Why does fantasy tend to overshadow sci fi as far as rpgs and genre stuff goes...

Why does fantasy tend to overshadow sci fi as far as rpgs and genre stuff goes? Is it just D&D/Tolkien 's shadow in the collective psyche? I've met tons of people who are really dismissive or disfavoring of SF stuff, with maybe the rare exception of ultra soft space fantasy stuff like SW or 40k. What does Veeky Forums think?

The fantastic elements of sci-fi must adhere to a certain degree of logic or believably to be enjoyable. This makes sci-fi much harder to write.

In fantasy having a weapon that floats in the air and fights for its wielder is easy to explain and accept. That is far less true of sci-fi worlds because the tech necessary to do that would have applications that you need to work into the world. Thats just one example. Basically, in general fantasy settings you can explain away the limitations and utility of things by just saying "magic" and in sci-fi you cant.

The real problem as i see it is that it is much harder to have heroic individuals making a difference in a scifi setting. The main reason for this is firearms. With sword and shield you can go around and be a hero, and it is reasonable for you to survive for some time doing this based on the assumption that your just more skilled and badass then everyone else. In scifi it doesnt matter how skilled or badass you are, one laser bolt will end you, and there is honestly jack shit you can do about it. Furthermore scifi tends to have large centralized powers more than fantasy. Heroing works best if the governement can't do shit, cause if the goverment can actually do shit, then there really wouldnt be to much need of heroes cause they'd get all the shit done. This is also why a lot of scifi settings seem to revolve around lawless pc's or rebels out to fuck big brother. All just my opinion, i know none of this is definitive.

These gentlemen are both my niggers.

So how would you suggest we go about creating heroic sci fi?

Also, another possible point in fantasy's favor: a generic baseline exists for fantasy in media and especially rpgs. People come in thinking about elves and orcs and pseudo medieval magic lands and such, and that tends to be expected. I think we've all seen people who vocally prefer traditional fantasy tropes. Science fiction doesn't have that baseline. One man's sf and interpretations of various tropes and ideas will probably be completely different than another. You say sci fi, I don't know if I should expect Deus ex, Asimov, Alien, or Star Trek

40k

>So how would you suggest we go about creating heroic sci fi?
I would suggest making limitations for the use of firearms, such as "they might breach the hull of a spaceship" or "automated weapons caused great wars so they became a taboo"

or you just say "lightsabers wielded by skilled people can outclass laser blasters", and let it be.

there's no way to make someone look truly heroic with a gun, though. firearms will always be seen as something bad

The first thing that is necessary is some way to make you, the player, relevant. This is important because players like to be important. I can be joe smoe any day of the week, but Saturday when i get with my group i get to be the hero. In Scifi settings this can generally be achieved by giving them some manner of rank and responsibility in setting. You make them a ship captain, or something. Thing is if they work for the government then there would be rules and regulations, and players don't want people telling them 'uh, dude, that violates the prime directive you can't do that shit" so having them hold military rank is difficult. But if your just some civvy that's boring. Therefore the best option is people living on the fringes of society. This is why we get outlaw type games. Which are actually pretty fun. People like roleplaying t hings they don't get to do, and there is a certain thrill in flipping off authority. Alternatively they could be operating on the edges of known space, like some sort of space conquistador or Lewis and Clarke or something. Exploration and finding aliens and new planets. Pretty fun, compelling fantasy. Now we just need to solve the problem of them being good at something mattering. This can be solved in two ways. Way number one, have combat be handled in space ships only pretty much. The skill they are badass in is piloting and fighting their ship. Since ship battles probably won't end in one single salvo like a gunfight will, this could be interesting. Alternatively some manner of defensive technology that renders guns moot. Energy shields on roids that need to be gotten around some other way. But generally that just turns into laser swords and fantasy with a thin veneer of scifi slapped on it (its not magic, its psychic powers. That isn't an elf, its an alien, dude why don't you like my not!lightsaber). That can be fun. I love star wars and 40k, and both can be pretty guilty of that, but neither is really hard scifi.

