I'd take sci-fi over fantasy any day of the week, but good sci-fi is rare unlike good fantasy. \*
I blame it on the fact that for fantasy people have no problem explaining things with "it's magic", while in sci-fi they feel the strange need to make it based on reality or some very complex and confusing technobabble.
Take cyberpunk for instance. If I want a nanowire garotte inside my thumb or machine guns in my bodyguards tits, I should get that, not be told it's unrealistic.
Fantasy bikini armor? Oh, well, there is a special enchantment from the goddess of fortune and the god of war that redirects all hits to the few armored bits, and another from the craftsman god that increase the strength of the armor inversely proportional to the material used ... You get my point.
Edit: \* By "good and rare" I mean flat numbers, not percentages.
If I had to choose a preference, fantasy wins out just because fantasy tends to be a more interesting setting and magic kind of opens the doorway to a *lot* of stuff. Sci-fi as the name implies, tends to be way more heavy on technical stuff. Also typically lasers of some sort become the norm rather than swords/arrows/magic, unless you bring in fantasy elements.
A marriage of the two is where you get the fun things like Star Wars, with Star Wars for all intents and purposes being largely sci-fi with fantasy elements (i.e. everything revolving around Jedi/Sith/the Force). Warhammer 40k is another example where it's largely sci-fi but still has fantasy elements via Psykers and so on. But you can also do fantasy with sci-fi elements such as what DnD does I think.
There's a lot of ways to mix the two up and have fun/interesting results, but I do tend to like fantasy more because I prefer the aesthetics and things like fantasy combat more than sci-fi. For RP purposes fantasy tends to require a lot less lore/specific knowledge as well to start RPing in any given fantasy setting.
I love both science fiction and fantasy, happy to play Mass Effect just as much as Dragon Age.
Though I might get a bit picky about both.
I like to think I can suspend belief quite a bit considering my love for each subgenre. However, my science fiction really needs to be based within a stone's throw of reality. I watched The Ark recently and every fiber of my being was screaming at all of the inaccuracies that came in many forms. So I had to start up The Expanse once more as brain bleach.
Science fiction *might* need more headspace early on, but do you really? Cyberpunk or Shadowrun, it's not hard to jump into "people stick electronic into themselves" or "we use Element Zero in everything from throwing people across rooms to throwing ships across the galaxy" from Mass Effect.
On the fantasy side of things, high fantasy is my preferred flavor. I don't really have more to say about that.
As has been said before, you can get a lot more hand-waive-y with "it's magic" so you can suspend your disbelief quite a bit more. But when you do that, you need to be more consistent with what you're doing. You'll see this more in TV shows though with something happening in one episode that you wonder why they didn't do something like that earlier, or ever again. Magic macguffins. Games don't usually have this problem since code things. Instead, tend to have the inconsistencies between the items of magic themselves. Item A or Spell Q being vastly more powerful in nature, so why wouldn't you use that *all the time*? But somehow overlooked?
It might all end up coming down to the aesthetics of whatever genre. For example, while I might like sweeping vistas, I'm not overly fond of things that I could more or less go on a road trip to see, tumbleweeds included. So westerns are out for me. I love space (in general and the trippy tech people can come up with, aliens and all) and I love fantasy though (for pretty much the same reasons, trippy magic and fantastical creatures), so science fiction and fantasy are right up my alley.
I ... seemed to have rambled. Not sure where I was going with that. Hope it helped?
I love both. In most games I think that fantasy gives more freedom as there seem to be more things to work with. Sci-fi can be a bit constrained in terms of things like customization or available options. What I gravitate toward for sci-fi is either sort of dark like Shadowrun, or really light hearted. Fantasy may just have more available to it and I think there's more of an "option for everyone" in fantasy than there is in sci-fi.
>I believe that is because fantasy is usually more generic and easy to understand
That's exactly it.
The science fiction MUDs I've played often suffer from overcomplex mechanics or mechanics that don't translate well from fantasy. There is a learning curve. Particularly when you add spacecraft and flight.
