Image by Reimund Bertrams from Pixabay, cropped by Mike

I try very hard to provide balance in my coverage of different genres here at Campaign Mastery, guided by the relative popularity. Out of every 15 posts, 6 should be Fantasy oriented, 4 should be sci-fi oriented, 2 should be ‘realistic’ (Modern-day or Pulp, hence the inverted commas), 2 should be Superhero/Secret Agent oriented, and one should be about something else.

Of course, these are just guidelines, and if there’s one or two too many of anything, it doesn’t matter too much – this is all just my way of attempting to ensure that as many readers as possible find something relevant getting posted each week.

Nevertheless, I have been known to ‘bump’ an article a week or more if there have been too many from that genre lately.

I’m helped a lot in achieving these targets by post subjects and treatments that can apply to a range of genres. This is always something that I aspire to, because it means that I’m potentially helping the greatest number of readers.

For example, take last week’s article, which mused on the impact that the Covid-19 Pandemic should have on the characters that we create. While it is obviously directly relevant to modern-day campaigns (box ticked), there is also relevance to the Spanish Flu epidemic of a century ago (Pulp – but that box is already ticked), and to any fantasy game in which a plague breaks out (box ticked), and bio-terrorism and bio-warfare are always going to be relevant to Sci-fi and superheros and secret agents (tick, tick, tick – hey, that’s every genre on my list!). I could even argue that epidemics may occur on a smaller scale in Western games, but the notion of a whole town getting sick because of contaminated water or whatever is pure genre, and the relative isolation means that the whole Pandemic reaction is the same, just scaled to the isolated population. So this even ticked the ‘something else’ box.

I’m not sure what it was, but something this week led me to ponder just what the differences were between these different genres. And I soon realized that the distinctions were a little different in tabletop gaming (or should be) than they were in the worlds of Fiction and Media.

My thoughts started with the distinction between Sci-Fi and Fantasy…

The Fantastic in Sci-Fi and Fantasy

I quickly reached the conclusion (because I had been there before) that the big difference between the two was how the Fantastic was treated in these two genres, the core of TTRPGs – I would bet that 70% of all games would be one or the other in some shape or form.

In Fantasy, anything can happen. The imagination is unfettered. There are no limits. If you want a talking caterpillar reclining on a toadstool and smoking a hookah, you can have the PCs encounter one.

In Science Fiction, there are strict rules imposed by reality. We call these Physics and Chemistry and Biology. The theory is that only what is possible within the reality around us is acceptable within the bounds of Sci-Fi.

Those definitions are both way too black and white, especially when it comes to Fantasy Gaming. But my thoughts along those lines actually started with Sci-Fi.

You see, most of the participants (if not all) are not science experts. In general, they may have a Popular Mechanics appreciation for Science, and beyond that, they apply Clarke’s Third Law.

Clarke’s Three Laws

‘Clarke” is distinguished science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, undoubtedly most famous for writing The Monolith, which became the foundation for the movies 2001: A Space Odyssey and 2010: The Year We Make Contact.

A 1962 Essay, published in Profiles Of The Future, quoted the first law, and implied the second; others quickly imparted the status of “a law” to it. The third had been suggested by others with no-one quite managing to capture its entire essence in a single statement until Clarke did so in a 1963 revision to his essay.

The three laws are:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

It’s fair to say that it’s the third law that has most captured the imaginations of writers and thinkers the world over, ever since. The Wikipedia article on Clarke’s Three Laws has a long list of corollaries and one expansion. There are three that I’m particularly drawn to:

• Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice (Grey’s Law);
• Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. (Gehm’s corollary); and,
• “Any technology, no matter how primitive, is magic to those who don’t understand it.” (from the Webcomic Freefall).

…though I’m more prone to using the first in the form, “Never underestimate the power of human stupidity”, a pessimistic statement by Robert A Heinlein that forms the cornerstone of many of the developments in my RPG campaigns. (I’m also fond of another Heinlein quote, “Everything is theoretically impossible, until it is done” – though I don’t consider it to be quite as universal as it purports to be.

The implications are that the ‘rules of reality’ aren’t quite the straitjacket that the description of Sci-Fi suggested that they were. This was explicitly stated by Gene Roddenberry in pitching Star Trek to various studios back in the day – “Anything is possible” – to which I would append, “so long as is it’s plausible”.

