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Post by squeatus on May 3, 2015 12:51:11 GMT -8
I want a system in place to mitigate a GM's potential for trapping me in their basement for six hours in some masturbatory reading of their manuscript. Wait! You actually believe this or are you giving voice to your avatar? You think you, with the admittedly limited vocabulary, can out rule an asshole just with some designer's rules...? Admit it. You think like this because you're a munchkin-size rules lawyer.... I don't understand anything you just said. Sorry. I think mitigate means to reduce a negative effect, not to necessarily eliminate it. There's still an impetus on the player not to game with someone like you after they figure out you're just there to recite a Furry/Twilight/Potter/Transformers mashup draft at them.
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Post by Forresst on May 3, 2015 23:05:45 GMT -8
I always kinda figured there was a bit of a multi-faceted thing at play here to explain why gaming in a fantasy setting is generally the most popular way to game.
For one, you have history. Not just the history of tabletop games, where D&D has dominated the average person's default "this is a tabletop rpg" label for... what like 30+ years? Which is significant, but you just have straight up history, as in the history of human civilisation, as a kind of felt curtain with little castles n' shit painted on it as a default backdrop. You can get really creative very easily, by plugging in different stuff: magic, non-human species, different societal paradigms, etc; but all in all, you kind of end up with a pretty familiar baseline to start with, and one that most of us can tune in on pretty easily. Almost anyone can imagine a fictional past-like world in which if I can catch a wild chicken, I can trade it to a farmer for like a few potatoes and a lump of butter or whatevs. Now we compare that to sci-fi, where you have to extrapolate what's going on now and try to anticipate what will happen because of such over the course of... I dunno. Pick a time frame. Or you can just throw everything we have as a history out the window and just start making it up wholesale. As it turns out, making up a whole damn universe is REALLY HARD. You can start out by making up a planet or even just a place on a planet and expand from there and it gets a little easier but then you have to make sure your players are all on board with your substitute history, and you substitute culture, and then also explain how a laser gun works and all this.
The other big thing, I think, is human drama. Like, in-game human drama, not the thing where you throw the cheetos at the baloney-smell guy and storm out the door, but like... oh god, Mos just fell in the dark water and there's a crocodile and what will his sister do they are inseparable?! Fantasy has a really fast inroads to exploring relationships between people, and fans of the genre tend to zero in on it really fast, while in sci-fi, yeah, you get to the same relationships but you have to wade through a bunch of ten dollar words about lasers or spaceships or something so that you can get there. I honestly believe that a gamer needs to be of a certain mindset or in a certain mood to really enjoy the kind of extrapolative, conjectural thinking that really makes a sci-fi game shine. But, that same gamer (or a different one) can easily slide into a fantasy setting and just go.
I could be wrong about all this, sure. But, it's pretty much what I've seen and believe.
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Post by lamesaucejohn on May 26, 2015 17:50:21 GMT -8
I have been the dm in alot of games and i personally get bogged down running modern and sci fi games. I would say most people born in the 80s as i was have seen more fantasy than anything else. ad&d was all i ever heard about till i was a teenager plus fantasy movies like Willow,Dragonslayer,Conan were awesome and awe inspiring.
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Post by gilgalad on Aug 3, 2015 14:45:23 GMT -8
Swords are simply sexier than lasers. Look at Jedi Knights. The really cool, really powerful people don't use uncivilized blasters. Look at Dune, they created a whole complex shield system so they could bring blades into a world with future tech. As cool as sci-fi is there is just something romantic about skill on skill, standing toe to toe and testing yourself against someone else rather then pew pewing each other.
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Post by archmagezemoc on Aug 4, 2015 9:46:31 GMT -8
Swords are simply sexier than lasers. Look at Jedi Knights. The really cool, really powerful people don't use uncivilized blasters. Look at Dune, they created a whole complex shield system so they could bring blades into a world with future tech. As cool as sci-fi is there is just something romantic about skill on skill, standing toe to toe and testing yourself against someone else rather then pew pewing each other. And yet isn't a "Power Sword" cooler than a normal sword? I mean it has the word "Power" in its name! (Not to mention the CHAINSWORD!!) The Heresy runs rampant in this topic. But based off of my preference and how hard it is to write a coherent campaign in said setting here's my ranking. Warhammer 40k > General Fantasy > General Scifi Fantasy is simply easier to make and hand wave. If I wasn't entrenched in 40k I wouldn't put it first as it's a pretty complex setting to jump into and just play with no beforehand knowledge. And I take great pitty on the GM who tries to run anything in the 40k IP without a lot of knowledge. At least in Star Wars you can just go "Jedis and Rebels are good, Sith and Empire are bad, oh and lightsabers. you're good to go."
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