Are questions about fantasy-football type games on topic?

Question

This question appears to be asking about creating a fantasy football type of game system for rock bands. That's great. But is it on topic for us?

A quick Google search will tell you that fantasy football is extremely similar to D&D. However, all those articles and posts are written with an agenda: trying to lift the social stigma from RPGs by comparing them to a more "cool," socially-acceptable game. This means these articles are strongly biased, having every reason to cherry-pick similarities and ignore whatever differences might exist between the games.

Fantasy football looks more like a competitive strategy game than an RPG to me, but I don't know enough about it to say that with any confidence--so I bring it to you, O Groupmind.

Answer 1

Are fantasy sports on topic? No.

It goes back to the defining attributes of an RPG compared to other kinds of games: the emphasis on the shared fiction of play.

Fantasy sports is a game of research and strategy, akin to a more complicated version of sports betting. You pick players for your lineup, then wait for game results to figure out your hypothetical team's score. There's not even, like, a "session" really — AFAIK many people like to turn the initial draft into a party, but afterward you're just checking stats and occasionally trading with other players. You could imagine yourself as a team manager just like you can imagine yourself as a real-estate speculator in Monopoly, but this isn't a shared experience and it has no impact on situations or outcomes in the game.

Are make-believe games about [whatever] on topic? Maybe.

One could conceivably make and play a game an RPG or RPG-like game about sports or the music industry or whatever you like, of course! It's really not that weird of an idea.

Remember that the site is scoped to "tabletop, paper-and-pencil role-playing games." However, as far as I know, we've been pretty permissive about some TRPG-adjacent stuff like freeform play-by-post and solo roleplaying.

Some examples of previous meta questions about RPG-like games:

• Play-by-email games: on topic.
• MUD/MUSH play-by-chat: on topic (except for technical questions).
• Game-book game questions: borderline.
• RPG-derived board games like Castle Ravenloft: not on topic (they fail the same test as fantasy sports, actually).

Deriving a standardized rule is dicey, but, here's me taking a shot at it:

This is a site about tabletop RPGs (including tabletop RPGs played online).

Questions about other RPG-like activities are generally in scope if they cover a facet of that activity that relates closely to tabletop roleplaying.

Are LARP questions on topic? Yes. (We just forget about LARP all the time.)

(Pureferret asked about this in the comments.)

LARP is mentioned in the FAQ — "Dungeons & Dragons, Dogs in the Vineyard, Shadowrun, World of Darkness, FATE, or any of the thousands of other pen-and-paper RPGs (including LARPs)" — but not on the Tour page.

My understanding is that LARP was always assumed to be in-scope because of the huge overlap between TRPGs and LARPs in terms of player base, subject matter, and even techniques, but it's not very popular among users overall so people forget about it all the time. LARP seems to be supported here the same way it is on RPGnet (which is to say, absolutely on-topic, but the discussion is rather low-volume and peripheral because it's only of interest to a minority of the community).

Answer 2

Some probably do, but not all.

There are two kinds of "fantasy sports" games that I'm aware of. The first is in the category of "Rotisserie baseball," wherein the primary activity is the act of constructing a team of players and using their real-world progress to see how well "your team" does. Although you may give your team a name and enjoy the "role" of a manager, it's not an integral part of the game.

The second is like "fantasy wrestling," which seems to have as much in common with play-by-email and play-by-post games as it does with things like Strat-o-Matic. In it, part of the game is handling promos, feuds, and other character-driven action while a simulator determines the results of matches. I'd say that this kind of fantasy sport game is on-topic here, and moreover that the "fantasy band manager" game the OP has described would also be on topic. (If the game were played by, I don't know, watching SoundScan rankings or the Billboard charts and allotting points by some means for chart position and duration, that would be more like the first game. And I'm surprised no one's made that game yet.)

Answer 3

Fantasy football leagues do typically have rules. They are games, but don't involve any roleplaying, so don't qualify as RPGs. Fantasy football players do not appear to self-identify fantasy football as an RPG either. They're more akin to skill-based complex betting pools.

The question in the link appears to be the opposite: no rules, only freeform solo roleplaying. Solo RPGs do exist, so that's not a mark against it; but lacking rules, the pass-time described in the question appears to have no game involved. They do appear to self-identify it as an RPG, though, which may be enough to place it just barely in the outer fringes of RPGs. This is more akin to a structured fiction-writing exercise, which some RPGs do verge on.

(Aside, even if the pass-time described qualifies as an RPG, the questions they're asking are ill-defined enough to be unanswerable.)