Why does fantasy seem to be much more popular than SF? Is it

>>51395777
because hard sci-fi is no fun

>>51395777
It's completely different in film industry,

>>51395777
Sci-Fi is closer to real life. It's less heroic and free.

>>51395777
>buttery soft
>40k
I think Sci fi isn't as popular because of edge lords that dislike guns. The main issue I've always heard about reluctance to do a Sci fi campaign is waaaaaaaah guns r bad waaaaah

I wish I was that barbarian/melee guy in the pic. He looks fucking hardcore

Is this from something?

>>51395777

The "great wheel" of genre reincarnation used to flip over between SF and fantasy about every ten years, pretty regularly through most of the twentieth century, but it stopped on fantasy in the 90s and has been dragging ever since. SF is beginning to regain popularity, though, and might take the #1 spot again soon. As >>51395828 points out, the film industry seems to be ahead of the curve on this.

>>51395904

Someone remind me what "edge lord" means again because it seems to have switched definition since I last looked.

>>51395904
>40k
>not the softest sci-fi of all time

It has elves, for the sake of Christ. It's softer than a pillow.

>>51395982
It's harder than Star Wars by a wide margin.

>>51396013
Both are completely divorced from reality to the point where I have a hard time seeing any meaningful argument for any of them being more or less soft.

>>51395965
>setting has guns in it
>some dude walking around using a sword as his primary weapon
That's textbook edge lord. The first signs of an edge lord is someone's refusal to partake in a setting that has guns in it

>>51396041
So edgelord means "Likes swords" now?

>>51395777
Sci-Fi is just a sub-category of Fantasy.

>>51396089
no but the likes sword is usually justified with some cringe worthy BS about either honor or wanting to look his victims in the eyes as he kills them

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>>51396041

You're an idiot.

>>51396041
Obi-Wan was an edgelord?

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>>51395777

Because with magic you don't have explain shit, while with anything sci-fi you have to atleast provide a veneer of scientific realism into the picture.

Also this >>51395794

>>51396130

This is true, one thing edge lords like is to be different. What they latch on to specifically depends on the edgelord's interests. Setting with lots of guns? He probably wants a sword. Setting where only bad guys use guns? Oh you know he's gonna be toting an arsenal.

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>>51395928
Sort of. The artist has a lot of stuff set in the same world, but hasn't really done anything with it. It's all pretty dope though.

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>>51396412

>>51395777

Aesthetic appeal. The only major appealing side of Sci-fi to normies are the medieval aspects replacing conventional modern armor and arms. Swords, melee combat, and knight/samurai inspired armor get people hype and are usually the standout thing in popular sci-fi franchises outside of Star Trek.

>>51395777
Sci fi is not as interesting.

>>51396041
>I don't know what edgy means

>>51396549
How so?

>>51396513
Are you trying to tell me people don't like guns?

>>51396549
>Generic fantasy setting with swords and magic is more interesting than exploring the void, other planets, aliens and such

Fantasy is anything based (loosely) on the past, meaning that you have free reign to both steal from real life, making your cultures more defined without additional work, and to change shit at will, obviating the need for additional research.

Sci-fi is the future, meaning you're obligated to portray a history that matches up with real life until the current day, you're obligated to more or less respect current science where possible, and you've still got to make a setting that's unique and interesting. And those things are kind of dynamically opposed, so it's a balancing act, while fantasy can just go wild in whichever direction.

>>51396041
"edge lord" doesn't mean "likes things with literal edges" mate.

>>51396130
Honor isn't edgy. Honor is wholesome and good.

>>51396644

So you're saying fantasy is easier, and nerds are lazy?

>>51396567
More like
>I take the word edgy literally

>>51395965
I thought edge lord is anyone who significantly goes against the curve / status quo and assumes that doing so makes them better than other people. Example: The bow weilder on a laze gun battlefield.

They also use their own "resistance" to things as proof of obsolete concepts.

The difference to them and snowflakes is that snowflakes have plot armour, where as edge lords typically don't.

>OP

I always find scifi is usually metaphorical of trends of a period where as fantasy tends to retain a timeless / romantic charm to it and thus a wider audience. Take bstar galactica which basically tried to be a commentary on Iraq

>>51396669
Its slavish devotion to a 60 year old book series shows that a lot of its writer are lazy.

>>51396668
if your guy insisting killing the shit out of people for minor or perceived slights is more acceptable because you use obsolete technology congrats your an edgelord

>>51396567
>>51396592
Sorry, I meant as a roleplay setting.
Lots of Elements in sci fi makes for generally disliked Gameplay. Guns, space ships, lack of support for distinctive Classes.

>>51396152
All force users are supreme edgelords

>>51396727
Yeah, but at the same time fantasy tends to be a lot more samey, as it's all generally drawing from the same well of tropes and inspiration. I think everyone here has seen the sheer volume of tired pseudo-tolkienian bullshit in every stores fantasy/sci fi section.

>>51396013

What? No, you are just a blind 40k faggot.

>>51396013
The fuck are you on about anon? They go to fucking *hell* as a means of FTL travel. There are high elves, dark elves, orcs and demons running around for fuck's sake.

>>51395777
Fantasy is a healthier medium because it is at peace with its own status as fiction. Science fiction keeps trying to make real predictions and keeps getting them dead wrong, which is why nobody can take it seriously anymore.

>>51395777
You realize that your personal experience isn't indicative of a worldwide trend, right?

>>51397207
I'll take "Opinions" for a $1000, Alex.

>>51395855
>It's less heroic and free.

What sort of faggotry is this?

>Hurr durr, only sword and sorcery has heroism

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>>51397207

>science fiction is about predicting what the future will be
>not commenting on the real world via a hypothetical future, lol who does that?

Are you one of those illiterate morons who writes articles for popular magazines or something? Read a book already.

