dorchadas | (Reply)

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I don't take it as an insult, and I think you're 💯 right. The participatory nature of TTRPGs means that the goals and ways they're used is much different than character-focused fanfiction--since most TTRPG players make their own characters, there's not a lot of draw in a fictional world involving famous characters who enact all the changes on the world and accomplish all the setting goals. In that case, what do the PCs do? Playing second-fiddle or, worse, henchmen to established characters often isn't fun, so one of the most common canon changes I see is removing existing characters to make room for the PCs--like, Vader and Luke both die at the Battle of Yavin, now the PCs do stuff with the Rebellion.

The Expanse I feel is a great example of a setting that doesn't need this to happen as much, especially if starting later in the timeline, because there are so many stories to be told with the gate network and the breadth of human settlement in first the solar system and then the universe (hence the TTRPG existing, I suspect), even if the plot mostly involves Holden being intimately involved in every major historical event.

Maybe it's because I have the opposite approach to fiction. My favorite part is usually the worldbuilding and the exploration of the setting, so I don't mind flat or dislikable characters if the world is interesting enough. I remember being mystified when I found online Tolkein fandom because of all the shipping in The Silmarillion fans--Mairon/Morgoth, Maedhros/Fingon, etc--because it's just not something I'm interested in at all, whereas I ran a two-year-old TTRPG game based on 8-bit Nintendo games rammed into a Conan-esque sword and sorcery setting and probably spent hundreds of hours building out the world and the RPG's mechanics. Though there were pivotal characters in the setting, like the Dragon Emperor, the Princess of the House of Peach, or Dragmire the Black Prince of the Desert, the players never met them so I never came up with anything other than their names.

That's probably why I don't read a lot of fanfic, because the portion that's "let's explore how this aspect of the setting works" is much smaller than character-focused fanfic, or it least it seems that way to me.