Image by lordpeppers from Pixabay

Fantasy Constrained

So, we’re left with Science Fiction being constrained by the plausible, while Fantasy enjoys an open field in which anything goes, right?

Not so fast! If ‘anything’ really ‘went’, players wouldn’t play in a game and readers wouldn’t read the story. Dueling deux-ex-machinas would populate every narrative and it would be very little fun for anyone, especially when one party (the GM) has the authority to deny the imaginings of the others (the players).

It’s quite rightly considered very bad GMing to drop in menaces simply because the players are getting too close to success (they call them Grudge Monsters in KODT).

So there have to be some guidelines and principles applied to constrain Fantasy – and ultimately, they boil down to whatever is plausible, given the established ground rules within the environment and context of the imaginary situation.

Plausible. There’s that word again.

But what about Magic? Isn’t it, by it’s nature, an upheaval in the environment and/or context, changing what is plausible and what is not? Does this not restore the Fantastic to a position of primacy within the Fantasy genre?

Well, yes and no.

I’ve written before about Asimov’s rules for science-fiction mysteries – about half-way through The Butler Did It, I quote selected passages from Isaac Asimov’s foreword to Asimov’s Mysteries in which he discusses the union of Mysteries and Science Fiction, and the perceived impossibility of uniting the genres. His number one rule that he invoked to solve this (and several other plot problems, I’m sure) was to play fair with the reader.

To him, that meant not using a technology without explaining it, and it’s limitations, well in advance, in every pertinent detail.

And, at the time, I followed those quotes with, “Magic and the other trappings of Fantasy are just as problematic, because (by definition) they contravene what we know as physical laws. If they exist, they make possible the otherwise impossible. But the same solution holds – understand how it works, what its limitations are, and how it affects cause-and-effect, and make sure that any relevant information is provided to the PCs…”

Magic has to have limits and rules in order to function within a game or it’s just a license for the GM to ad hoc and de facto anything that he wants to have happen. He has to play fair with the ‘reader’ – in this case, the player.

The rules of the game provide some constraint on the degree of reality alteration, anyway. If a PC knows only specific spells, he knows of only those specific ways and degrees with which to alter reality – which means that they can be anticipated and prepared for.

The upshot of all this is that you can’t have “just anything” happen in a Fantasy Game. The Fantastic is just as constrained in that genre as it is in Science Fiction. In some shape, almost anything that is relevant to one genre will be relevant to the other.

Take an article on Doppelgangers (complete with prominent misspelling). That’s pretty specific to the Fantasy genre, and to the D&D/Pathfinder sub-genres at that. And yet – have there never been science fiction plots in which a shape-changer has taken the place of a member of the crew? Well, yes there have. So, by seeking to maximize the plausibility within the Fantasy genre, what I have actually done is apply a little Science Fiction to the concept, then relabeled it Fantasy.

Technology In Science Fiction RPGs

At the same time, the rules limit the Fantastic within Science Fiction at least as stridently, also in a bid to ‘play fair’. There are proscribed limits to what a lightsaber can do in the various Star Wars RPGs, for example – because if you don’t have those, they device can become a crutch for weak play, a too-easy solution to a problem that’s supposed to be difficult.

This is sometimes stated as technology not being ‘a magic wand’ – at least in the real world – but in the context of gaming, I submit that a more accurate description would be technology us a magic wand – complete with restrictions and rules that define how and what and how often it can do things.

Fantasy and Sci-Fi may take the low road and high road, respectively, but both end up in the same place (when it comes to gaming) – different ends of the same uber-genre.

SF with outdated Science

There are a couple of alleyways of related thought to the above chain of thought that are worth exploring.

The first is a personal bugbear that causes affront to me whenever someone gets too picky about the ‘science’ in science-fiction not stacking up. What happens when a book is perfectly valid science fiction – until the understanding of the science underneath it changes? Does the book stop being science fiction? Does it become Fantasy? Or some strange hybrid of the two genres?

