My basic point was that in much of fantasy (both as a genre and an RPG) we tend to gloss over (the term I used was lampshade) the icky parts of what I mistakenly referred to as feudal periods. Again, people got a bit more caught up in chewing up the exact definitions rather than the point I was trying to make.
The point is this - yes, we use a Ren-Faire approach to a fantasy setting that is very loosely based on pre-industrial cultures, typically from Europe, although certainly not exclusively that. But, we then completely romanticize the whole thing. We have "good kings" that do good things and are "good kingdoms".
Meanwhile, players will absolutely lose their minds over things like the Wall of the Faithless in Forgotten Realms. Or the Cataclysm in Dragonlance. But, have no problems with autocratic governments where your character really has no rights or freedoms. But, because we ignore all that (mostly in service to creating an "old west" approach - itself incredibly ahistorical and romanticized) we wind up with these settings that, if you step back and pull off the lampshade, you realize that these settings are hiding a lot of nastiness that we just gloss over.
I mean, D&D campaigns also tend to have lots of "bad kingdoms," -- it's just that when you go bad, you might as well start twirling the mustaches and chewing the scenery.
That's where I'd put D&D's treatment of monarchies and fuedalism and autocratic government and such -- it tends to shoehorn it into the white hat/black hat mentality that pervades the system. Nuance is tough. Tougher still when the books have spent a half century trying to have it both ways as to whether the game is a generic fantasy ruleset or an implied default setting.
It works just fine if the players are Star Trek fans.
You watched Star Trek? The crew are just moving wallpaper, there are only a few characters who matter.
True. But for many players having a clear mission objective is an advantage. They don't want to goof around in the hope that something interesting turns up.
If the assumed operation state of RPGs is murderhobo, than yeah Star Trek is a hard sell. Star Trek tends to be a smaller sandbox the sides are easy to see. For many that instantly means railroad. There is so much opportunity working inside such well defined boxes as Star Trek. YMMV.
That's well and above what was said. Yora's assumption was that RPGs are sandbox, not murderhoboism. As to whether Star Trek isn't a sandbox... well (based on my own personal experience only) I'd say that most games I've played of it certainly are semi- rail-delivery-to-starting-point, and then free-form hike to freeform resolution. Adventures tend to start like show episodes: the starship and crew have arrived at <Place> (either because Starfleet sent it there or as part of their exploration mission) and come across <Problem>. Now, the PCs could theoretically move on and not engage the problem, but much like the crew in episodes almost never say, 'this isn't our business,' and move on (despite that being a foundational principle of their society with regards to a huge swath of what' s out there in space), I don't think I've seen people do so. The rails disappear at that point, though, as solutions to the problem are usually very open (negotiate, go in a-phasers' a-blazing, teleport the hostages to safety, do a high-tech heist montage, re-dafloober the deflector zingzang).
Principally speaking, there isn't a specific difference between
Star Trek and, say,
Traveller -- both are wide open frontiers with lots of problems to solve and lone ships often far from the rest of their side having to make tough decisions out in the field (ST might even have an advantage over Traveller in some ways, as Trav's fuel rules and ship mortgages mean you really don't do a lot of saying, "say, what's over there?" and just going). Where ST is limited is mostly in tendency of use -- you probably won't be going and setting up a mining consortium on Nigel 7 or exploring the dungeons of the mad god Q looking for treasure, or a multi-adventure arc fighting Emperor Palpitation because the expectation put forth in the media surrounding the fictional universe is one of post-scarcity military non-underdogs dealing with moderate and rarely existential challenges.