I know i'm just restating a lot, i don't really have an answer, i'm just brainstorming really.

There's a reason 40k and Star Wars are among the most popular Sci-Fi properties.

Do away with Sci-Fi's philosophical or scientific trappings. Those are for books and movies and sometimes video games. Not for table top largely.

>there's no way to make someone look truly heroic with a gun, though. firearms will always be seen as something bad
You obviously don't watch westerns.

Based on the model you have proposed the pc's are badass and survive because they have the quickest quick draw, and a sixth sense for danger that gets them to duck before the shooting starts. I actually love old westerns. I would play that shit. This would of course be predicated on the edge of the frontier model. So space wild west basically is what your proposing?

you can always give them a mission
the "random encounter at the tavern" but styled as sci-fi.
you might find an old guy being chased by mysterious people while wanting to contact the authorities, or have the players at a ship that goes under attack.
accidental heroes are easier to make on sci-fi, I think, and you don't need to give them "destinies" of being heroes. they're just trying to outcome the stuff


guns in westerns make the guys look badass, but there's still some negative shred to it. westerns usually aren't about glory and heroism, but about surviving in a harsh world.
anyways, I'm willing to read/watch anything that will prove me wrong.

>a generic baseline exists for fantasy
It really really shouldn't, FWIW. Fantasy should keep being the catch all that includes Dunsany, Alice in Wonderland, GRRM-style stuff, and Wuxia movies. Subgenres are okay and all, but myriad individual works with myriad individual tones/themes/milieus is better for a genre.

If anything it's the tight, limited number of original templates that limit scifi.
>First contact / invasion story
>Post apoc
>Cyberpunk
>Dystopia
>Space opera
>Rebels vs. space fascists
>Heroic space fascists shoot bugs
>Space survival
>Robots are revolting again
>The science experiment went wrong again
>The world is fake again
>There's a hole in space again

Getting away from some generic baseline is hard. And failing to do so makes it hard for your piece to "stick." Especially if your selling point is some high concept like "what if we can visit dreams?" (Reality is fake again)

Fantasy isn't exactly selling itself on a high concept as often. There's much more emphasis on tone and character, and when scifi feels fresh it's usually borrowing from those parts of the playbook. But fantasy still risks losing its novelty and cultural cache if it doesn't find some new territory to explore now and again.

So make them space ship crew sent to do x very important mission with the future of the galaxy hanging on the balance? Given a high degree of autonomy to do it?

yeah, basically.
that gives them some importance, but takes away the burocracy.
but that isn't stated on the first "episode". they are randomly gathered and thrown in the middle of it. some of them might be military, others just caught in the crossfire.

the usual gundam thing.
>colony gets invaded
>evacuation proceeds
>main characters are thrown in a warship
>???
>50 episode series

The biggest problem is 'space fantasy'.

It used to be huge and everyone loved it, but then we started getting cynical about actually colonizing space and everyone realized it was a void filled with absolutely nothing which is actually an awful prospect. Old stories where every planet had it's own Martian civilization or gleaming spires and you could go to space without needing a helmet or even messing up your hair were far more palatable, because that sense of emptiness is absent.

So to make a sci fi game work, I'd recommend limiting it to a single city/planet/spaceship, so you don't have to worry about trying to make up things to fill a totally empty universe.

Not sure you meant to reply to me, either way, I'm not the above space western guy. Just a passerby.

However, Space Westerns can be done quite well. Firefly was pretty great, and it would work well enough as a campaign setting. I'd argue that playing a sci-fi version of Dogs in the Vineyard could be one of the most awesome things of all time, especially adding in the conflicts of technology in the more civilized worlds pushing forward and the interplay of reliance the frontier worlds have with the core of civilization. Plus considering things like living on a non-earth-like planet and the fact that any violence could become catastrophic for everyone sounds like great pieces for conflict.