My personal definition is that if the science in a story was plausible enough at the time of writing, the book is still Sci-Fi – but I know a lot of Sci-Fi fans who disagree, sometimes vehemently. That’s alright – they can use their own more sterile definitions all they want. Just don’t expect me to change mine to accommodate you.

What’s more, it’s fairly easy to tie these purists up in logical knots by showing that by their own definitions, nothing is genuine science fiction.

It takes months to get a finished manuscript through the printing and proofing process. The pace of human development is such that by the time it is printed and available to read, the science upon which any given work is founded will have changed, the book will be out of date in some particulars at least (if not completely undone). Hence, by the purist’s definition, any book published in the modern era is no longer valid as Science Fiction – and they have already excluded everything not of the modern era. Which leaves them with an empty set – something that’s pointless, given the context. This usually forces the most strident but reasonable hard-liner to acknowledge that like absolute zero, perfection is unobtainable.

I therefore suggest to them that they are simply setting a higher threshold test for plausibility than most, and usually get a (sometimes grudging) acceptance of that proposal. But this introduces the concept of subjectivity into the discussion, and acceptance that others can have different thresholds and views that are just as valid as the hard-liner. It puts us on common ground – perhaps at different ends of it, but common ground nevertheless.

The logical next step is rarely taken to avoid re-inflaming prejudices already tweaked in the course of the discussion – which is to suggest that Fantasy and Science Fiction simply have different standards of scientific plausibility incorporated into them, and are simply points on a spectrum of possibility. A few have taken that step on their own, reclassifying both as simply “imaginative fiction”, and been the richer (in literary terms) for it.

Clearly, this particular alleyway loops back to the same meeting-point as the main discussion. So let’s move on to another.

Image by Stefan Keller from Pixabay, cropped by Mike

Space Opera and Science Fantasy

Space Opera is perhaps best described as Science Fiction Hyperbole. Big dramatic space battles, epic confrontations between sides A and B, larger-than-life heroes and villains, greater willingness to hand-wave what is possible and what technology can do – a branch of science fiction that tends to the spectacular. Sounds like a lot of successful movies from the last 40 years or so, in fact!

One could argue about whether or not Star Trek (the original series) was Space Opera. Star Wars definitely was, and so was the original Battlestar Galactica (the reboot was more introspective and psychological and sociological and just plain deeper than most Space Opera goes).

Space Opera, with its greater willingness to hand-wave science, is clearly some distance closer to Fantasy than most science fiction – but it clearly belongs on the same continuity between the two extremes.

Science Fantasy is science fiction that deliberately violates the ‘science’ in the interests of a better story. There are those who argue that any science fiction with an FTL Drive (other than one failing to ever function) belongs in the Science Fantasy category – usually those purists I talked about earlier.

But this exposes the reason for my hostility toward the purist attitude: it’s inherent narrow-mindedness, the arrogance of assuming that you know what is possible and what is not despite not knowing all of science. That’s something that I would not say to such a purist, not unless they had gotten me well-and-truly fired up beforehand. But it’s still implicit in the purist definition of science fiction, whether said aloud or not.

Thankfully, the proposed Fantasy-SciFi genre bridge solves the problem of Science Fantasy, too. It’s somewhere in between regular Fantasy and Space Opera – and certain technologies are granted hall passes if the in-context theory of how they operate is sufficiently convincing. So some FTL drives are Science Fiction, and some are Science Fantasy – and there would be a whole bunch of them that are at different points in between.

There are some critics who have suggested that Fantasy and Science Fantasy and Space Opera are “bad” science fiction. I think that this argument confuses plausibility with literary accessibility.

I’m a big fan of a lot of the Star Trek original novels. There are some fantastic science fiction stories and ideas amongst them. Some are, alas, unmitigated rubbish, with wooden characters and hollow plots. But some are as good as you’ll find – not only exploring the complex interpersonal dynamics of the leading characters, but developing new subsidiary characters and personalities, and offering intriguing plots and entertaining resolutions. Clearly, ‘literary merit’ is comprised of a host of possible sins.

To me, a good Franchise novel is both easier and harder to write than an original story – easier, in that you have a lot of the creative work done for you, harder in that in addition to all the other parameters within the heading of ‘literary merit’, you have ‘fidelity of characters and concepts’ added to the requirements – and that can sometimes be the hardest one of the lot to live up to. Those books that I described as “absolute rubbish” in the previous paragraph? They almost all fail this test, too.