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>>51396130

You're using an awful lot of posts to define "edgelord" as someone who is intentionally contrarian for the sake of looking cool or superior.

>>51395777
Do you mean popular on the tabletop scene, OP? If that's the case, I believe it's because High Fantasy is a more egalitarian genre. There's countless sources of it yet they all more or less paint the same picture. You can put a die-hard Read the Silmarillion Eight Times Tolkienfag and a guy who just casually watches Game of Thrones with his beer buddies together for a fantasy game and they'll both be able to immerse in the game.

Science Fiction, while popular, is a much more diverse genre and people like different things about it. When someone says sci fi, a player might think they're gonna get to play a Jedi or something. Another might have just read Starship Troopers and wants to fly around in power armor fighting aliens. Some want more grounded, Earth-bound sci fi where they hunt fugitive androids and others want a game where they have to solve relativistic equations to map out star systems. You say cyberpunk game? One player's gonna want to play an elf wizard in a trench coat, and the other guy is gonna want to stay as far away from that shit as possible.

Fantasy is egalitarian. Science Fiction is niche.

>>51397476
>egalitarian

That's a funny way of saying "stodgy and hidebound."
But you've got a point. Fantasy fans don't like new things, they looove rehashes of the same old shit, which means it's easy to get everyone on the same level for making characters and playing the game together..

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>>51397563

While I don't like criticizing people's tastes, you do have a point fantasy fans tend towards more conservative approaches. Which is a shame, because a creative GM can really play around with genres and settings to make something new and interesting. Shame most GMs who try to do something "new" just substitute the default poorly understood recreation of Medieval Europe with a poorly understood recreation of whatever culture/time period gets their dick hard at that moment.

Personally, I prefer science fiction mostly because I like space and robots.

>>51397476
It's less egalitarian and more dominated by a handful of ideas. It's Ironic that what most people think of when they think of fantasy is largely in no way fantastical. It's generally just a bland homogenized slurry of nondescriptly European, vaguely medieval tropes with elves and wizards thrown in.

>>51396669
It's not that simple. Lazy nerds are able to do more with what's there in fantasy, but hard-working nerds are also able to expand more in fantasy. Yes, you get stuff like aSoIaF that cribs off of real history as a matter of course and throws elements in without pausing to explain them, but at the other end of the spectrum you get stuff like Malazan which is incredibly fucking elaborate and detailed. You can't make a system like that which is both so thought out and so different from our reality in sci-fi, it just doesn't fit the genre.

>>51396751
Yes, but that isn't honor. That's just being touchy.

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>>51398035
>You can't make a system like that which is both so thought out and so different from our reality in sci-fi, it just doesn't fit the genre.

t. pleb who doesn't read

>>51395982
>implying elves aren't basically greys with a different coat of paint

>>51398187

>implying greys aren't lazy SF

>>51398183
You make a good point, but Simmons' stuff is so bizarre and different from the rest of the genre that it's only technically sci-fi. Something like Malazan doesn't have that disconnect.

>>51398203
Greys might be lazy, but they seem like a pretty ubiquitous trope

>>51397424
If that's how you read it, then it's even more pointless. What value is another person's polemic on what's good and bad about the real world? Either I agree with it or I don't, so I'll either find it redundant or repugnant. Nobody wants to be preached to; they just sort of tolerate it if they think they have no other choice.

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>>51398407

>What value is another person's polemic on what's good and bad about the real world?

It's interesting to read if done well? It's fun to look at what people think will and won't happen and see if you agree with it?

What do YOU like in your fiction, Mr. Salty McHatesBooks?

>>51395777
Fantasy ages better. I can pick up some Conan or some Lord Dunsany or some ancient mythology and it still holds up. Science fiction becomes silly and unreadable as soon as the science moves on. Science fiction based more on the social sciences holds up a little better because social science doesn't progress much, but that's not really what people think of when they think of science fiction.

>>51395777
I would assume it's that SF takes an assload more design work than fantasy work for the end result.

For a fantasy world, you've got swords and sometimes various non-humans and magic.

For sci-fi you've got to design armor, weapons, future technology, future clothing, computers, cultural views, etc.

Regardless of whether or not Tolkien has indirectly stagnated fantasy as we know it, we have to admit he left an amazing backbone to start from.
Sci-fi does not quite have that same leisure without a lot of effort put into it to make it unique enough that it actually doesn't run into some other more established franchise or IP (e.g. Star Trek/Wars, Galactica, Culture, Warham 40k, etc.)

>>51398407

>one person's polemic
>preached to

That's not how it works. By stepping outside of the world as we know it, you can get emotional distance from the issues that are being presented, which can allow clearer reasoning, and better insight. You don't use it to preach unless you're a shit writer. (which is the Sad Puppies problem) You use it to illuminate different points of view, at enough of a remove that people will be able to get inside that alien viewpoint and gain a better understanding of the world that is, by visiting one that isn't.
Good science fiction gives the reader a better perspective on our world.

>>51395777
All tg/ questions can be answered with one of those answers.

1-Myth
2-Lord of the rings
3-D&D
4-Gurps
5-Fatal
6-Hybrid

>>51395777
Why does fantasy seem to be much more popular than SF?

Autism

People always sprouting "muh realism lol" with absolute zero idea what they talked about. Secondly, they seems doesn't realize that realism is a very relative subject and depended on what level of technologies and how the entire science works in one place to another.

>Make Sci-Fi setting
>Have space battle
>"Ackshully for an Empire of thish shize, you should have at leasht a hundred more ships!"
>Players go to a mining planet to investigate mysterious occurrences
>"Why are there actual human miners? Like, this is *the future*, robots should be doing all of that work!"
>Go to a planet of great steppes and warm desert sands
>"So a sand planet? Like, JUST sand? Y'know that's rare or even impossible in real life, right?"
>Obligatory party questions
>"How can we understand the alien if they're a different species and might not even have a translatable language?"
>"So if we're all wearing universal translators, that means we aren't all talking using the same language? That's kinda sad, right? Like without those we could barely be friends!"
>"But if you're using warp travel, shouldn't we be arriving to planets possibly years after we needed to be there?"

