Thread by @doctorcomics

Thanks to everyone who spoke up and shared and liked my request for questions and comments. I can’t promise to address everyone, but I’ve really benefited from the conversation. So:

Why don’t sci-fi RPGs get more attention and
What can we do about it?

https://twitter.com/onecritwonder/status/1465724311247802373

Many of you suggested reasons why SF might somehow be harder for players to get into, in particular the idea there’s a generic fantasy genre, but SF is split up into subgenres dominated by IPs such as Star Wars or Star Trek.

This creates an expectation failure. Players coming to a fantasy game know what to expect: dwarves, elves, dragons, magic swords. People coming to a SF game don’t know if they’re getting Vulcans or Sith, phasers or lightsabers.

And what if there’s no recognizable IP elements at all? Original SF settings have no common frame of reference for new players, who don’t know what they’re playing. Many other broad generalizations have been asserted about the difference between SF and fantasy RPGs.

But I think these arguments are misguided, losing sight of the fact that SF’s relatively small share of the RPG hobby is not, in fact, limited to SF. Folks, *every* genre of RPGs, from superheroes to westerns, is a lightweight compared to the fantasy genre.

Is this because fantasy is somehow the ideal genre for RPGs? Every other genre is somehow harder to make, harder to play? I’m sorry, but no. This is not a question of “why doesn’t SF get more love?” but rather “Why does fantasy get ALL the love?” And we all know the answer.

It’s D&D, of course. D&D didn’t just create the RPG hobby, but it has continued to define the word “RPG” with strategies like the Open Gaming License and lightning-in-a-bottle successes like Critical Role.

For a decade, WotC’s strategy was to make d20 the default game system for the entire RPG hobby, the system that could do everything and that everyone used. And for a long time, they succeeded. d20 OGL games are still incredibly common. Hell, I help make one (but not P2!).

(A brief digression to talk Starfinder, which is a wildly successful space game. There are space RPGs which have produced more pages—Traveller—but many, many more which have withered and died. And we’re growing! Sales are going up.

Starfinder employs half a dozen people full time, plus ancillary teams. It may be the less-played of Paizo’s RPGs, but by any other measure, Starfinder is a huge success. I’m developing our 47th (!!!) Adventure Path volume right now. How many games have done that?)

But back to D&D’s role in the dominance of fantasy over all other RPG genres. This hasn’t always been so. Poor management and publication strategy created a gap which the World of Darkness and it’s cousins swept into in the 90s.

For a long time, “Monsters we are, lest monsters we become” (henceforth MWALMWB) was the dominant RPG genre. That ended with D&D 3e and the OGL. 4th edition made another opening, but the competitor there was *also* a Dungeon Fantasy game, so the genre stayed on top.

Now actual play has catapulted D&D into the stratosphere and WotC has the money to ensure market dominance. Because they're popular, everyone knows what Dungeon Fantasy games are, so that's what they want to play, which keeps them popular. Positive feedback loop.

(Another aside on Dungeon Fantasy vs Tolkienesque Fantasy. I realize this is a losing battle on the scale of insisting the plural of “dwarf” is “dwarrow”, but Dungeon Fantasy is a far more accurate name for this genre that Tolkienesque Fantasy.

D&D and its related games are *terrible Tolkien emulators*. I mean, sure, they have halflings and ents and rings of invisibility, but they are terrible at actually simulating anything Tolkien wrote. What they are good at is a particular subgenre of fantasy.

This is what people mean when they say D&D is very good at being itself. Heroes in D&D and related games are very good at doing the things D&D does, and pretty unlike fantasy heroes in any other medium. I didn’t invent the term Dungeon Fantasy for this genre. Moving on!)

OK, so we acknowledge market forces and the means of production are responsible for Dungeon Fantasy’s dominance of the RPG space. Can we do anything about it? Well, maybe. We can try.

Markets are volatile and chaos rewards the prepared. D&D could fall in popularity, and another genre could catch the same lightning-in-a-bottle volatility and be catapulted to the big leagues. But I don’t think we can predict that. All we can do is be ready.

We, as creators and players, can keep making and playing all the genres we love so much—science fiction, superheroes, horror. We can keep those genres innovating and creative, making diverse worlds that better represent the people who play our games.

And, in so doing, we position ourselves to capitalize on any break in trends. We have to remember, it’s not our fault, or the fault of our favorite genre, that a genre is not popular. We’re competing against a 50 year history and a budget we can only dream of.

Right now Dungeon Fantasy is to RPGs as superheroes are to comic books. There are plenty of comics that aren’t about superheroes, but in the popular imagination, these words are very nearly synonyms. Even as that’s eroding, superheroes are more popular than ever.

Maybe the solution is that, like comics, Dungeon Fantasy will outgrow its original medium. When D&D is a movie and TV franchise, the money it makes from RPGs will be dwarfed in comparison. Resources that used to go to D&D games will go to D&D movies instead.

In comics, the shift of superheroes to film and TV has accompanied a flourishing of non-superhero comics from many publishers. Maybe that will happen with RPGs too. I don’t know, but creators who are ready with good games will capitalize on it if it does. End.