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<blockquote data-quote="J.Quondam" data-source="post: 8249624" data-attributes="member: 7030100">Default fantasy has the advantage of being fairly well bounded by some nebulous part of human history that involves stone castles, steel swords, and powerful kings, with the monsters and magic of myth/folklore layered on as part of that reality. Designers turn knobs like &quot;acceptable anachronism&quot;, &quot;power of magic&quot;, &quot;historical culture&quot; to change the flavor of a setting. But the core of fantasy remains basically the same: castles, swords, kings, alongside magic and monsters.The key point is that it's fairly easy to riff and subvert to get from one fantasy setting to another. Crank the knobs to transform longsword to khopesh, magic to mage-tech, Greek gods to elder gods, high fantasy to sword &amp; sorc, humans-only to anthropomorphic animals.Sci-fi doesn't have any of this. It's not bounded in the way that fantasy is, not least because it's about the future-- all the history that hasn't been written yet.To be fair, there is a sort of a default: when you say &quot;sci-fi&quot; most people think about spaceships, lasers, and robots. So those are fair to incorporate into the notion of &quot;default&quot; sci-fi RPG setting. By riffing and subverting that default you can get from Star Wars to Babylon 5 to Alien to Starship Troopers to Buck Rogers to Battlestar Galactica to Star Trek. It covers a fair bit of common sci-fi ground.The problem comes in when you want to do other sci-fi. There's a world of well-known sci-fi worlds &amp; concepts that have little or nothing to do with space: The Matrix, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Bladerunner, Quantum Leap, and so on. But it's not straightforward to &quot;crank knobs&quot; to get from Star Wars to Fantastic Voyage, for example, even though they're both sci-fi. You can't arbitrarily riff and subvert your way across sci-fi settings, like you can with fantasy. Admittedly, of course, people don't immediately think about this at first when they think &quot;sci-fi&quot;, but they DO realize it pretty soon; these aren't obscure niches of sci-fi, after all.Sci-fi is simply too big. That's why there's no &quot;default&quot; sci-fi setting, at least not without first specifying some tighter bounds on the world or subgenre.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="J.Quondam, post: 8249624, member: 7030100"] Default fantasy has the advantage of being fairly well bounded by some nebulous part of human history that involves stone castles, steel swords, and powerful kings, with the monsters and magic of myth/folklore layered on as part of that reality. Designers turn knobs like "acceptable anachronism", "power of magic", "historical culture" to change the flavor of a setting. But the core of fantasy remains basically the same: castles, swords, kings, alongside magic and monsters. The key point is that [B]it's fairly easy to riff and subvert to get from one fantasy setting to another.[/B] Crank the knobs to transform longsword to khopesh, magic to mage-tech, Greek gods to elder gods, high fantasy to sword & sorc, humans-only to anthropomorphic animals. Sci-fi doesn't have any of this. It's not bounded in the way that fantasy is, not least because it's about the future-- all the history that hasn't been written yet. To be fair, there is a sort of a default: when you say "sci-fi" most people think about spaceships, lasers, and robots. So those are fair to incorporate into the notion of "default" sci-fi RPG setting. By riffing and subverting that default you can get from Star Wars to Babylon 5 to Alien to Starship Troopers to Buck Rogers to Battlestar Galactica to Star Trek. It covers a fair bit of common sci-fi ground. The problem comes in when you want to do [I]other[/I] sci-fi. There's a world of well-known sci-fi worlds & concepts that have little or nothing to do with space: The Matrix, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Bladerunner, Quantum Leap, and so on. But it's not straightforward to "crank knobs" to get from Star Wars to Fantastic Voyage, for example, even though they're both sci-fi. [B]You can't arbitrarily riff and subvert your way across sci-fi settings[/B], like you can with fantasy. Admittedly, of course, people don't immediately think about this at first when they think "sci-fi", but they DO realize it pretty soon; these aren't obscure niches of sci-fi, after all. Sci-fi is simply too big. That's why there's no "default" sci-fi setting, at least not without first specifying some tighter bounds on the world or subgenre. [/QUOTE]

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