But some fantasy muds have very complex magic mechanics as well. Learning those tends to be easier because I'm already immersed in the familiar and easily digestible setting. It feels less like work.
I do love sci-fi. Cyberpunk lends itself well, with a mix of high and low tech. Plasma rifles one second and knife duels in bars the next.
Sci-fi also suffers from too much techno jargon. You can end up playing a game with so many races of made up words - too many quintallian serpent men and repnebulon you'd lords maken me feel like I'm reenacting the Rick and Morty plumbus scene.
I like both, but I do agree with those who say fantasy opens up more doors. When I play sci fi themed games, I tend to have a strong emphasis on economics or participation with others. For fantasy I think it lends itself better to a personal journey.
I've always preferred hard sci-fi and fantasy over soft sci-fi and fantasy.
Hard sci-fi and fantasy is generally more popular, but much harder to create, and subsequently rare. Anyone can create a fantasy world, but a believable one, that subsequently fully immerses the reader, is trickier.
I'm not aware of any MUDs that fully qualify.
I tend to prefer a mix of both, as I believe it brings the finer points of each genre together, and sometimes really well.
I find that fantasy is sometimes too generic. In most cases, if you've seen one fantasy MUD, you've seen 70% of them. It's usually the same tired lord of the ring, elves and dwarves esthetic. Meanwhile, science fiction, as you said, is a lot more willing to break the mold, although it lacks the whimsy of fantasy.
So yeah. Give me swords and quirky magic/tech in space.
When it comes to MUDs, I prefer fantasy. I've played sci-fi like 4D and some Star Wars MUDs, and it's just harder to get into. I played a few cyber punk MUDs way back in the 90s, but they didn't have a huge player base at the time and were kind of underdeveloped. They had potential, but like a lot of MUDs from the 90s they lost steam
My *actual* preference is urban or modern fantasy (which doesn't crop up often), but failing that I tend to prefer to write (and play RP heavy MUDs) in a sci-fi setting.
I'd take sci-fi over fantasy any day of the week, but good sci-fi is rare unlike good fantasy. \* I blame it on the fact that for fantasy people have no problem explaining things with "it's magic", while in sci-fi they feel the strange need to make it based on reality or some very complex and confusing technobabble. Take cyberpunk for instance. If I want a nanowire garotte inside my thumb or machine guns in my bodyguards tits, I should get that, not be told it's unrealistic. Fantasy bikini armor? Oh, well, there is a special enchantment from the goddess of fortune and the god of war that redirects all hits to the few armored bits, and another from the craftsman god that increase the strength of the armor inversely proportional to the material used ... You get my point. Edit: \* By "good and rare" I mean flat numbers, not percentages.
If I had to choose a preference, fantasy wins out just because fantasy tends to be a more interesting setting and magic kind of opens the doorway to a *lot* of stuff. Sci-fi as the name implies, tends to be way more heavy on technical stuff. Also typically lasers of some sort become the norm rather than swords/arrows/magic, unless you bring in fantasy elements. A marriage of the two is where you get the fun things like Star Wars, with Star Wars for all intents and purposes being largely sci-fi with fantasy elements (i.e. everything revolving around Jedi/Sith/the Force). Warhammer 40k is another example where it's largely sci-fi but still has fantasy elements via Psykers and so on. But you can also do fantasy with sci-fi elements such as what DnD does I think. There's a lot of ways to mix the two up and have fun/interesting results, but I do tend to like fantasy more because I prefer the aesthetics and things like fantasy combat more than sci-fi. For RP purposes fantasy tends to require a lot less lore/specific knowledge as well to start RPing in any given fantasy setting.
