What Is It About the Fantasy Genre Anyway?

[Desdichado]

I think part of it is just the natural intersection between people who like roleplaying games and people who like fantasy. I believe that in general a lot of people like those two things for the same reasons, and therefore if D&D hadn't been first, the RPG landscape would still be dominated by fantasy anyway.

 

[CruelSummerLord]

There's been a lot of great responses in this thread, and suffice it to say that I agree with most of them, such as fantasy being more forgiving and sword-to-sword combat being more epic than an impersonal gun battle. My two coppers are as follows...

-First off, fantasy fires my imagination and my creativity in ways that science fiction simply doesn't. The magic of the fairies, the legends of heroic knights, and forgotten secrets in hidden glens all appeal to me as a distraction from the stresses and frustrations of reality. When I want to deal with the real world, I go out and interact with it by living my life. But at times, when I'm depressed and burned out, focussing on the fantasy and magic of other worlds lets me get away from it, just for a little while, before I can come back ready to deal with it once again.

-Secondly, as many other posters have alluded, you can handwave or otherwise BS a lot of things in fantasy that you couldn't get away with in a science fiction or modern reality setting. Science fiction, especially, requires a lot of detail and precision to make it believable, especially if some of your players are themselves scientists or engineers.

While I might be able to BS some sort of semi-believable explanation in a comic book superhero setting (where being exposed to a massive amount of cosmic rays or gamma radiation will give you superpowers, instead of just killing you), I really don't want to have to do research to make such things more believable. As it is, I've been called out in my fantasy writing by stating that oil can burn to burn trolls, but it can't burn to power an engine. I find such things as chemistry and physics to be dreadfully boring, and I just can't bring myself to enjoy my work if I have to spend a lot of additional time on research that I don't want to do.

Whereas with fantasy, the audience knows going in that things are not going to be "realistic", such as the fact that humanity has existed for anywhere from 2,200 to more than 10,000-plus years without any appreciable technological advancement. No one will blink an eye if the protagonists travel three thousand years into the future and find that in the future, man is still using horses and wooden sailing-ships as his fastest methods of transportation, and arrows are the deadliest form of missiles available to a war leader.

As long as it's internally consistent and believable, such as with the traditional Vancian magic, or the system of magic as described in the Harry Potter series, a fantasy writer can write almost anything they want, and in many ways the audience can accept it. Again, you have to allow for things like personal taste, quality of the writing, internal consistency, and so forth, but for a guy like me fantasy is much easier both to read and to write.

Of course, if you like Doctor Who or Star Trek, then by all means enjoy it on whatever level you like, and more power to you, but sci-fi just doesn't hold the same appeal for a scientific illiterate like me. Strictly from a personal point of view, fantasy is a lot easier to get along with.

 

[pogre]

"God made all men, but Sam Colt made them equal."

This is it for me. Once guns hit the scene character death tends to go way up in combat intensive games. Running away is also a lot less viable. I like combat.

 

[Toben the Many]

This is it for me. Once guns hit the scene character death tends to go way up in combat intensive games. Running away is also a lot less viable. I like combat.

That is simply not true. d20 Modern has guns a plenty, but characters don't face any higher of a mortality rate. Indeed, at the higher levels, characters in d20 Modern are far likely to live compared to the higher levels of 3.5 D&D.

Another example - all of the Star Wars editions. Lots of guns. Very little death.

Running away, I have found, is much easier in a gun-game. Because the characters are fighting at range, it's far easier to slip out the back door or run down an alley. Running away while in the midst of a hand-to-hand melee, however, is harder.

 

[The Green Adam]

Another example - all of the Star Wars editions. Lots of guns. Very little death.

Star Trek as well, which is odd since a single hit can make a character disappear. Yeah, there's a big difference between, "you ten 10 hits points" and "you get a glowing green outline and now you ain't there no more." And yet, very few characters seem to die of anything short of their ship exploding and that too is very, very rare.

AD

 

[Toben the Many]

Let's start with re-examining the OP's most basic premise: fantasy isn't the dominant genre. D&D is the dominant game. There's a big distinction there. When you look at the runner-up games, those with sword-and-sorcery fantasy settings don't outnumber the rest. That's because most folks choose D&D when they want to play fantasy.