There's a reason that Star Wars became one of the most popular Sci-Fi franchises out there: it's fucking simple. It contains enough fantastical elements that complaints about battle sizes and the like don't have to be raised.

Meanwhile Star Trek can just come across as... just cheesy sometimes, even with attempts to reboot it as "grittier" and more fitting with a "modern audience".

>>51398949

>There's a reason that Star Wars became one of the most popular Sci-Fi franchises out there: it's fucking simple

Not if the Wookiepedia editors have any say in it

>>51399028
There's pool might be really fucking wide, but it isn't that deep.

Star Wars suffered from, to a lesser degree, the "Star Trek" effect of essentially every single thing that ever appeared on screen for even a nano-second being given a full page with citations and all.

The guy who basically sat around saying "Preparing to fire" got his own page for fuck's sake.

However it still is relatively simple to follow: "Jumping to Lightspeed" just works, no explanation, it just fucking works. The ships we see defending the death star are, we assume, a large fleet regardless of the "logistics" of it, blasters? They're just laser guns, they work.

That seems to be the key defining theme of Star Wars, in a universe where "The Force" exists, things just fucking work.

The harder you go on the sci-fi scale, the more questions are raised and the more frustrating it becomes to even bother with it.

>>51399229

>The harder you go on the sci-fi scale, the more questions are raised and the more frustrating it becomes to even bother with it.

Which makes it all the more satisfying when the writer knows his shit. It's always really fun when the author or GM not only has the technical know-how but the narrative skill to make it interesting and not a long math lesson.

>>51395777
>>51398656
In general, sci-fi settings are based on the future, while fantasy settings are based on the past.

Since the past has already happened, this means that it's much easier to create a fantasy setting than it is to create a science fiction setting. Fantasy settings tend to have farmers who tend to crops and animals, knights who wear armor and ride animals into battle, warriors who wield swords and bows, scribes who write in books with ink, houses made of wood, and horse-drawn wagons. All of those things have happened in the past, so it's easy to get a clear picture of how they'd work alongside the setting's supernatural elements, and it's easy to mentally fill in th blanks if something isn't specifically mentioned. A setting might be based on non-medieval history, or be drastically changed by commonplace magic, but it's not too much trouble to build the world when it's based on well-explored territory.

Sci-fi, on the other hand, is all kinds of crazy. It's almost always based on cultures that are more advanced than our own modern society, and who knows how they'll turn out? How will they communicate? How will they record data? What weapons will they wield? If they have robots, how will they be designed or programmed? Not only is it all so much more complicated, it's all uncharted territory; the future could take any number of different things in any number of different directions, and an author has to decide on all of those directions any time they come up, on top of keeping it all consistent with the setting as a whole. This is especially true of tabletop RPGs; if you're writing a video game, for example, you can gloss over things like data structures and starship combat if they're not directly related to the gameplay or story, but with a tabletop game there's no telling what the GMs and players will get up to. The modern world is already complex, and the sheer scope of a sci-fi setting can make it a dauting task to write.

>>51399253
>"Interesting"
>"We can't have space battles because ballistic weapons wont work, lasers maybe, but they'd likely be instantaneous and invisible, the only method of travel is in ugly pod ships that you fall asleep on for years, since there 'fighter' ships just kind of glide through space and spin around."
>"You can't get any armor, instead since the world isn't terraformed, you have to wear a bulky space suit."
>"There's no intergalactic commerce as that's incredibly inefficient."
>"There's likely no aliens either, if there are, they look just like humans, but you likely wont be able to communicate to them without a translator."
>"Most work is done by machines, most of your gear is 3D printed."
>Any of this boring shit
>Fun

Interstellar may have been "dramatic", but it'd be a shit scenario

>>51398949
Have you tried not playing with a bunch of whiny autists?

It's hard to make hard sci-fi interesting and not "roll my eyes so far back I kill myself" tier. Even interesting ones will frequently just serve as shitflinging target boards for autists, see Blindsight.

Also 40k and SW are sci-fantasy, not sci-fi.

Because Sci-Fi is much, MUCH harder to create than Fantasy.

Fantasy is easy. You take the world in a certain time period, distort it, then bam, compelling story. Add in a few magic powers and boom, high fantasy.

Sci-Fi has to fucking work for it. It can't just be blatant about stealing from the past, it has to hide it under a layer of parallel and futurism. It has to make predictions on where the future will take us in terms of tech. It has to keep a plot going that doesn't get gagged down in filler and technobabble or else it becomes boring. It can't pull too hard from the average cliche well like fantasy or else it becomes Science Fantasy.

Basically, the amount of effort it takes to make a good Sci-Fi setting is leagues and bounds harder than the amount of effort to make a good fantasy setting.

>>51399459
>ballistic weapons won't work
They do. You can fire handguns in space.
>no armor, bulky space suit
Suits will probably get less bulky in the future and can be armored if necessary, but not Space Mehren tier obviously, unless you really go far far into the future.
>no intergalactic commerce
A planet that produces unique shit only it can produce will trade.
>likely no aliens
The non-existence of aliens is improbable. Not encountering them is probable, but it all depends on your aliens.
>they look just like humans
There is 0 reason for this, and the humanoid form isn't the best configuration possible.
>"Most work is done by machines, most of your gear is 3D printed."
These aren't boring since by default your characters would do things robots wouldn't, and you can make 3D printing more interesting by things like schematic designing. It's no different from doing some stupid ass quest to get some special adamantium armor made by ancient aliens.

