Why does fantasy dominate RPGs?

[redrick]

From a film and television standpoint, Science Fiction really lends itself to minimalism in costumes and set design. Space is just a black backdrop with some pinpoint lights in it. Space-ships can be entirely indoors, and the sets can be made with cheap materials. The costumes can be whatever we want them to be, so why not cheap synthetic onesies? Sure, plenty of Science Fiction movies and shows go for massive set design and elaborate aliens, but I think the acceptable baseline is much lower. A science fiction movie can achieve good production values within a reasonable budget. I love to point at Alphaville, which is shot entirely in undressed mundane modern locations, but manages to evoke a dystopian future.

Science fiction as a genre is also a much bigger tent when we define it. Star Wars and Star Trek might be the big titles, but space opera and space exploration are just one small subset of the science fiction genre. Pretty much anything can be called Science Fiction. In fact, a great deal of science fiction is really just fantasy in the present or future time. (eg most superhero movies.) Fantasy, by contrast, seems to be generally understood as having a much narrower definition. At a distance, it all bleeds together.

This uniformity in fantasy works great for RPGs, because there is an implied meta-setting that most players can settle into without actually needing to know many of the actual details. When I sit down to play a fantasy RPG, I have a pretty good idea of what the world will be like, whereas, when I sit down to play a "science fiction" rpg, I have no idea what kind of game I am playing.

 

[Morrus]

From a film and television standpoint, Science Fiction really lends itself to minimalism in costumes and set design. Space is just a black backdrop with some pinpoint lights in it. Space-ships can be entirely indoors, and the sets can be made with cheap materials. The costumes can be whatever we want them to be, so why not cheap synthetic onesies? Sure, plenty of Science Fiction movies and shows go for massive set design and elaborate aliens, but I think the acceptable baseline is much lower. A science fiction movie can achieve good production values within a reasonable budget. I love to point at Alphaville, which is shot entirely in undressed mundane modern locations, but manages to evoke a dystopian future.

Oh, I dunno. A field is easier than a spaceship! You can do fantasy sets by just going outside.

 

[redrick]

Oh, I dunno. A field is easier than a spaceship! You can do fantasy sets by just going outside.

But then you are dependent on the weather and gennies, not to mention that there aren't a ton of fields near NY and LA, so now we're talking distant location costs and per diems for the crew. And you aren't going to set your whole fantasy tv show in the same field are you? You'll probably need a number of them and the right ones might not be very close together.

Filming in Iceland, for instance, which screams "Fantasy Location!" is a pain, because the weather changes constantly, so you can never get consistent lighting and weather conditions. Waiting on the weather gets very expensive very quickly when you've got a union crew with a guaranteed 12 hour day.

Again, there are plenty of ways to spend a hundred million on a science fiction movies, and, yes, there are probably ways to make a fantasy movie with reasonable production values for under $15 million, but I can't think of a single good low-budget fantasy movie, unless we start talking horror (say The Witch), and I can think of a number of strong low budget science fiction movies. (Primer, Under the Skin, Alphaville, Ex Machina, Midnight Special (didn't actually love that one, but still) are a few that jump to mind immediately.)

 

[Morrus]

But then you are dependent on the weather and gennies, not to mention that there aren't a ton of fields near NY and LA, so now we're talking distant location costs and per diems for the crew. And you aren't going to set your whole fantasy tv show in the same field are you? You'll probably need a number of them and the right ones might not be very close together.

Filming in Iceland, for instance, which screams "Fantasy Location!" is a pain, because the weather changes constantly, so you can never get consistent lighting and weather conditions. Waiting on the weather gets very expensive very quickly when you've got a union crew with a guaranteed 12 hour day.

But people do it all the time. Lots of outdoor scenes on TV! It's never proved a particularly insurmountable barrier! Game of Thrones, Walking Dead, Doctor Who, Eastenders all feature characters who go outside.

And if we talk movies too, they're frequently filmed in exotic locations. Half the time it's actually cheaper!

