MGibster
Legend
I wasn't so sure about this until I gave some thought to the reward play-loop. After all, there were plenty of television shows during the 50s and 60s with stories that could be viewed as a campaign including Rawhide, Gunsmoke, and Bonanza for example. On Rawhide, each week Gil Favor leads our band of cowboys through various adventures as they drive a herd of cattle from San Antonio to Missouri which sure sounds like a campaign to me. But there's a decided lack of reward play-loop examples. When Rowdy Yates guns down a no good varmint he doesn't immediately loot the corpse for +1 Boots of Scooting or that +2 Smoke Wagon of Doom the dead cowpoke carried on his hip. When Wishbone helps a sodbuster deliver her child he doesn't expect monetary compensation in return. I'm not convinced fantasy lends itself better to a campaign mode but maybe it does on the reward play loop.I would say (and I have said) that another reasons that fantasy predominates in the RPG world is because fantasy, moreso than any other genre, particularly lends itself to both the "campaign" and to the reward play loop (zero-to-hero) that so many people enjoy.
In the other thread that went off on feudalism, I likened D&D settings to theme parks. It's like visiting Walt Disney World in Florida and going to the Star Wars world, then to Epcot, then to Animal Kingdom, then to Magic Kingdom. Each one of them is completely fake with a veneer designed to help visitors have a good time and separate them from their money. Likewise, D&D settings exist primarily to give player characters a place to adventure in. I don't believe they were ever really designed to model anything realistically.What is surprising is the extent to which some people assert that D&D necessarily resembles medieval Europe- or would have feudalism (to use the example that was brought up in the other thread). To start with, D&D is fantasy, but while it borrows tropes from European (and other) fantasy stories, it doesn't resemble any specific historic period so much as it resembles ... itself.