>>51399459

So you not only dislike it when people use realistic rules of science as storytelling elements, but you have absolutely no understanding of those rules yourself.

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>>51395794

Space hard sf is boring. Earth hard SF is awesome

>>51396748
Which 60 year old sci-fi books are you referring to?

>>51395777
I think as far as gaming goes. It's much harder to build a frame of reference for sci-fi. The DM says "elf" and everybody knows the jist of it. The Space-DM says "Abraxian" and nobody has any reference. It takes more effort to build up new references for something sci-fi (and usually requires a new set of references for each setting) as opposed to one generally one fantasy reference pool that's been around a while.

Though I might be a little biased. I'm a DM who wishes his players weren't lazy fucks and bothered to try something other than D&D for once.

>>51399813

Or maybe they are just unimaginative fucks who perfer their faggot elf songs and and scottish wanna be dwarfs and think sci-fi is only cyberpunk and nothing else.

>>51397207
Ender's game predicted blogs, forums, flaming, trolling and sock puppetry

>>51396089
I mean, swords ARE edged weapons.

>>51400952
Cool. So when do we get holographic dicks and zero-gravity sports?

>>51395777
I hate SF for the crowd of obnoxious and childish faggots they attracted.

Star Wars is space fantasy which is okay and their fans are fun to be around with in gaming.
Since tabletop is a group activity, the type of people playing it will affect how much you enjoy yourself too.
For that, fantasy group is much more bigger and more fun and creative to be around.

>>51395777
Same reason Britney Spears is more popular that Bach. Marketing.

>>51404991
expln pls

holocock?

>>51405130
See and I would think it has to do with being alive.

>>51405130

Comparing the popularity of a dead classical musician to a modern pop singer is a pretty invalid point.

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>>51399604
>It's hard to make hard sci-fi interesting
its not. Any setting can be interesting with a good DM.

>>51398949
Players can be douchebags in any setting. All the Traveller campaigns I ran were great fun and if anything the metagaming was much less than when we played fantasy, because people weren't familiar with the system or the kind of encounters they would expect.

There's also a much larger variety of encounters possible in Sci fi, each world you go to is essentially an entire fantasy world, with different races, political ideas, government types, climate, geography, etc.

One day you're trying to get information from a robot, the next you're riding giant water-skimming Beatles with a bunch of native tribesmen trying to nuke your way into an underwater mega-corp lair, the next day you're getting sucked out into space after your bridge suffers an explosive decompression during a battle with a destroyer and 2 smaller gunships. Thankfully you're all wearing vacc-suits during combat, and your buddies in the other ships pick you up after dealing to the destroyer with salvo after salvo of nuclear missiles. The government of the local world wouldn't usually tolerate nukes in orbit, but this world is a bunch of warlord-esque criminal factions with only average tech level...

The imagination is the only limit to any setting. All of you who say sci fi is harder to do are incorrect. You just need a solid system (balanced between crunch and play-ability - Traveller is very nice for this) and an imagination.

>>51405144
>>51405191
The point is marketing can make anything popular. With enough exposure and an easily digestible image, even the lowest quality rehashed ideas can be popular.

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>>51405295
>you're riding giant water-skimming Beatles

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>>51395777
I'd agree that people want more Tolkien. Fantasy is familiar; to so some people, gaming means fantasy.

>>51405295
Harder science fiction is definitely not less interesting, but it is more simple to manufacture a flavor of fantasy and build some contingent.
On top of that, harder science fiction requires a much more cogent understanding, among the entire group, of the setting in general. So, this means that fantasy settings are easier to play due to less specificity for why things happen.

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>>51405415
>tfw you trust auto-correct and are too tired to notice

Like I said... variety of encounters...

>>51405431
>gaming means fantasy
there are lots of people that mostly play 40K and X-wing. For them gaming means space ships and lasers. Definitely not hard sci fi, but sci fi none the less. Fiction occurring in space.

Sci Fi has just as much grounding as fantasy for creative flavor. People are familiar with star trek, star wars, 40K, 2001, Alien, and the many many other older sci fi shows and films. More recently we have series like Firefly, The Expanse, and films like Gravity.

Plenty of fun to be had even in hard sci fi, using current technology. Its all down to the DM and open minded players who just want to have some fun.

It's hard to explain, but I feel like fantasy in a lot of ways is easier to get.

Seriously, try to imagine how you'd explain the Star Wars movies. Then maybe Dune, or Ender's Game. It's hard to readily work off of understood archetypes and ideas, even though Star Wars especially is really well known and pretty straightforward in its story.

But if you look at fantasy, it seems obvious what a barbarian and a wizard are, most races and dynamics are pretty well known. I guess so much of it has become common 'fantasy,' while sci-fi keeps on having to define itself for every story. There's never really a big sci-fi story that all others are based off of, with people cribbing races like elves and dwarves until they're almost an expected part of the genre.

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>>51395777
Fantasy is more popular in games because it has been boiled into a singe, generic setting that is vaguely Tolkien/Howard. There is fantasy out there that isn't that (even the source material would be unrecognisable to your average Dragon Age player), but it's not nearly as popular because it requires learning a new setting.

There isn't much in the way of a single generic sci-fi setting. While most fantasy settings are based in the past with roughly similar available action, sci-fi opens up loads of new rules for what can and can't be done. This frontload of setting lore and rules makes barrier to entry high, which some people may like, but it doesn't make for a popular game.

>The only SF stuff that ever seems to gain much traction is the buttery-soft space fantasy stuff like Star Wars or 40k.
Because writers are not scientists or sociologists and the kinds of people who will notice those realistic details will likely find ever more nits to pick even in a vigorously researched setting. Likewise GMs and players are usually not scientists or sociologists and a hard sci-fi setting offers way more rules to learn and strictly adhere to, see above. This extra work and devotion to a single setting makes it inherently niche.