So, if a genre novel is as difficult to write well as a completely original one, you can see why snobbish attitudes towards original fiction on the part of some self-appointed critics would get up my nose. But that’s not relevant; what IS relevant is that “Literary merit” (or dramatic merit, in the case of a movie or TV show) lies on a completely separate axis of appreciation to the one under discussion. Together, they form a landscape, a two-dimensional plane.

(Yes, before anyone asks, the disrespect with which the Academy Awards treat Science Fiction also qualifies as being worthy of disdain, at least in my book).

I’m perfectly content to let others debate the shape of the landscape. Is Space Opera inherently biased away from the edge-zone of “high literary quality”? Perhaps, yes. Some of it was not especially well-written – but that doesn’t put it all the way over to the “bad fiction” side of the landscape, because there are examples that were not, at least in some respects.

Fairy Stories

Anyway, moving on to fairy stories: these are tales that we tend to read, or get told, as children. They are the last true bastions of ‘anything goes’. There is a continual temptation to build an RPG around them, aimed specifically at those of a much younger age bracket than are typically served by RPGs like D&D.

But then I realize that it’s not necessary – as soon as a child is old enough to understand cheating and why it’s bad (and not to do it, and to expect others not to do it), they are ready to play an RPG. It might not be one as complicated as Pathfinder – but my experience (described in Gaming With The Family – Lessons from yesteryear) are that if you (and any other players) make appropriate allowances, children much younger than the recommended ages of such games are perfectly capable – and the concept of building a bridge between the world of their imaginations and the world of rules which we call “the real world” has a major appeal to them.

Fairy stories, then, lie somewhere on the far end of Fantasy of all the Science Fiction sub-genres. To be a satisfying story, they still need enough credibility and literary merit to stand up – they still have to make sense in context – but beyond that, anything goes.

My bottom-line test is always how much enjoyment can I wring out of what I’m reading. That enjoyment can be grappling with new ideas, or a new interpretation of an old idea, or interesting characters, or a thrilling plot, or some combination of all of the above. “Dull is death” should be tattooed on my anatomy somewhere! or maybe, “Be interesting or be gone!”

Hard Science Fiction and Technobabble

When it comes to a discussion of science fiction, it isn’t long before someone brings up the classification of “Hard Science Fiction” (verses, I guess, “Soft” Science Fiction).

Hard science fiction prioritizes scientific accuracy and logic. The term was first used in print by P. Schuyler Miller in a 1957 review of John W Campbell’s Islands Of Space in Astounding Science Fiction. The complimentary term, “Soft Science Fiction” first appeared in the 1970s.

An early example is Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea from 1870, often cited as an example by later writers within the sub-genre, though Verne himself denied writing as a scientist or seriously attempting to predict the technology of the future.

There’s nothing wrong with Hard Science Fiction. i don’t start having problems until the search for fidelity to the Science starts getting in the way of other elements of literary merit. I have a much stronger reaction to extremist fans of the sub-genre who have the attitude that “the only good science fiction is hard science fiction,” as is probably fairly predictable from what I’ve already written.

To me, Hard Science Fiction defines one edge of the landscape, just as Fairy Stories define the other. But it’s still part of the landscape.

Technobabble is anathema to Hard SF purists. It is the use of terminology in lieu of explanation – some would say, in lieu of plausible foundation. It shifts the supposed ‘science’ of science fiction towards the fantasy end of the spectrum.

I don’t have that big a problem with technobabble if it’s well-written, semi-plausible technobabble, that is applied consistently through a conceptual framework that is as rigorous as any real science or engineering would be.

“Reverse the polarity of” whatever is the sort of thing that sets my teeth on edge – something that the purists and I can probably agree on. That’s definitely using terminology in lieu of plausible explanation.

Using “pattern buffers” to “enhance a transporter”, on the other hand, is just fine. It’s worth understanding why.

