if, in addition to what [USER=7027139]@loverdrive[/USER] was saying about D&D being the normie term for all TTRPGs, it's also in some ways a universal reference point for fantasy, a genre that otherwise lives mostly in books and video games, and rarely achieves the kind of pop culture ubiquity that sci-fi, for example, often has. Is part of D&D's gravitational pull and brand momentum the fact that it started in the 70's as sort of a safe haven for fantasy fans--the dweebiest of dweebs, long before nerd culture was absorbed into the mainstream, and back when even Trekkies could look down on them in their cultural ghetto--and was just never really challenged as a way of establishing a specific kind of fandom-based identity. It's a less fragile fandom, in a lot of ways, than being a Star Wars fan or even a LotR fan. It's basically saying "I'm a fantasy fan." And time and culture has just cemented that unique relationship, making fantasy fandom and identity inextricable from D&D fandom and identity, to the point that you literally can't separate the two now.Not a terribly great example, but the Pixar movie Onward is set in a fantasy version of modern day, but it doesn't actually play on fantasy tropes. It plays almost exclusively (IMO) on D&D tropes. There's a damn gelatinous cube scene and everything!Anyway, that's something that's been bugging me--whether D&D essentially created and sustained the modern version of fantasy fandom, or whether fantasy fandom sustains and grows D&D, for all the reasons above (relative paucity of mainstream fantasy content, historical associations with D&D, etc.).Or is it much simpler and more mechanical: Fantasy is the most natural fit for TTRPGs, because guns, spaceships, and technology of all kinds make it generally harder for GMs and adventure writers to anticipate what players might do, and most gaming is based on anticipating, railroading, etc (no judgments there, just seems like an obvious baseline to me). Same for full-on superheroes, which, if all things were equal and TTRPGs reflected the larger culture, would completely dwarf all other gaming genres.</blockquote>

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