>google DnD
>get fantasy stuff
thats why
most people dont know any other phrases for it, so to get SF fantasy stuff you have to already know the specific system.

>>51405532
Right, but I guess I'm more interested in why the harder stuff gets rejected as a potential gaming option.

Like the OP says, the only sci-fi that seems to really flourish is softer, which I attribute to ease-of-use for the setting's creator and the players, at least in TTRPG scenarios.

I also think that the closer one gets to reality, the harder it is to deal with guns. Softer sci-fi settings can invent whatever details they need to neuter the damn things but without scarcity in a harder sci-fi setting, you really have to work to prevent them from killing the party two sessions in.
You can remove guns altogether but people really seem to enjoy using them with their characters.

>>51405609
To elaborate a little:

If you're exposed to a little bit of fantasy, you're exposed to at least part of fantasy as a whole. Let's say you read Sword of Shannara. You get exposed to most of the common races, magic and magical items, and various dangerous monsters typical parts of a fantasy story. Even with something a little less generic (for lack of a better word) in its fantasy, you'll probably get exposed to magic, certain races, magical creatures, stuff like that. And that's assuming you somehow never get exposed to classical myths, and essentially the same things they bring in.

Fantasy is an old, old genre, if you include mythos and cosmology. Sci-fi is only a century and a half old if you stretch it to the utmost, and it's not as recognizable as it is today until at least the 60s. And watching Star Wars and learning the nuances of Jedi, the Force, lightsabers and laser guns, and droids will not prepare you for Star Trek and it's phasers and more human-like droids and different kinds of characters and story. Even though they both have exotic alien races, they don't overlap - there are no wookies in Star Trek, and no Klingons in Star Wars, unlike where with fantasy you get elves - sometimes with that name, sometimes with super special ones.

Another aspect to consider is the fact that at many gaming tables the players will initially be unfamiliar with the setting and fantasy offers many archetypes and races that are instantly familiar to the player, it's a lot easier for a player to sit down and star playing an elf Mage or dwarf cleric then say a frother berserker or vevaphon assassin. Thus fantasy has an advantage in that it is easier to just pick up and play, while the more unique aspects of the setting can be introduced later, whereas sci-fi is more front loaded.

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>>51405778
>I also think that the closer one gets to reality, the harder it is to deal with guns. Softer sci-fi settings can invent whatever details they need to neuter the damn things but without scarcity in a harder sci-fi setting, you really have to work to prevent them from killing the party two sessions in.

On the other hand, consider that possibly the most popular SF RPG of all time, Traveller, is very lethal when it comes to gun combat.

>>51405788
>Sword of Shannara

One of the worst offenders when it comes to generic Tolkien rip-off, though strangely you wouldn't know it if you listened to the author. He's convinced he's writing an homage to Faulkner.

Still, I guess maybe there is something there, because I read Faulkner in my 20s as well, and much like Terry Brooks, when I put the book down I was left to wonder "who the fuck were all those people and why was I supposed to care again?"

>>51398574
>Fantasy ages better.
I bet your battleaxes weigh a billion pounds and your dragons' tails drag on the ground.

>>51395777

Fantasy almost always has Elves, Dwarves Orcs which are known staples that are easily identifiable and are easy to "identify" with as they share human traits
Fantasy has Magic which is limited to powerful wizards and therefore rare and powerful
Fantasy lets you explore a unexplored Magic world
Scifi has Aliens, none of which stay similar over setttings even the more iconic ones are still only in one setting.
Scifi has magic-like Superscience but every Idiot can use a disintegrator-pistol
Scifi lets you explore a scientific and therefore predictable Universe.
If you read fantasy you know OH this guys and Elf, but what kind of elf is he, is he the tricky fairy type or the noble "betterthanyou" highelf, oh and orks are they noble savages or the killydakka types.(which gets the reader thinking about it)
If you read Scifi you see oh its an alien, theyre different, I have 0 knowledge and therefore no imagination of what they could be.

Its not weird to find goblins in the jungle and the forest 200 miles south. But finding the same alien species on planets lightyears away is weird if its hardly sentient
This is why 40k is successfull because it literally has space elves and space orks. or Psykers of which it takes a dozen to destroy a planet with.
Starwars has Jedis

Nobody is surprised if your fantasy book has elves or orks but if you suddenly introduce daleks and klingons in your Scifi its strange. mostly because former have become a staple

>>51397393
It's funny because sword & sorcery is one of the most antiheroic fantasy subgenres.

>>51405645
There really can't be a "generic sci-fi" setting because science fiction becomes obsolete at an incredible pace. If people remain attached to old sci-fi, it basically becomes a fantasy setting, usually with a "-punk" tacked on at the end.

Meanwhile, people are exposed to "generic" fantasy from a young age via fairy tales and ancient mythology, so much of the imagery is already present in a person's head before they even open the rulebook. If there's a dragon, you already know that it's a creature of incredible power, has lots of gold, and probably has a central role in the gameplay. Compare that to a setting like Eclipse Phase, where players may struggle to imagine how their characters get out of bed in the morning, to say nothing of their role in society.

I always took it as fantasy being more easily understandable to audiences as well as easier for writers to portray.
When it comes to Science Fiction it requires a modicum of scientific knowledge and literacy to one degree or another in order to write for or grasp. (At least for really good sci fi.)

>>51405833
Traveller is have a very small audience in comparison to DnD or Pathfinder.

>>51395777
Guess people are tired of technology and one-hitting weapons being everywhere.

>>51405833
>>51407018

Star Wars systems which is the actual most popular SF game in term of audience and market share and not headcanon, don't have one-hitting weapons and you usually can survive hits comparable to that of fantasy systems.

Which also led a lot to their popularity.