D&D being the dominant game certainly has something to do with it. However, that's not the one and only factor.

If it were just a matter of D&D being the dominant game, then we would have a very large, very popular Sci-Fi game out there as well. It wouldn't be dominant as D&D, but that Sci-Fi game would be as big as say...White Wolf's line?

But we don't have even that.

There's D&D on top. Then, coming in at a distant second is: White Wolf and Mutants and Masterminds.

The Sci-Fi crowd is divided up between Battletech, Star Wars, ShadowRun, etc.

However, I will say that there are strong indications that Dark Heresy might be the 2nd or 3rd best selling game out there right now. So, perhaps we'll see a sudden ascendency of Sci-Fi game out there. Who knows?

 

[Remathilis]

Another example - all of the Star Wars editions. Lots of guns. Very little death.

Didja play d20 Star Wars before Saga? We averaged 1 character every 4 sessions, before the DM started pulling punches and house-ruling things left-and-right. Vitality/Wound meant that any given attack (and especially as you gained levels) was a 5%-15% chance of instant death.

Granted, lightsabers were the cause of many of those deaths (occupational hazard of fighting sith) but we racked up a good number of "blaster-crit" death.

As to the OP, I tend to find that unless you're playing a very hard Sci-Fi or actual earth setting, Arthur Clarke's rules apply. Call it the Force, nanobot healing technology, Stimpacks, or Cure Light Wounds, they are all "magical" healing. Its easier to define the concept of "magic" (because by nature, magic cannot exist) than create a believable science-based equivalent (even if the science is impossible, see saber, light).

The Doctor: Must be a spatio-temporal hyperlink.
Mickey Smith: What's that?
The Doctor: No idea, I just made it up. Didn't want to say "Magic Door".

 

[Felon]

D&D being the dominant game certainly has something to do with it. However, that's not the one and only factor.

If it were just a matter of D&D being the dominant game, then we would have a very large, very popular Sci-Fi game out there as well. It wouldn't be dominant as D&D, but that Sci-Fi game would be as big as say...White Wolf's line?

But we don't have even that.

The rest of my long screed went on to explain why there's no wildly popular sci-fi, or wildly popular anything besides D&D. There's no sci-fi game with a reward system that approaches D&D's. When you kill a bunch of stromtroopers in Star Wars, what do you get? Are you going to use their weapons and armor? Sell empire gear at the local weapon shop? Loot their corpses for credits? Probably none of the above.

Who else is out there making a whole-hearted effort to build that element into their games? Not many. The closest I can think of would be games like Shadowrun, where you get paid to do jobs and then, if you're lucky, you get to go shopping afterwards. A lot of games fixate on more lofty, intangible qualities, which leaves many players wondering where the goodies are. Even a devout role-player can enjoy the niftyness of swag.

 

[GSHamster]

That is simply not true. d20 Modern has guns a plenty, but characters don't face any higher of a mortality rate. Indeed, at the higher levels, characters in d20 Modern are far likely to live compared to the higher levels of 3.5 D&D.

The point is that modern games like that tend to stretch belief beyond the breaking point, and that's why people don't play them. The uber-high survival rate feels wrong. It's like the character is surviving because of the power of plot, rather than because he's a badass.

 

[Darrin Drader]

The point is that modern games like that tend to stretch belief beyond the breaking point, and that's why people don't play them. The uber-high survival rate feels wrong. It's like the character is surviving because of the power of plot, rather than because he's a badass.

I don't really buy that argument. If modern games stretch belief that far, then so too do cop shows, 24, action movies, etc. There's a whole popular genre out there that involves gun play and is on week after week, yet people don't seem to complain that belief has been stretched too far.

Aside from that, swords and axes are deadlier than bullets. A bullet will punch a hole through a person while an axe or sword cuts into a person, often cutting entire parts of the body off. The D&D explanation that a character goes up in HP as they do in level because they learn how to move so as to avoid taking the brunt of a hit works just as well when they're trying to dodge bullets.