Why does fantasy dominate RPGs?

[schnee]

Speaking as someone who absolutely loved Shadowrun, Traveller, and Gamma World back in the day, I think the pervasiveness of information technology has ruined sci-fi.

Like the jokes about cell phones and movie plots - having wifi, RFID, cameras, smart phones, GPS, motion tracking, and smart enough algorithms at everyone's disposal has made all the fun sci-fi story telling of the past kind of retro.

Sneaking around? Breaking and entering? All the 'juicy' targets that are fun to use as adversaries are now impenetrable. To do them with any verisimilitude means spending so much time investigating and hacking and doing confidence games that the 'break in, have combat, get the MacGuffin, get away' model is kind of broken. It's why nobody ever really played Deckers in Shadowrun, because it became a completely different game that involved a boring set of skills.

It also means there is so much *complexity* in that style of game now. It's not about avoiding a camera, distracting a guard, and cracking a lock - it's about foiling an interconnected system of hundreds of cameras all with facial recognition, doors keyed to specific RFID badges and biometrics. Imagine what happens in 20 years? 200? Who wants to make rules for that, let alone do all the adjudication?

Let's face it, most of our RPGs were just a game that let us act out our favorite movies and books from when we were kids. The Buck Rogers / Star Wars swashbuckling model is dead. What sort of hand-waving and 'world building' would you have to do to make the actual Death Star as easy to sneak around in as it was in the 80's?

It's really odd to read Shadowrun and realize it's one of those 'Popular Mechanics' issues from the 1930's that got the future hilariously wrong.

Fantasy is a lot simpler, and you can hand-wave away things that aren't realistic.

 

[MichaelSomething]

I, for one, would be willing to play an RPG based off of Seinfeld!

Make a DC 20 shopping check or NO SOUP FOR YOU!!!!!!!

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I would be a Cleric of Festivus with a puffy shirt and mastery of his domain.

Yadda, yadda, yadda...

 

[Bannister Nicholas]

My Answer: Speed and Simplicity.

Sci-fi is often about speed & complexity, terabytes of data, at the speed of light.

Speed: It needs fast choices and fast result to get that feel, lasers, automatic computers reacting for you to enable shields, many things that require instantaneous reactions. Picking up a die, rolling it and working out the math, just doesn't give that feeling of speed.
Complexity: To do a task correctly, or seemingly correctly we need training, to be able to roleplay as a technician, there needs to be an understanding of the tools, machines and how they work, to gamify those aspects, reduces the complexity, which reduces the feeling of immersion, makes it harder to 'get into character'

but Fantasy is almost on par, and far simpler: shooting a bow, or swinging a sword can take the same time as rolling a die, casting a spell, the same time as looking through your spells lists, and choosing which one to use, there is a fair balance between the time take to perform the action both in game and in reality.
Simplicity: We live in the future of medieval society, we are far advanced, and so its nice to slow down and worry only about simpler times. Its easier to cope with a game when the game is simpler than our own lives.

Think of it this way: The Smart man, playing a dumb character, vs the dumb man playing a smart character.

Even sci-fi games are more just a 'skin' over a fantasy engine.

 

[tomBitonti]

But, while a car is more complex than a cart, driving a cart -- with a possibly unruly nag for a horse, over uneven, rutty, roads, is likely a harder thing to do. And truly fighting well, I wager, is pretty complicated. Imagining that it is simple is probably easy because of a lack of knowledge.

I agree that modern events can occur very quickly, and that does seem hard to capture in RPGs. For example, gunfights can use a score of bullets in just a few seconds, and be over.

Yeah, a lot of sci-fi is reskinned fantasy.

I don't thing that folks of any era were stupid. The had less effective tools and less knowledge, but that is a different thing.

Thx!
TomB

 

[Bannister Nicholas]

But, while a car is more complex than a cart, driving a cart -- with a possibly unruly nag for a horse, over uneven, rutty, roads, is likely a harder thing to do. And truly fighting well, I wager, is pretty complicated. Imagining that it is simple is probably easy because of a lack of knowledge.

Having done both, its of my opinion that racing a car at 90mph requires far higher reflexes and mental agility than a runaway horse and cart, also the car will run itself into a tree, but at least the horse 'might' try to avoid the tree, As to fighting, your point about imagining it is whats important here, I can imagine my character swinging a sword, parry, swing, parry, stab, bleeding, death.. but imagine rebuilding the circuitry of a robot? imagine piloting a plane? often you hear of professionals complaining how wrong movies get it when they try to portray realistic yet complex tasks.

I don't thing that folks of any era were stupid. The had less effective tools and less knowledge, but that is a different thing.

Appologies, I did not mean my quote to suggest that folks were stupid, I meant to say that like a clever or smart player can far more easily roleplay a slower dim-witted character, than a slower player can roleplay as a genius, that roleplaying simpler times, where math, timing, tasks relying on intelligence were far rarer, would mean that a modern education allows the player the ability to think in terms of fantasy & medieval history, lifting a Stone door with a lever? forced marching for a day? fighting foes with simple tactics? ambushing some goblins?, simpler and easier than it is for modern man portraying a futuristic war veteran, could roleplay tactical decision making, reprogramming war-bots, re-routing power couplets, juryrigging auto-pilots while aiming a las-cannon at the shield generator panel of a Boreas gunship.