I'm going to have to disagree with you there. But I've also watched a bunch of "white hat vs black hat" westerns and old WWII propaganda-type movies where guns are presented as heroically as a sword so long as they are in the heroes' hands. John Wayne movies, the really old ones, have a lot of that attitude.

Honestly? As much as I hate to say it, the closest thing to a standardised baseline scifi setting is probably cyberpunk/generic dystopian shit. Sure, it's nowhere as big or influential to the concept as a whole as Tolkienite fantasy was, but it's one of the precious few subgenres where you instantly have some tropes that come to mind

>Big Bad Gov/Megacorps
>Leet Haxxors
>Tech coming out of your ears, often literally
>Sticking it to the man
>Murky neon aesthetic
>Jaded cynical take on "le wonderous world of tomorrow"
Sure, some of the tech and power levels may vary, especially in weapons - but what other flavours (not just particular franchises) of scifi can you automatically have a reasonable understanding of what it entails just by mentioning the name?

inb4
>REEEEEE not real scifi
>[Veeky Forums getting triggered by the suffix -punk]

Heroic scifi can be (and has been) done pretty well before, but the problem is that its prerequisites are usually the opposite of what you want on the tabletop.

I've always found there to be an incredibly striking difference between Brit and US scifi. American stuff is more focused on the big scale; on the pioneers, the explorers and innovators, on the final frontiers facing impossible odds (Trekshit being the obvious contender here). The Bongs, on the other hand, usually concern themselves with the ordinary people of a setting, no matter how fuckhuge the scale or challenges (some of Baxter's best work concerns worthless soldiers in spehss trench warfare against the most OP aliens in any setting I've seen; while most of Clarke's best work was about regular joes). I'd argue that that's also why IG are still get screen time, the adamantium balls meme and plotty characters in 40k instead of being faceless redshirts ALL of the time.

tl;dr: heroic scifi is best when the PCs win through grit and bloodymindedness rather than idealistic heroism or overt superiority

>So how would you suggest we go about creating heroic sci fi?
Psychic powers, mad scientists, and super soldiers.
>Martial equivalents are super soldiers with bones that can resist rifle fire, skin as tough as Kevlar, who can lift a car, and fire an autocannon from the hip.
>Psychics can manipulate the fabric of reality, lightning, fire, teleportation, biomancy, summoning, "spirits", etc.
>Mad scientists are geniuses with so much technology in them that they are barely even human anymore, they can almost instinctively find the weak spots of a vehicle, how to hack a computer, and can integrate a completely alien weapon into their body in minutes

Essentially since 40k was originally WHFB in space. Instead of knightly orders and Bretonnians you have space marines, instead of mages you have psykers, you have admech, haemonculi, and dark mechanicus for technology shit, and Orcs and Elves are just aliens. If you wanted to be less hamfisted fantasy you could easily modify concepts to make them less overt, eg. psychic powers are more limited than magic in most settings or aliens are actually unique as opposed to space elves.

> In scifi it doesnt matter how skilled or badass you are, one laser bolt will end you, and there is honestly jack shit you can do about it.
The same is true of a sword, yet plenty of people run heroic fantasy games where PCs are expected to get stabbed routinely.

>there's no way to make someone look truly heroic with a gun, though. firearms will always be seen as something bad
found the europoor

This is true. A sword can end you. But you can dodge a sword, or deflect it. Skilled activities your pc can be capable of. I have yet to find a man capable of dodging or deflecting a bullet, but if that became a thing, then they would be pc's.

I'm a big fan of lunar systems, since there's a decent excuse to get bodies in space with less of the relativistic fuckery and a realistic reason for a whole pile of worlds in the goldilocks zone.

This. Also, the counters to firearms in terms of armour/energy shielding don't really have the same feel

you can always lightsabers
that's the sole reason they exist, to look cool and protagonistic

Well yeah, but then why am i not just playing fantasy? There has to be a way to do scifi without just doing a reskin of fantasy.