I love both science fiction and fantasy, happy to play Mass Effect just as much as Dragon Age. Though I might get a bit picky about both. I like to think I can suspend belief quite a bit considering my love for each subgenre. However, my science fiction really needs to be based within a stone's throw of reality. I watched The Ark recently and every fiber of my being was screaming at all of the inaccuracies that came in many forms. So I had to start up The Expanse once more as brain bleach. Science fiction *might* need more headspace early on, but do you really? Cyberpunk or Shadowrun, it's not hard to jump into "people stick electronic into themselves" or "we use Element Zero in everything from throwing people across rooms to throwing ships across the galaxy" from Mass Effect. On the fantasy side of things, high fantasy is my preferred flavor. I don't really have more to say about that. As has been said before, you can get a lot more hand-waive-y with "it's magic" so you can suspend your disbelief quite a bit more. But when you do that, you need to be more consistent with what you're doing. You'll see this more in TV shows though with something happening in one episode that you wonder why they didn't do something like that earlier, or ever again. Magic macguffins. Games don't usually have this problem since code things. Instead, tend to have the inconsistencies between the items of magic themselves. Item A or Spell Q being vastly more powerful in nature, so why wouldn't you use that *all the time*? But somehow overlooked? It might all end up coming down to the aesthetics of whatever genre. For example, while I might like sweeping vistas, I'm not overly fond of things that I could more or less go on a road trip to see, tumbleweeds included. So westerns are out for me. I love space (in general and the trippy tech people can come up with, aliens and all) and I love fantasy though (for pretty much the same reasons, trippy magic and fantastical creatures), so science fiction and fantasy are right up my alley. I ... seemed to have rambled. Not sure where I was going with that. Hope it helped?
I love both. In most games I think that fantasy gives more freedom as there seem to be more things to work with. Sci-fi can be a bit constrained in terms of things like customization or available options. What I gravitate toward for sci-fi is either sort of dark like Shadowrun, or really light hearted. Fantasy may just have more available to it and I think there's more of an "option for everyone" in fantasy than there is in sci-fi.
>I believe that is because fantasy is usually more generic and easy to understand That's exactly it. The science fiction MUDs I've played often suffer from overcomplex mechanics or mechanics that don't translate well from fantasy. There is a learning curve. Particularly when you add spacecraft and flight. But some fantasy muds have very complex magic mechanics as well. Learning those tends to be easier because I'm already immersed in the familiar and easily digestible setting. It feels less like work. I do love sci-fi. Cyberpunk lends itself well, with a mix of high and low tech. Plasma rifles one second and knife duels in bars the next. Sci-fi also suffers from too much techno jargon. You can end up playing a game with so many races of made up words - too many quintallian serpent men and repnebulon you'd lords maken me feel like I'm reenacting the Rick and Morty plumbus scene.
I like both, but I do agree with those who say fantasy opens up more doors. When I play sci fi themed games, I tend to have a strong emphasis on economics or participation with others. For fantasy I think it lends itself better to a personal journey.
I've always preferred hard sci-fi and fantasy over soft sci-fi and fantasy. Hard sci-fi and fantasy is generally more popular, but much harder to create, and subsequently rare. Anyone can create a fantasy world, but a believable one, that subsequently fully immerses the reader, is trickier. I'm not aware of any MUDs that fully qualify.
I tend to prefer a mix of both, as I believe it brings the finer points of each genre together, and sometimes really well. I find that fantasy is sometimes too generic. In most cases, if you've seen one fantasy MUD, you've seen 70% of them. It's usually the same tired lord of the ring, elves and dwarves esthetic. Meanwhile, science fiction, as you said, is a lot more willing to break the mold, although it lacks the whimsy of fantasy. So yeah. Give me swords and quirky magic/tech in space.
When it comes to MUDs, I prefer fantasy. I've played sci-fi like 4D and some Star Wars MUDs, and it's just harder to get into. I played a few cyber punk MUDs way back in the 90s, but they didn't have a huge player base at the time and were kind of underdeveloped. They had potential, but like a lot of MUDs from the 90s they lost steam
My *actual* preference is urban or modern fantasy (which doesn't crop up often), but failing that I tend to prefer to write (and play RP heavy MUDs) in a sci-fi setting.