Science Fiction does not necessarily need to involve mass combat. For one thing, Star Wars is really a fantasy franchise, not really science fiction, and aside from a few big set pieces, Star Wars revolves primarily around individual or small party combat.
But, why is Fantasy more popular than sci-fi in RPGs? A lot of it has to do simply with the fact that Dungeons & Dragons exists and captured the market 45 years ago. Back in the 1980s, I played both D&D and Traveller, and enjoyed both immensely. Our Traveller games certainly did not involve mass combat, and were effectively indistinguishable from our D&D games, save for the fact that we had a spaceship with stats of its own, and our D&D games did not typically involve vehicles or ships, though they could have. In Traveller, as in D&D, our party was a small party of 4-5 adventurers taking on scenarios that small parties could conceivably complete.
My suspicion is simply that Fantasy is more relatable to the human experience, as it roughly maps to a nostalgia, however anachronistic, for imagined past ways of life, and particularly to âThe Heroâs Journeyâ, as described by Joseph Campbell, type plotlines, while sci-fi tends to require a much more complex civilization, and for the space-bound types of sci-fi, multiple such civilizations.
Then there is the fact that in sci-fi, we tend to demand more realismâunless you are a fan of Star Trek type technobabbleâwhereas in fantasy, we tend to elide realism in favor of âmagicâ, and at that point, literally anything goes. I actually demand as much realism from fantasy as I do from sci-fi, but thatâs an individual preference that doesnât apply to, I think, most fantasy aficionados.
Granted, as I noted earlier, a lot of what is considered to be âsci-fiâ is really fantasy in disguise. If you really think about, the idea of spaceship combat is wildly unrealistic. Physics simply wouldnât allow for it.