 

[Mercurius]

I've only skimmed the first page, so don't know if what I'm going to say has already been said, but I think a lot of it has to do with the intrinsic differences between fantasy and science fiction, specifically their relationship to the present, and the degree to which they change.

Fantasy has an archetypal, timeless quality. Barring silly 80s visuals in which barbarians had mullets, elves looked like punk rockers, the images of fantasy are timeless and not bound to fad or fashion. In other words, fantasy in 1967 and fantasy in the 2017 could theoretically look and feel the same. And this may be why it is so hard to create fantasy on film: film, being so visual, cannot but be influenced by current fashions (thus the mullet-wearing barbarian).

Science fiction, on the hand, is more of a moving target: it is a glimpse of the future based upon the present and ultimately says more about the present (or when it was created) then it does about the future. Thus the Jetsons are really about the 1950s, and the original Star Trek series about 60s America and The Next Generation about the 80s and 90s.

I will also channel Marshall McLuhan and say that fantasy is more of a genre for print media, because print media relies upon the imagination, whereas science fiction works well with visual media. This doesn't mean you can't mix things up, but here is a "native" quality to fantasy and print, and scifi and film. Imagine reading The Matrix - it wouldn't have a fraction of the impact. Or we can look at 2001: A Space Odyssey - in a way, Stanley Kubrick singlehandedly claimed scifi for the visual format.

With fantasy, no visual depiction of the balrog will every equal Tolkien's very expressionistic depiction in LotR. He barely said anything about the creature, but it became so iconic. Peter Jackson's CGI monstrosity was pretty good, but lost a touch in translation.

I'm reminded of an anecdote that Gary Gygax shared: He said a kid once told him that he liked books more than movies, "because the pictures are better." For reasons explored above, I think this is more true of fantasy than scifi.

 

[redrick]

But people do it all the time. Lots of outdoor scenes on TV! It's never proved a particularly insurmountable barrier! Game of Thrones, Walking Dead, Doctor Who, Eastenders all feature characters who go outside.

And if we talk movies too, they're frequently filmed in exotic locations. Half the time it's actually cheaper!

Hey, I'm not saying it's not possible, I'm just saying it's not automatically cheaper to shoot in a field than indoors. Especially when it needs to be a fantastic field. Or a fantastic town. Or a fantastic city. Or a fantastic castle.

Season 1 of GoT apparently ran about $6 million per episode, and has since gone up to $10 mil. Star Trek TNG ran about $1.3 mil per episode, which, adjusted for inflation to 2017, would be about $2.3 mil or so. Now, obviously, one is premium cable, the other is network TV. GoT has 10 episodes per season, whereas Star Trek would have had around 25 per season. Obviously, a lot can impact budgets, and the salaries go up as the seasons go on, so, for all I know, the extra $4 mil per episode of GoT is going entirely to larger paychecks for principal cast and creatives. Complicated stuff, budgeting. But again, I am hard pressed to think of good classic fantasy movies and television made with low budgets, whereas SF has a lot of them.

 

[billd91]

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

Whether you think it's a fallacy or not, this is what you get with sci-if offerings - a lot of splitting hairs whether something is sci-if or not. That's sci-fi fandom for you.

 

[dbm]

Or we can look at 2001: A Space Odyssey - in a way, Stanley Kubrick singlehandedly claimed scifi for the visual format.

See, I think this shows the complete opposite. 2001 the film was beautiful but incomprehensible. By comparison, the book was much clearer and understandable. I greatly preferred the book.

 

[Morrus]

Season 1 of GoT apparently ran about $6 million per episode, and has since gone up to $10 mil. Star Trek TNG ran about $1.3 mil per episode, which, adjusted for inflation to 2017, would be about $2.3 mil or so. Now, obviously, one is premium cable, the other is network TV. GoT has 10 episodes per season, whereas Star

Assuming those figures are accurate, Star Trek's annual budget was 2.3x25=57.5 while GoT is 6x10=60. About the same.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Of course, adjusted for inflation...

But then again, if it were made today, modern SFX would make it look better for a lot less.