First, the “transporter” has been well-established within Star Trek (TNG this time), dating back to the original series. In particular, it’s been found and demonstrated that the technology has limitations, and that it’s very much an all-or-nothing – a failed transport means you stay where you are (if you’re lucky) or are having a very VERY bad day (if you’re not). In essence, it’s a teleportation device that utilizes a destructive “read” process to guide a “reconstruction” of the object being teleported, accurate to a subatomic level. Setting aside the technological difficulties in processing that much data, much less receiving it in any timely fashion, the transfer of information from source to destination is clearly at the heart of the technology. So far, fair enough ‘not-so-hard’ science fiction, then. Which brings me to the “pattern buffers” – having some sort of ‘holding area’ in which a redundant copy of the information can be held for repeated attempts at retrieval makes perfect sense to anyone who’s had to deal with data corruption over a dodgy internet connection. It implies being able to retry a download until you get it right – it might take multiple attempts, but you will get there in the end. So that makes perfect sense in terms of the function of the ‘transporter’ as an enhancement. It’s quite likely that there are some commensurate downsides – like the ‘held pattern’ being vulnerable to disruption – that explains why they can’t be used all the time.

This is technobabble that implies a reasonable pseudo-scientific explanation without interrupting the story long enough to deliver a lecture on the technology – to me, that’s science fiction at its best. But it’s definitely not “hard” science fiction.

This establishes an important point, though, by implying that literary quality and the rigor of plausibility are not complete exclusive and unrelated variables.

This point is easily demonstrated. We have a character – a good family man, who has worked all his life as a baker, mastering the art of the pastry, who lives his day though a set routine ruled by the clock. A good, dramatic story could be told about this routine being disrupted by some extraordinary event in his life (and has been, I’m sure). And so have a lot of bad fiction examples, where completely out of the blue he runs away to join a circus (abandoning his wife and children), or some such nonsense. One shows consistency of character and explores the consequences of a change in the social landscape that defines his life; the other shows a complete inconsistency of character as that character has been defined, and is bad writing, plain and simple. To make it… better writing (term chosen carefully), you need to define the character in such a way that this out-of-the-blue decision makes sense, has some internal logic. “Bob lived his days by the clock, every day the same endless routine, grinding away at his soul, and hating it. One day, he could tolerate the mindless mundania of his nuclear family life no more, and threw caution to the winds; abandoning his jailers, he ran away in search of his dreams.” Suddenly, we have a stable platform on which to build a narrative. Perhaps Bob will find that the grass isn’t always greener, or that dreams are not a reflection of reality, or that there were aspects of his former existence that had value, and will find his way back to his family, a slightly-changed man for the experience. There are several variations on the basic story implied by the character definition that could be told.

Clearly, credibility and plausibility are critical elements of good literary practice and technique. What defines the genres of Science Fiction and Fantasy are the credibility and plausibility of their approach to the fantastic – which implies that they must contain some elements that meet that definition.

Image by Stefan Keller from Pixabay, cropped by Mike

The Fantastic in Superhero Games

What else can be fitted onto this continuity of genre? Well, lets talk about superheroes. These often have an origin story and fundamental concept that plays fast and loose with the ‘science’ of the environment, but (generally) once the ground rules have been established, good practice in superhero stories is to establish solid credibility in a flashy, spectacular, way.

Superhero stories are simply space opera with offshoots in different directions. One is into gritty realism; another lurches past Science Fantasy into the realms of fantasy and magic; and a third gropes its way toward real, even hard, science fiction.

Technically, superhero stories are actually Science Fantasy, I suppose. They need to have a logical consistency, but the underpinning assumptions about reality are fantastic and not realistic.

That’s one of the reasons I love the genre – it can be all things to all people. I can go from a fantasy oriented situation to a space romp to a knock-em-down brawl to a gritty social satire – sometimes within the scope of a single adventure!

It can be argued that there is even more of the Fantastic about superhero adventures than is the case in most Science Fiction and Fantasy, and I would find that difficult to argue with.

But that implies a third axis on our continuity of genre: integration of the fantastic. And clearly, the less Fantastic there is, the less importance would be attached to the plausibility of that little, so our structure of genres is not a cube, but a triangle with a depth extension.

The Fantastic in Pulp, Horror & Western Games

Which brings me to the next trio of genres that I’m going to discuss: Pulp, Horror, and Western Games.

These can all be differentiated by their treatment of the Fantastic.