Egh, that's approaching fantasy territory

Depends what subgenre you're looking at first, senpai. Space opera, science fantasy, dystopian near future? Get that tied down and we can start looking at what works and what doesn't

Dodging and deflecting bullets is pretty easy in fucking sci fi

By what means is this accomplished?

(power) armor, force fields, psi power, superhuman reflexes, sheer grit and luck, etc

because fantasy doesn't have giant robots, fights for fuel and other resources or sweet sweet laser technology.

laser swords, shields, space magic, etc
everything we don't want on a scenario that tries to not be a fantasy reskin

I think it's perfectly possible, but might require very different stakes, pcs, and 'adventures'. Sci fi , at least the more grounded kind, is a lot less accepting of world saving larger than life ubermensche, and when it has them they tend to be more Char Aznable or (various people from LOTGH) than Conan or Aragorn.

Grit and luck don't really make for interesting gaming in my opinion. Congratulations, you live because the dm willed it and flubbed the rolls isn't really my pot of tea.

Superhuman reflexes are actually good. We can work with this depending on how they are achieved. Everone bullet times. Guns still get used but you can do something about it. ok, that could work.

the others have already been brought up i think, but if they weren't above they are right here

Not your luck/grit, the characters. They get dodge bonuses or whatever just for being gritty, hardened badasses. They'd still probably need to be more tactical than a standard fantasy pc, but it would let them do some action movie shit sometimes

>because fantasy doesn't have giant robots, fights for fuel and other resources or sweet sweet laser technology.
Maybe your fantasy setting doesn't.

fuck off back to 40kids general

if you stretch it, any setting can have anything
I was planning on a "spellpunk" setting with giant robots and high tech spellcrafted stuff, but I'm not gonna stretch it and say it's an example of the average fantasy scenario

I think the big thing is sci fi makes the things that you have to fight in an equivalent fantasy setting too easy. It's like how none of Seinfeld would've happened if the characters had cell phones.

...

>Castle golem
>plague and famine
>literally any ray spell

...

It's because sci-fi is boring because the setting is always convoluted, guns ruin everything, space ships ruin everything, mechs ruin everything, and it's always HUMANITY FUCK YEAH.

All these people shittalking guns, it's like a forum full of feudal lords. You see it as taking heroism out of things, I see it as making it so anybody can be a hero. You don't see as many scholarly characters in fantasy without them being wizards or npcs, but sci fi and pulp can totally have action scientists

Well that's the problem. Hero's can exist if skill is taken out. Guns ruin a setting.

I know this is bait, but I know a guy who's basically like this. The few times my playgroup has done any SF stuff, he's tried to be as antithetical to the setting.

>the setting is convoluted
>defending a genre where tolkien took care to write stat sheets for every single character and their dog
Hey, the complexity in scifi is out of tech or political(ish) shit that's at least vaguely interesting

>scifi
>must have space
>must have mechs
>must have HFY
...I've been baited, haven't I?

Master Baited, yes.

>you can only be heroic if you are THE BEST AT FITING GUD!!1!!1!
> t. martial
PCs =/= OC donut steals

Because sci-fi is too broad of a genre, and if you just say sci-fi and rope people into it and it turns out to be retrofuturistic garbage instead of posthumanist utopia where competing in business is considered a national sport, they will be disappointed.

Fantasy is.. Pretty uniform. Sci-fi goes from 1984 to Hard Sci-fi to future fantasy to space operas to cyberpunk to post-apocalyptic wastelands.

People arent writing for you, secreyly pissing in your coffee and writing generic fantasy/sci-fi to piss you off.
They write what they think sounds good and occasionally: what sells.

/thread

What? I was just wondering why people seem to like fantasy more. I don't think it's to piss me off, I just wonder why SF's not as popular. Have a japanesey robot for your trouble

I like these robots.

