You Got Your Science Fiction In My Fantasy
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And back in the 70's and early 80's, we seemed cool with that. Well, okay, I was only a kid, and wouldn't have understood the difference much otherwise. But it seemed that Dungeons & Dragons games often had a mix of powered armor, vibro-blades, and laser rifles muddying the waters of homebrewed Middle Earths. On the computer front, the early Ultima games mixed hover cars, space ships, evil computers, and time travel pretty freely.
Somewhere in the mid 80's (subjective time), the dividing line came down. Fantasy, as a genre, began standing on its own on the shelves of the bookstores, instead of being lumped into the anemic "science fiction" shelves. People started drawing a hard line between what constituted fantasy and what was required of science fiction. The term "speculative fiction" had been coined to include both genres, and began coming into vogue sometime after that to prevent the terms for the specific genres from getting misused with broader meanings.
And suddenly, even in RPGs, it was no longer cool to stick fusion-powered armor in your fantasy games. Well, most of them. We still had the genre-melding games like Shadowrun and stuff designed specifically around that concept. But there was mostly an assumption that anyone mixing the two genres was ignorant of the important distinction.
Because, you know, if that sword is electrified by a fusion battery or something in its hilt, it's SF! But if it is electrified by magic, it's F! Silly people!
And I also note that around that time, Ultima IV excised the last of the trappings of science fiction from the world.