In a Pulp campaign, there are occasional touches of the fantastic, but in general, what we are talking about is exaggerated reality. At the same time, pulp stories can have a gritty flavor, a fantasy flavor, or a science-fictional flavor. So the genre is superheroes with more tightly controlled smaller doses of the fantastic.

A Horror campaign frequently has even more fantastic content than a Pulp campaign, but in more concentrated doses. It should also be noted that a Pulp adventure can also have a horror flavor!

But there’s a big difference between Friday The 13th or Nightmare On Elm Street as an RPG and Call Of Cthulhu, and Hellraiser is even more extreme. Of those four examples, you would have to put CoC down as the least fantastic, certainly less so than Pulp, which can have frequent low-level doses of fantastic content. You would also have to agree that they lean more towards the Fantasy end of the continuity than the hard science, no matter how much science may be used to shroud and explain the situation. But there are clear exceptions like The Fly and Alien, and the Dr Phibes movies, and even Frankenstein. In fact, I would suggest that Horror exists in two bands – one to each side of the Pulp mid-point – and that both extend tendrils down to the more Fantastic.

Most realistic of all are Western Games. These tend a little more towards the science side, but can occasionally have a little touch of the Fantastic about them – in particular when it comes to Native American Medicine Men! But these are exceptions. Western Games are clearly, in RPG terms, the pinnacle of UnFantastic – until someone puts out a soap opera RPG (what, they’ve done that?

• Pasion de las Pasiones, a Telenovela RPG, and
• SOAP: The Game Of Soap Opera Mayhem from Wingnut Games which is more of a board game, but still…
• … and then there was Dallas, The Roleplaying Game (I kid you not!) but it wasn’t what you’d call a success.

…I guess they have. And most of these, if not all of them, would have a lot less of the Fantastic about them than even Western Games, thanks to those occasional Medicine Men again).

The Fantastic in Pirate Games

There was a time when the Pirate Genre was not unlike the Western – it was all about the Swashbuckling. And then came Pirates Of The Caribbean, and the Pirate genre would never be the same again. These days, it’s lurking somewhere to the Fantastic side of Western Games, and only because the Fantastic is relatively tightly controlled for game balance reasons does it avoid diving all the way to the Fantasy realm below.

The Fantastic in Spy & Modern Games

Finally, we have two more genres in which the Fantastic is tightly controlled. Most games set in the modern day either belong to one of the genres already discussed or to the spy genre, but there are also oddballs that might fit here – military RPGs and the like. These have no room for the fantastic, or very very little.

But the super-spy genre does – usually restricted to villainous plans and gadget capabilities, and fairly strictly controlled within those limits.

It’s probably not going too far to consider super-spies to be an offshoot of Pulp that happens to be set in the modern day. But there is less scope for the Fantastic than in Pulp – you can’t have a horror-themed super-spy adventure without deliberately shifting the genre towards the Fantasy-Horror or Sci-Fi Horror nexuses, nor can you have a fantasy-themed adventure without shifting the genre. That plants it between Pulp and the apex of our pyramid.

The Rules Of Good Writing

As a general rule, the techniques and restrictions that work in one genre will translate readily to another. Where good writers sometimes struggle is in the specialized content that they have to deliver, not the method of delivery – bad writers will just expound for page after page, with little or no interaction until the lecture is over.

That means that as a general rule, each of the genres and sub-genres represent a cylindrical form running back from “Good Quality Writing” to “Bad Quality Writing”. But if we take this as read, and assume that these cylinders have a consistent thickness throughout, we could posit a triangular map of the genres.

I’m not sure entirely what value such a map would have. It lacks context. But it could be done.

More important, I think, to have some appreciation for how Genre can be defined by two key attributes: the degree of Fantastic typically infused into the (sub-) genre, and the level of plausibility demanded within the (sub-) genre.

Once you understand those two key parameters, and how they pertain to the genre of your game or campaign, everything else is down to the literary merit of your writing. Interesting, well-defined characters; clear and confounding plots; interesting situations and challenges; accessible narrative; communicative dialogue; and satisfying resolutions – these things never go out of style.

And add one more to the mixture: the ability to generate entertainment. It’s a subtle quality, hard to define – but essential to any creative effort.