>>51395777
Way less work has to go into a believable fantasy world than a sci-fi one of the same quality. All fiction leans on the principal of minimal departure to fill in the gaps between stated differences in each fictional setting and fantasy takes full advantage of this by being set largely in the past and being based on myths and legends. Sci-fi on the other hand is usually set in some far-flung future and therefore can't lean on the cumulative experiences of humanity. The more shit that has to be explained the more shit that can be poorly implemented and the fewer words/screentime the work has to spend on actually having shit happen instead of worldbuilding.

>>51407056
Because their game mechanics are divorced from the shows and movies where a single blaster bolt or tap with a lightsaber kills all but the biggest badasses in one shot.

Space Fantasy is my favorite genre because of how diverse your characters can be. Soft sci-fi gives you the illusion of sci-fi to normies while not parading itself as "realistic" so it doesnt make autists butthurt.

>>51407128
>Because their game mechanics are divorced from the shows and movies where a single blaster bolt or tap with a lightsaber kills all but the biggest badasses in one shot.
Fantasy shows and games also do that, you know.
Movies are movies and games and games. Both have different expectations.

Personally, I prefer fantasy to sci-fi because it's generally more consistent with the rules of the setting (and this applies to books as well as games). Often in SF it seems like the social rules and general way of doing things varies wildly from place to place, making it hard to get immersed in the world. Or, by the time I start getting immersed into one world, whoops, we're going somewhere else where things are completely different. It sometimes seems SF writers (again, both for books & games) have too much imagination and could do with narrowing things down a bit, a lot of SF books can feel like a series of short stories with the same characters in different universes rather than one big story in the same setting. It's kind of funny you mention 40k and star wars, I think part of the appeal of these is the narrative rules ARE broadly consistent from place to place.

>>51395904
This.
Swords are way too iconic in every fucking civilization and guns haven't had enough time to replace them.
I imagine in older and forgotten myths swordfags were mad as hell about every legendary weapon being spears and bows that are now forgotten to time.

>>51409670
Well I mean if your GM is worth his salt then things in your fantasy setting should be drastically different from place to place.

>>51409828
Well, yes, but things are at least vaguely consistent - magic works the same way, this creature will behave in this way, this device will still do this thing. And so on. I guess it doesn't help that I've been trying to get into Banks recently (everyone seems to go on about him) but the technology level of the Culture means they're basically wizards who can do whatever the fuck the author needs them to be capable of at any given point. I just can't immerse myself in a setting where the rules and what people/creatures/technology are capable of seems to change from moment to moment.

Like I say, I do like some sci-fi, but fantasy seems to behave itself more.

> ctrl-f women
> ctrl-f females

0 results. I am so disappointed in all of you

>>51398055
>that isn't honor
It is according to knights and samurai.

>>51397776
>slurry of nondescriptly European
Strange world

>vaguely medieval tropes
Strange cultures

>with elves and wizards thrown in
Strange people

How is that not fantastical?

>>51396592
Yes, exactly.

>>51395777
Because fantasy is storytelling distilled to its purest essence, and hard sci-fi is boring wank material for conceited nerds.

>>51395982
And yet, it's harder sci-fi than Star Trek. They have several kinds of space elves.

>>51410065
It is, but most fantasy lacks those, largely for the reasons people have given that fantasy is more popular than sci fi. People know dwarves and knights and vaguely feudal central european/british states. Nothing need be explained in detail, and even the most slackjawed player can understand whats happening.
Start getting into weirder settings like talislanta or creation or the like, however, and you can usually see your average fantasyfag's eyes glaze over and hear them start bitching about classic fantasy and special snowflakes

>>51410135
>but most fantasy lacks those
But the post I quoted was about how every fantasy setting had those.

>>51410243
I meant most fantasy lacks strangeness, not that it lacks the traditional elements

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2OiQ5ruiGE

this video sums it up. but the short version is this:

Fansasy: things are about the character and the worlds spins around them. this means that challenges, antagonists, and all the situations the character is in is all based on the own characters shortcomings and strengths. the world is tailored to the character background

Fiction: fuck your character this is the world and your character lives in it. it is a statement about the world how it works and society. and it is presented trough the eyes of the character.


in a way in Fantasy if your character is afraid of storms a storm will come at the "right" time. if it is fiction if can rain any day.

people just prefer for it to rain at the right time.

>>51395777
OP, are you retarded? Legitimately wondering.

>>51410394
Are you?

Why is it Fantasy can have Achetype as race but not Science Fiction?
Human ="my" culture
Elf = Those weird people who are arguably superior and we can respect them as equals at the very least
Dwarf = Industry, greed
Orcs = Uncivilized savages, though their culture occasionally brings about some good ( noble savage archetype )

Even though Science Fiction has archetypes available they just throw the archetypes any which were. Being of logic? Range from an AI to fleshy alien Vulcans. No theming other than the themes themselves. AI/Computer Intelligence is given emotion. Why? You can already explore that with just humans or even aliens. They do it anyways.
You can get different but still interesting archetypes and still have it be more or less reasonable and uniform across Science Fiction settings but the difference between Fantasy and SciFi is SciFi mixes the archetypes willy nilly unlike Fantasy which is pretty consistent across settings, which leads to ease of play ability.
Human = "normal" human ideals
Cyborg = people who give up their "humanity" in exchange for something they see as greater, making you question what it means to be human
Machine/AI = The type that makes you question cold rationality and pure utilitarianism and if people would be better or worse or neither as emotionless utility seekers
Alien(s) = Contrast against the Machine pure logic, the alien is pure emotion. Often Hunger/Wrath/Pleasure. May ( Predator) or may not (Alien aliens)be reasoned with, but the Alien emotion usually overpowers this or it's a temporary agreement up to the whim of the aliens desires.

>>51410285
Not all fantasy is bad fantasy you know. Hell, that is one of the biggest complaints about fantasy RPG videogames like Skyrim, level scaling and making the player character the centre of everything. Also in what feasible sense is fantasy not fiction?