As do I. Those two and these cyber-knights are apparently concept art for...some sort of game. Don't know what

>It's one of those "user completely misunderstands the point of a thread" episodes

its because Fantasy has a more timeless set up inmost cases, despite some claims, Magic, Orcs, elves and dwarves don't get old, Sci-fi by its very nature dates itself by the values and science it was written under, what was cutting edge and on the verge of getting the universe 5 years ago is considered quackery today only to maybe be vindicated 10 years down the line. Sci-fi is a perpetual reflection of the times its written in, the hopes, dreams, fears doubts and ideals of the age and region, while fantasy stands in a world so old as to be alien and divided from our own, its why the most popular sci-fi have these truely impossible fantasy elements to keep it timeless, nobody will question the viability of hyperdrive in a world with Jedi, or the validity of a chainsword when there are literal daemons, or the nature of transporters in a universe where Q can drop by

If anyone know's the game let me know.

It's maybe horizon zero dawn. It's all I know that Geurilla's working on right now

>Fantasy has a more timeless set up inmost cases
This is true.
>Orcs, elves and dwarves don't get old
This is not. Luckily, most fantasy outside of vidya and D&D has moved beyond shitty Tolkien knockoffs.

>Using old-timey rip offs of sweet technology

I like fantasy as much as the next user, but don't give me a golem that you can get inside and "pilot."

I've not seen them

Frodo wasn't a hero?

A couple rarely touched themes for sci-fi would make it generally as cool as fantasy but I think they'd also have to include some kind of magic/powers setup

> Travel between Settings

Time Travelers
Alternate Reality Travelers
Universe Jumpers

because then the centralized authority figures of futuristic or modern sci-fi become more distant and the players are more left to their own devices and ability to move around as they see fit

You can still have evil alien empires and so on but they seem again like distant factions such as "orcs" or "elves".

The players may be employed by some government project but, once they're out of the teleporter lab the only reprocussions they may face against them are not being able to come back or having an occasional cleaner squad sent after them, and they may find life in their new place more fulfulling and fun anyway.

hey, there's nothing wrong with popular archetypes

I don't understand the love Fantasy gets. Like I love Tolkein and Conan but Sci fi has much better opportunities for fun pulp adventure AND deep explorations of the darkest natures of man

Like seriously, name fantasy writer as on point as John Brunner

That's a very good point. Most cyperpunk is still lingering in the 80s and 90s, and was made before people could begin to comprehend wireless. And more often than not, people end up making sci-fi that's either 'modern day stuff with fancy trappings,' or 'something so alien and different only serious sci-fi nuts could try and get into it.'

They may have gotten old for you, but there are other people still just getting exposed to them, or maybe getting tired of the reinventions and just wanting to go back to the classics.

>The first thing that is necessary is some way to make you, the player, relevant.

Now you see that I really don't get. Stories are much more interesting when they are a human level, that's why people like Crime Dramas and thrillers more than epic fantasy.

Low Level is the way to go. Nice Noirish lethal as fuck campaigns with a high mortality rate but low body count. Good old fashioned pulp

>I don't understand the love Fantasy gets.

Fantasy has been around a lot longer; there is actual mythology and real history to base it on. Sci-Fi became popular 60/70 years ago?

on some level i want to read that. on another level after reading some of the quotes i'm sure it would piss me off.

It's the most depressing science fiction book ever written because it predicted nowadays better than any other book or movie or fucking anything

Hoplophobe faggot

If you look at the most popular fantasy series written recently, you'll find few if any Tolkienesque settings: Dresden Files, The Farseer Trilogy, The Lies of Locke Lamora, Mistborn, The Name of the Wind, The Stormlight Archive, and The Wheel of Time all lack the "standard fantasy" races. For RPGs there's stuff like Ars Magica, Legend of the Five Rings, and Unknown Armies. For visual media you have all sorts of things, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Game of Thrones to wuxia movies.

