Why does fantasy seem to be much more popular than SF? Is it just Tolkien/D&D's cultural influence...

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.

>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

So edgelord means "Likes swords" now?

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

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

You're an idiot.

Obi-Wan was an edgelord?

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

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.

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.

...

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.

Sci fi is not as interesting.

>I don't know what edgy means

How so?

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

>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.

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

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

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

More like
>I take the word edgy literally

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

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

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

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.

All force users are supreme edgelords

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.

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

The fuck are you on about user? 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.

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.

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

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

>It's less heroic and free.

What sort of faggotry is this?

>Hurr durr, only sword and sorcery has heroism

>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.

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.

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.

>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..

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.

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.

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.

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

>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

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

>implying greys aren't lazy SF

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.

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

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.

>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?

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.

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.)

>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.

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

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".

>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

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.

>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.

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.

>"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

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.

>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.

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.

Space hard sf is boring. Earth hard SF is awesome

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

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.

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.

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

I mean, swords ARE edged weapons.

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

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.

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

expln pls

holocock?

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

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

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

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.

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.

>you're riding giant water-skimming Beatles

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

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.

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

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

>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.

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.

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.

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.

>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.

>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?"

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