>>51410040
Not actual knights and samurai.

>>51395777

>why is fantasy more popular, not counting the wildly popular sci-fi franchises?

Star Wars and Star Trek have penetrated the public consciousness to a degree which probably exceeds even that of LotR. Just because they're "buttery-soft" to you doesn't mean that they're not valid for this argument. The fantasy equivalent to "hard" sci-fi is hardly more popular; if anything, you'll see a lot more sci-fi in TV and film than fantasy. Even in books, sci-fi is still huge right now thanks to the wave of dystopian future novels. Plus, The Expanse outstrips probably every contemporary fantasy series but GoT in terms of exposure right now.

>>51411006
if you really watched the video you can see that both of the terms can coexist at different degrees.

and about the Fantasy vs Fiction I usually don't like arguing about semantics. and i think both terms are properly fitting for the topic discussed. do you know of a better alternative?

>>51405860
>Sword of Sha-na-na
I listened to a lecture series on fantasy recently. The professor said that you know when a series is derivative of Tolkien when there's a volcano. They're just rare enough that representation of them stands out even more.

>>51399604
Blindsight got shit flung at it? I thought it was super popular.

>>51406979
>>51407056

I don't know, Traveller in the early 80s was second only to D&D in popularity; it fell off but has remained a popular choice in SF ever since. The Star Wars rpgs have had periods where they were pretty big, but their popularity rises and falls pretty hard with interest in Star Wars, because that's ll you can run in them.

>>51411331
You cannot denigrate the entire fantasy genre by co-opting its name to solely describe bad writing.

I have never seen anybody try to define Fantasy as works that revolve around the main character before.

>>51411608
>I have never seen anybody try to define Fantasy as works that revolve around the main character before.
That's really strange because all of the top RPG games are all about a world that revolves around the main character ( player )

>>51411785
>fantasy is all vidya

But seriously, I think that's more a conceit of games rather than one of fantasy.
Most game worlds revolve around the player, it's just in their nature

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I think it's because people live in a world with technology and technological progress as the norm. Part of the allure of Fantasy as a genre is exploring wild, exotic ideas and imagining life in a completely different world from the one you live in. I think that's what escapism really is, you escape.

Hard SF is like the real world but even MORE. So the kind of genre that it appeals to most is Horror - the innate fear that people have of the unknown future and all the ways that that things we love can be perverted by this tiger we have by the tail.

It's less to do with the genre, I think, and more to do with what people want to get out of their entertainment.

Could you make a really dope, hard sci-fi adventure series that's about exploring the galaxy or dealing with alien cultures? I think so, yes - but you'd need to come at it from a completely new angle.

But even the softer Sci-fi series in pop-culture like Mass Effect, Star Trek, Westworld, AI - they more often than not capitalized on cosmic horror, the insignificance of life in space, moral quandaries about technology. They used the science-fantasy as a platform to question and define humanism. It's not really about the escapism or the adventure anymore. It's too much thinking. It's too real.

I think that it's like... a number line of how far away something is from a person's everyday life.

> -1 physics textbook

> 0 Real life

> 1 Real Horror (Serial Killers)

> 2 Supernatural Horror (Unexplained Phenomenon / Monsters)

> 3 Science Fiction Horror (Black Mirror / Westworld / Dystopian Future)

> 4 Hard Science Fiction (Cyberpunk / 70s Novels etc)

> 5 Science Fantasy (Star Wars, 40k)

> 6 Low-magic Fantasy (Conan / Game of Thrones?)

> 7 High-magic Fantasy (DnD / Warcraft / Epic fantasy)

But that's just off the top of my head, it might be totally different. Hard Sci-fi, as I see it, is in this weird grey area in people's minds between Scary and Fantasy that is hard to 'escape' into.

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>>51395777
Fantasy is easier to do then Sci-fi, especially space bound or universal sci-fi

When you only have a continent and some races to work with in fantasy you can mix something usable, granted if you choose to only stick to a single city for a sci-fi setting it can be easier to but for the larger sci-fi settings you gonna be lookin at a hell of a lot more work

>>51411785
Do you mean videogames or pen and paper? Wanting a world that revolves around you in P&P is nothing but a sign of selfish, immaturity. The GM should be proving a living world with plausible consequences to your actions.

Its somewhat unavoidable in videogames. But games like Skyrim still get heavily criticised for allowing or even encouraging the PC to become head of every organisation of note in the world and other such things.

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Because people are fuckin dumb

>>51405452

>G11

Nice

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It's a shame that Bungie and Activision shit the bed so hard with Destiny. At its core it's a pretty neat marriage of fantasy and sci-fi.

Of course a cool idea with shit execution is a flop.

>>51395794
Yes. Nonsense sci-fi is the best

>>51416903
It's still a pretty neat setting, not that you'd know from the game

>>51419501
All the lore that's hidden on the card things on their website paints a cool setting.

I tried really, really hard to like Destiny on release. I was a die-hard Halo fan before Halo 4 and was hoping that the spirit of Bungie would live on. Between the loss of staff in the escape from Microsoft and Activision fucking with stuff it fell flat.

>>51395777
>The only SF stuff that ever seems to gain much traction is the buttery-soft space fantasy stuff like Star Wars or 40k.

Your world is just small.

>>51421021
Then name some popular medium-hard sf stuff that's hit the mainstream and stuck.

>>51421053
Star Trek

>>51421922
Star Trek is not not even sort of hard.

>>51422846

Firefly is kinda medium, considering it remembers there is no sound in space and the setting is just one star system.

>>51421053
You may have heard of a little known TV show (not movie, not book, TV. fucking. show) from 1966? Star Trek, I believe it's called?
I think it kinda stuck around for a while.