Outside of vidya, where having an original and interesting setting isn't really a priority most of the time, a list of popular fantasy works that actually do include Tolkien races would be much shorter. There's D&D, Warhammer, LotR itself, Discworld, Malazan (kind of), and that's about it. It's just that those first 3 are so popular that people (especially on Veeky Forums) tend to assume all fantasy looks exactly like that, when it actually tends to be quite a bit more varied.

>tfw none of the things he mentioned interest you

Cyberpunk isn't going to leave the 80s and 90s either, it's been cemented there as a genre.

In general, all the -punks are just sci-fi from an earlier era. Their concepts and imagery have been crystallized and only become more caricatured.

>Cyberpunk isn't going to leave the 80s and 90s either

But like nowadays is cyberpunk

thats why we keep it in the 80's, those innacurate predictions are part of the charm that real life's resemblances lack

Eh, I disagree. Cyberpunk got the future more right than most sci fi genres did.

Now the only accurate sf is stuff like The Water Knife or Soft Apocalypse. Jesus we're fucked

Because fantasy is naturally more limited with its fantastical elements, and is thusly way easier to write, whereas science-fiction is much more intertwined with cause and effect, and every fantastical science-fiction element that is utilized must have its affects on the overall fictional universe accounted for.

Magic can be as expansive or as limited as the author wants. And it's usually limited.
Science-fiction concepts are almost inherently and exclusively expansive.

If a scientists creates a robot to do his bidding, it revolutionizes the fictional world he lives in, as commandable robots would drastically change the spheres of manufacturing, warfare, home-life, space-exploration, labor, economics, etc.
By comparison, if a wizard creates an artificial golem to do his bidding, it changes nothing.

Science, by its definition, is built on principles that can be repeated by other individuals. Thusly any scientific advancement affects the whole of society.
Magic, which is typically written to be limited and exclusive, does dick in regards to society.

Because people are stupid

"Fantasy" and "science fiction" weren't opposed or even distinct genres until recently

An alien comet crashing into earth, stealing souls, and being vanquished by a local wizard in a neo-shamanic journey wouldn't raise any eyebrows

"Science fiction" and "fantasy" are nothing more than a successful bookstore marketing strategy

In the western tradition "magic" and "science" were indistinguishable

FFS we have grimoires with bulletproofing spells from the 16th century

Isaac Newton was an alchemist, and considered it his greatest work

Paracelsus was the father of toxicology and a well known magus who invented the popular fantasy "elementals"

Astronomy is the daughter of Astrology

These guys weren't crazy, nor were they idiots

"Magic" (although THEY wouldn't even see it as such in many cases) was cutting edge science

Psychic powers were once a plausible scientific theory

In short, fuck fabricated boundaries

Main point is that it has been cemented in a specific spot in time, where fantasy is somewhere almost completely timeless - based on history, sure, but also outside of it.

I will never be able to wrap my head around the idea that a dude going around shanking people with a sword is more heroic then a gun. I won't claim that one is more important than the other because the heroic nature of it lies with the one using it.

As far as "Heroic Sci-fi" goes I'd put Destiny up there. In spite of whatever faults it has I feel it does do a lot of things right. You have characters who are comparable to the sorts you see in your fantasy eqvuilient settings; Shinobou who was a hunter who promised to aid some people to get to the last city in spite of the fact she and her crew were hurt, had barely any ammo left and were up against overwhelming odds against the Fallen, Jharen Ward who wielded a famous handcannon tracking down and dueling a fallen hunter Dredgen Yor who was later finished off by his apprentince Shin Malphur. The epicness of the Titans who stood fast and held the walls of the last city against a Fallen siege. Saint--14 Headbutting a Fallen Kell to death and later Ryzel Azier letting himself get killed so he could revive and put six bullets right in the chin of another Fallen Kell.

