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fantasy

9 (30%)

sci-fi

3 (10%)

they're the same thing

2 (6.7%)

I like them both for different reasons

14 (46.7%)

my opinions are too nuanced to fall within these strictly defined categories!

2 (6.7%)

Total Members Voted: 30

[King Zultan]

I found the raisins!

I like fantasy because wizards and shit.

I like sci-fi because space and pew pew lasers.

[MeimieFan88]

I found some raisins too. They were in the cupboard.

[Horizon]

I hate raisins, and I hate pew pew.

[MeimieFan88]

I don't care too much for pew pew settings, but I do like pew pew characters, and the nuances of RPing as/against them. That is my biggest raisin.

[King Zultan]

I hate raisins, and I hate pew pew.

Shame on you for hating the pew pew and raisins!

[syvarris]

I chose option 4.  I dislike a lot of things about sci-fi, mostly things that damage my suspension of disbelief.  Scale is often really absurd (because space), and communication technology is really prone to creating massive plot holes.  A lot of stories depend on someone or other not just telling someone something, or information otherwise not being known, and even modern communication technology makes that much much harder to justify.  Advanced technology that does valuable and useful things which for no stated reason is never mass produced and doesn't affect society (Reed Richards is Useless!) is another one. 

Fantasy settings have a lot of similarities, and are often the same basic story design with different aesthetics, but I find it much easier to just accept their justifications for how things work.  It's magic, it's supposed to not be understood or follow the logic of my world by definition.  Sci-fi?  It typically overlaps too much with things I understand, and it's much harder to ignore that.

...Which is why I nearly voted that I prefer fantasy settings.  But sci-fi settings have modern guns.  And I really like modern guns, when they're done well. 

[Horizon]

Unga bunga gun bad, sword gud

[Egan_BW]

Starting to worry that I'm the only one who likes muskets. :p

[Horizon]

Starting to worry that I'm the only one who likes muskets. :p

Musket primitive pew pew it alright.

[Egan_BW]

I chose option 4.  I dislike a lot of things about sci-fi, mostly things that damage my suspension of disbelief.  Scale is often really absurd (because space), and communication technology is really prone to creating massive plot holes.  A lot of stories depend on someone or other not just telling someone something, or information otherwise not being known, and even modern communication technology makes that much much harder to justify.  Advanced technology that does valuable and useful things which for no stated reason is never mass produced and doesn't affect society (Reed Richards is Useless!) is another one. 

Fantasy settings have a lot of similarities, and are often the same basic story design with different aesthetics, but I find it much easier to just accept their justifications for how things work.  It's magic, it's supposed to not be understood or follow the logic of my world by definition.  Sci-fi?  It typically overlaps too much with things I understand, and it's much harder to ignore that.

...Which is why I nearly voted that I prefer fantasy settings.  But sci-fi settings have modern guns.  And I really like modern guns, when they're done well.

This one seems relevant: Trope Talk: Those Dang Phones

The TL;DR being that we're to the point where writers are more used to people being able to communicate from anywhere at any time, so thus give fantasy characters magic phones. To the point that in DnD and such, communications spells are given capabilities which they weren't originally written to have because it's more convenient and having a rock which lets you send someone a message just once a day or something.

I feel like if we want to be realistic, the confluence of absurd scale and communications can put us back to information having a hard time getting around. Light speed delay means a LOT if you're not going to just cheat... using magic, again. :p
IE in warhammer, the scale is absolutely absurd sure, but one interesting thing is that communications does require having a magic dude talking to other magic dudes and he might get corrupted by demons or bribed or something or you might just be too poor to hire one.

[Egan_BW]

And of course the sci-fi thingie I had in mind when I made this poll wasn't space at all, just cyberpunk. So no absurd scale except for the modern kind of absurd scale we're used to.

[syvarris]

40K is a scifi setting I rather like, in part because these issues don't really apply to it.  It's an extremely magical setting where magic tends to permeate almost everything.  Even the "nonmagical" tech is explicitly more akin to fantasy magic than most scifi, since most people don't understand it at all in-universe.  And of course it's just really silly, which helps.  A lot of scifi takes itself much too seriously.

That's really the core of my issue--most scifi tries to justify itself as somewhat realistic, with most real science being accurate and applicable, but with random exceptions as needed, which don't have the large scale ramifications I'd expect from them.  It's "realistic, but with a spot of magic here and there", which is much harder for me to accept than a straightforward "yeah the whole world is magic, it's totally different, the planet's prolly not even a sphere and is likely the literal center of existence."  In a fantasy setting, chemistry probably doesn't exist; fire is more likely to be a metaphysical concept directly drawing power from some entity or law of nature, rather than any kind of chemical reaction.  In a scifi setting... it's generally going to work just as it does in my world unless explicitly stated otherwise, which means I'm supposed to understand it, and that causes issues.

As for communications stuff, yeah, you can usually write around it.  The problem isn't so much that it can't be handled, it's that it's usually not handled.  And scifi settings will have communications technology as a given, while fantasy settings have to deliberately choose to make that mistake.  And they'll prolly still have an easier time with it, because they can just stipulate some extra random rules for the magic comm rocks to justify whatever the story needs.