Remind me how much Conan, Tolkien or anything else ressembling fantasy was on TV in those days? (no seriously, I'd love to know)
And is still there?

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>>51421053
If we're counting 40k as "mainstream" as in OP, then Mass Effect? After all, all the sci-fi shit except Reaper Space Magic is caused by their One Big Lie, namely, the mass effect fields, so I guess it's hardish in that sense.

>>51422846
Not that anon, but I'd say it's harder than the likes of Star Wars, in the sense that Trek makes the pretense of being somewhat scientific.
Also, in terms of the literary scale of sci-fi hardness, it leans harder because of the social commentary aspect. Not that Trek is hard at all mind you, it's all relative.

>>51424882
I wish they had kept the original plot of 0-Energy causing the early death of stars.

It would have made such a more interesting and morally gray plot than choose three colors.

>>51395965
>Someone remind me what "edge lord" means
Anyone who dares to like something different to you...the absolute cunts.

>>51405878
Sure they do. Why do you think they're called drag-ons?

>>51398747
You're describing all fiction. What makes science fiction unique is its completely unearned pretension to "accuracy."

>>51395777
>dick-waving contests over what counts as hard scifi

Why? Most fiction is much more scientifically accurate than even the hardest science fiction, simply because it's set in the real world's past or present. If you're afraid of getting something wrong, why on earth would you work in an inherently speculative genre?

>>51398949
>Go to a planet of great steppes and warm desert sands
>"So a sand planet? Like, JUST sand? Y'know that's rare or even impossible in real life, right?"
And if you decide to be realistic about it and just go to different parts of the same planet:
>"Why are we playing a game with space travel if we're not flying around in space?"

>>51396576
Not that guy but...yeah. Swords require skill and allow you to do flashy action scenes. A gun is usually just point and shoot.

The exact same thing that made guns such a practical alternative to swords (ease of use) makes them less aesthetically appealing. Unless you have something like gun-kata, which though cool looking appears ridiculous to many audiences.

Plus, you can dodge a sword. Its really hard to have a battle not end up like that one fight from Indiana Jones without insane luck.

If you don't believe me, think of a lot of action movies. How often do you have battles where the first thing the characters do is lose their weapons or have no line of sight.

>>51399229
>The guy who basically sat around saying "Preparing to fire" got his own page for fuck's sake.
Not only that, he was turned into sort of an unsung hero of the Galactic Civil War, because he was having a crisis of conscience about being the one who actually pressed the button to destroy Alderaan and was deliberately stalling in the hope that the Rebels would destroy the Death Star before he'd be forced to fire the superlaser.

>>51396898
40k at least tries to bother to explain its FTL travel and psychic powers, and the repercussions thereof on its setting. As well as acknowledging just how fucking big the galaxy is.

Star Wars tends to be better about its alien races, which are usually not just thinly veiled elves, orks, greys, terminators, and xenomorphs like in 40k.

>>51406002
>Nobody is surprised if your fantasy book has elves or orks but if you suddenly introduce daleks and klingons in your Scifi its strange. mostly because former have become a staple

Building on this elves, dwarfs, dragons, and the like have such a history and become such a staple of fantasy that if you tried copyright them you would be laughed at (though a lot of the modern incarnations are heavily Tolkien inspired). By contrast, if people try to write thinly-veiled versions of Klingons and Daleks into their stories, they get sued so hard their far-future descendants would feel it. That's why the few sci-fi archetype races out there include things like "space marines" (the normal kind, not the GW kind), "assimilationist cyborgs", "space locusts", and "psycho robots". And "space elves" to some extent, if you look at Vulkans, Minbari, etc., but that might just be lazy writing.

>>51405295
>There's also a much larger variety of encounters possible in Sci fi, each world you go to is essentially an entire fantasy world, with different races, political ideas, government types, climate, geography, etc.

>One day you're trying to get information from a robot, the next you're riding giant water-skimming Beatles with a bunch of native tribesmen trying to nuke your way into an underwater mega-corp lair, the next day you're getting sucked out into space after your bridge suffers an explosive decompression during a battle with a destroyer and 2 smaller gunships. Thankfully you're all wearing vacc-suits during combat, and your buddies in the other ships pick you up after dealing to the destroyer with salvo after salvo of nuclear missiles. The government of the local world wouldn't usually tolerate nukes in orbit, but this world is a bunch of warlord-esque criminal factions with only average tech level...
With a little adjustment, you could essentially do all of those things in fantasy as well. I think it comes down to what flavor you prefer. Do you like lasers and power armor or do you like magic and dragons?

Hard sci-fi is definitely much more difficult, though, because you have to come up with a plausible reason for all that stuff that's based on current science instead of being able to say "Things just work" like you can in fantasy and soft sci-fi, and unless your audience is really into real-world science, it's wasted effort.

>>51424823
The 90's had a ton of them, most notably Hercules: The Legendary Journies and Xena. Not sure about earlier, but films did seem to have a hard-on for ancient/medevial-based stories. And Westerns/Weird West, which are essentially very similar and near-dead now.

Sci-Fi had a much bigger heyday in the 60's-80's it seemed, because the possibilities seemed so much wider. Then we learned we weren't going to be going to other planets anytime soon and kind of gave up on it. Earth became too small, and there seemed to be no way to get off it. Note how quite a bit of novel, mainstream sci-fi tends to be dystopian stories with little to no futuristic elements than stuff like Star Wars (Mass Effect notwithstanding).

>>51411180
>The fantasy equivalent to "hard" sci-fi is hardly more popular
I'm not the OP, but that's a good point. Personally, my level of dislike for hard sci-fi and low-magic, "realistic" fantasy is pretty much the same. That said, I do prefer fantasy overall.

>>51395777
It doesn't force them outside their comfort zone.

>>51395794
>>51400386
>>51417665
Aaaallll of these.