Ya'll niggas just need to get off your shit that sci-fi means whatever shit you puked out earlier. If I wanted a hard sci-fi setting then what you said makes sense but I want my power armor ranger wielding a shotgun partially made out of the bones from some alien I ganked.

well said

>implying a psychic can defeat a saint
>shit, implying an army can beat a saint

Fuck, yeah that sounds dumb as hell. But what about a suit of armor that enhances strength?

Because its even easier to say 'magic'. Shit's easier than reversing the polarity, which is pmuch magic, but you have to at least know a bit about the miracle of magnets for that. And turns out most people like easy things when they're consuming media for fun.

I really don't understand the argument about guns not working in an rpg. Do bows and crossbows break games? Hell, do fireball spells mean sword and board players should go home?

Are we saying that a knight can take 4 bolts to the chest, but a future cop can't take 4 bullets to the chest? Does armor not exist in the future? Does skill with a firearm not matter? Then why does the army train its soldiers? Why are there different ranks of marksman if a gun is so easy?

If you don't like armor, then personal energy shields like Dune or hey, everybody is backed up to a central mainframe and if you die, you'll be reincarnated in a "CloneTek" body the next week when you miss your scheduled backup. You can have PCs be specially trained Gunkata experts that can dodge incoming fire. You can have genetically engineered super agile soldiers. You can have a personal CIWS that will block 90% of incoming fire. Drugs or implants that increase agility and endurance. Anything you can imagine, you can put into your setting.

Why not? That's what you asked for.

>spehss trench warfare against the most OP aliens in any setting I've seen

What's the book called?

>I'd put Destiny up there
You shouldn't because, like Star Wars, it's not sci-fi at all. It's just a Fantasy story with a high-tech paint job.

The best way to do sci fi is to get a jumpsuit, a sword, and a raygun, go down to some primitive planet, swap out the jumpsuit for a loin cloth, save the double headed lizard woman from the mighty zor, then move on to the next planet and repeat.
Nothing is stopping you from being old time science fiction hero.

If Starwars and Destiny are Fantasy, then how do we tell Sci-Fi and Fantasy apart?

"Sci-fi" is mostly defined by the technology level. Space opera settings are still sci-fi even though it's at the soft end of the spectrum.

I could be off base, but I've always thought fantasy simply had more fans in total, and therefor more people in the category of RPG players.

An explanation I heard was that in fantasy, you're the chosen one; in sci fi, you're not.

It might be because there's stuff like the Force in Star Wars and literal wizards in Destiny, but I've read star wars stories that were way harder sci fi than the movies.

It's mostly on an individual basis, although I think the special/not special thing holds

But in Destiny you're not the chosen one. You're literally just another zombie that the Traveler resurrected to fight for it.

Shit, now that I type that out it sounds awfully fantasy.

>not the chosen one

>kill an aspiring Devil Archon before you get your jumphsip
>kill the Machine God Sepiks Prime, crippling the Devil ether supply
>find the hive on the moon and stop them from stealing Light form the traveler, thus allowing it to heal
>break through cabal forces on mars looking for Vex
>kill a proto-god in the heart of the black garden that the vex worship
>all before lvl 20
>kill aethon, stopping their attempt to make the vex a fundamental law of the universe
>kill Crota, a demi-god that spent eons killing things across the universe
>kill Skolas, crippling wolves
>kill rebuilt wolf servitor prime, doming the wolves
>dismantle the hive enough to make jaina proud kill Oryx(a god), his daughters(demi-gods), his court, his war priest(could be considered a demi-god), his pet super weapon, take control of the ship, and kill another god when they dropped oryx
>acquire titles such as Hive Bane, Kingslayer, Wolf Breaker, and The Guardian
>THE Guardian

not chosen my ass

> Do bows and crossbows break games? Hell, do fireball spells mean sword and board players should go home?

Yes

>Casters4life

Dude, with about a hours worth of learning you can pick up a rifle and hit a man sized target at about 75 yards. Outside of something extreme like a sniper, shooting isn't skillful in the slightest.