#RPGaDAY2020
26: STRANGE
RPGs have been linked to fantasy and other genres from the outset. The format started with Dungeons & Dragons rather than Chainmail. My own start was with gamebooks, and while Fighting Fantasy diversified into SF with the fourth book and horror with the tenth, they left straight historical adventure and detective gamebooks to other publishers. Even the Brontës’ proto-RPGing was set in a fantasy world.
This continues partially because the big RPGs are genre works so they attract genre fans, but also I think because of the strengths and weaknesses of the form.
Improvisational storytelling lends itself to the fantastic because it’s as easy to describe an imagined vista as a modern real-world setting, and easier to make something up about it. So RPGs tend to the strange and unusual in form as well as audience.
It’s also easier to strip the fantasy elements from a game than add them in, and to create source material - and own it as intellectual property - rather than collate and research real examples. It’s easy to make a real-world-ish detective game from most of the investigative RPGs.
There have been few successful real-world-ish RPGs - Dallas was an early outlier, both in concept and design, and is famous for its weirdness. In this hobby, a lack of monsters is strange.
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