 

[Derren]

As it was already said several times I think fantasy is so common as RPG because it lacks authority and can easily be made into a kitchen sink as you can add pretty much anything without anyone asking many questions.
Lets face it, most RPG characters are murderhobos who go around and kill people. That is easy to justify in an fantasy setting where absolute evil exist which can be murdered without repercussions and where there is no authority which prevents the PCs from murdering people. Its pretty much lawless. While there are some Sci-Fi settings which emulate that it gets harder to explain how the PCs can walk around murdering things with all the surveillance possible. In a fantasy setting the PCs do not have to worry about facial recognition software or leaving behind their genetic informations.

 

[Lwaxy]

I think it is more that with SciFi, most people know and want to play the big stuff Star Wars, Star Trek, maybe Babylon 5 or Dr. Who. Finding a group for other things is much more tricky, as "normal" casual players want to play what they saw on TV. In fantasy, no matter what fantasy world I give them, it is very similar to what they know from LotR etc. Unless of course I mix it up totally, what I only do with long time players.

If you look at the not-so-common fantasy settings - Talislanta, Finsterland etc - it is hard to get players for as well.

 

[TBeholder]

To answer the original question, it depends on flexibility in adventure types on the player side and cloning vs. licensing on the designer side.

What other genres there are? Horror, space opera, cyberpunk, superheroes, wacky melodrama, detective, spy, military, post-apocalypse.

• Fantasy: allows variety from H&S to court politics. As demanding or lax (thud and blunder, etc) as you want.
• Horror: Seems to allow too little variety in adventures. And usually easily combined with other genres with or without minimal adaptation - you may have a haunted castle or haunted spaceship, inbred cannibal tribe or cannibalistic mutant outcasts, etc.
• Space opera: actually pretty close, but implicitly demands more attention to details. Ever-present, but RPG isn't for the crowd who wants flashy special effects, nor perhaps most trekkies (last seen, they were squabbling over which version of a collectivist utopia is "TRÜ"… again). Surprisingly few popular and playable settings to port - Star Wars is there, but it's © and was made for what, 4 or 5 different cores already?
• Cyberpunk: never particularly popular nor unpopular. Has fairly high starting barrier in RP, setting and crunch - compared to "there are 5 orcs, start smashing".
• Tights&Capes: are here, but once pieces of the bubble flew apart and fell to the cold wet earth, it seems to be of medium to low popularity even in Atlantic Lemuria, contrary to the advertisement. And traditionally seen as low-brow by almost everyone - starting with the authors and publishers (see superdickery.com for examples). Seems to allow too little variety in adventures, despite obvious actual possibilities.
• Wacky melodrama: practically best represented by anime, and Maid alone seems to cover most of demand. Because it's one of those things more for watching than participation. Also, combined with others easily enough that it doesn't really need any specialization.
• Detective: Has relatively high starting barrier in RP and crunch is not very good for it - that's just not what most RPGT aim for or are good at. Seems to allow too little variety in adventures. Thus tend to be folded into other genres - either spy or cyberpunk stuff or a mix of everything (Dark Heresy), depending on how "hardboiled" you like it.
• Spy action: Mostly just out of fashion. And it's out of fashion - needs a good setting and Cold War died so hard that recent attempts to resuscitate attract mostly contempt. Seems to allow too little variety in adventures. Thus practically folded into others - especially cyberpunk, though as reconnaissance has its place in any genre.
• Military: Pro: endless fount of dark humour. Cons: the same as spy and space opera together, few good settings that aren't cheesy, but known - and existence of wargames. Seems to allow too little variety in adventures UNLESS you change them often or go for small-unit special forces action. From recent ones there are... Only War and Planet Mercenary?
• Post-apocalypse: Mostly just out of fashion (annoyance of a certain apocalypse cargo cult shoved down the people's throats may or may not have contributed). Much like its settings - never quite alive, never quite dead. Seems to allow little variety in adventures UNLESS you blatantly disregard staying true to the genre, but then you may just have a side-trek into bad area in another.

Genres correspond to settings, and except post-apocalypse there are 3-4 available. So in the end it's more a matter of style than genre.

Well, that's just a sterling example of the No True Scotsman fallacy!

With the benefit of non-true Scotsmen being dumped where convenient.
Without fallacy, notion of aramis would boil down to an observation that genre purity is practically non-existent, and there's a lot of bad imitation - which are valid points.
I, for one, like Spelljammer for honest approach - as in, not pretending that boats are rocket ships when they obviously behave like boats. What you see is what you get.
Those who want boats, swashbuckling, vampires and elves in "space" (which can indeed be fun) may jolly well just have them without silly rubber foreheads.

Fantasy is a lot simpler, and you can hand-wave away things that aren't realistic.

As opposed to? Bad writing is bad. Anywhere. Hand-waving is bad writing if it's not internally consistent (and if consistent, it's not as much hand-waving as laws of a setting).
And usually (with obvious exceptions like Wonderland) when it's not consistent with "like real world unless noted" (as in, we expect stones to not turn into cheese without some very good reason).

 

[pogre]

As for why Fantasy RPGs are more popular I think it has to do with modern guns. Rules for character survivability are easier in fantasy, as opposed to getting hit by a modern or futuristic weapon. I'm not saying the impression is correct, but most people think of it as: Hit by a gun = game over. To survive a modern of science-fiction game PCs should be seeking to avoid combat for the most part. As many others have said, I think our reality impedes suspension of disbelief in even far future games.

Why aren't Supers more popular? That one I don't know. I'm not crazy about Supers, but man, they seem to dominate the movie market these days.