What makes a good “soft” sci-fi/fantasy story?

I'm not sure what you mean by "soft", like, how low-key the fantasy or sci-fi elements are? LOTR would be "hard" because it just goes "full fantasy"? Would Blade Runner be "soft" because it's just a detective story in a city, but with flying cars and robots, vs say Star Wars, which is fully a galaxy far far away with lightsabers and spaceships and aliens? I've written stories in both genres, so hard to pinpoint it that way.

Here's the difference between hard and soft sci-fi. Hard tries to explain stuff to make it real. By doing that you are leaving yourself open to people that know better than you to pick it apart. Soft is "the tie fight flies and makes sound, and a blaster shoots energy", end of story. Most people don't care about the science behind the story (true science in a story about space is depressing and you don't want to live or travel there. The distances are long, there is no faster than light travel, and most planets will kill you instantly if you landed.) People don't care about the real science. Just make it real enough to tell your story as that is the most important thing.

I think @Junohugger has the right idea: a soft setting/system means that the paradigms the world runs on are subtle, simple, and/or remain in the background.

And the easiest way to achieve that is to NOT focus on them. ^^; Write a story about the characters' relationships, goals, or conflicts, where the technology they use is mostly a means to an end. It explains certain things, or allows the characters to do certain things, but that's it. Your biggest questions about it should be things like "what is the item called" or "who can afford it"...any further detail should not be needed to understand the story, or discussed by the characters.

For example, think about guns-- probably one of the most influential inventions in human history. Since the moment it became feasible to carry one around in your hands, a lot of aspects of modern life have just been different.
And yet, in most stories where guns are featured prominently, they're just tools. The characters don't spend a lot of time learning about them, or modifying them, or even talking about them: they just pick them up and use them. And if they happen to pick one up that the viewer might not recognize or understand...it honestly doesn't matter, and it's not treated as if it might. ^^; The expectation is that you'll get to see what that gun does, and learn all you need to know about it that way.

^That's what a soft system tends to feel like. It's just * there *, a normal part of the world, a means to an end. It may have a cool concept, and every character may own ten pieces of technology related to it, but it's still just an accessory to the story. The focus and the stakes should be based on the characters themselves, not on how well the characters understand how to navigate the rules. Because a soft system will only have maybe 2 or 3 rules. ^^;

Just speculating here, I'm guessing by soft vs. hard settings, you mean how grounded in reality something is. Going off of that, a good system for a soft sci-fi setting would be earth. Challenge yourself down to earth story using only real events that have happened to you and give a bit of a dramatic flair by placing a element X in the story that changes the world just a tiny bit. (This could range from AI to power crystals, or even a scientific form of magic)

You also mentioned soft magic and power systems. Essentially, these systems are ones where the rules are vague. (In my opinion, these are harder to write, as it is hard to keep things consistent and not looking like a convenient plot device that a character pulls out of nowhere. However, it is impossible to keep this from happening, so there is bound to be a few plot holes here and there which you have to be ok with.)

In general, soft power systems are used in stories where the element x, or the magic, isn't the main focus. These can be seen by having the "magic user" be apart from the protagonist, like they are folklore almost. Or it could be seen through the eyes of a magically inept person (The Hobbit). Or in the case of Harry Potter, not be in main focus, but still play a significant role by just existing and being used whenever it is needed.

TLDR: Soft magic/power systems are usually written apart from the main perspective of the protagonist, but in any case, it will bend to fit the plot.

So for the uninitiated in this thread: in fantasy, 'hard' refers to fantastical elements with hard, defined, clear rules. Dungeons and Dragons has a pretty hard magic system (All video games that use magic have hard magic systems by definition), so does Avatar: The Last Airbender, and most novels written by Brandon Sanderson (which are amazing if you haven't read them.) Other things like the Nen system from Hunter x Hunter and Chakra from Naruto are fairly hard magic systems. you use the magical superpowers to do a thing, you do it intentionally, you know what the capabilities of different kinds of magic are, and they operate on rules and logic that may not be strictly realistic, but can be clearly understood.

A soft magic system refers to one where magic is weird, esoteric, beyond human understanding, and not necessarily logical or consistent. Lord of the Rings has very soft magic in it as a good example. Other soft magic systems include Chainsaw Man's demon contracts, Jojo's completely flexible and indeterminate limits on what stands can be or do, and Harry Potter's inexhaustible list of spells that can do... whatever the hell you want them to, apparently.

Of course, this exists on a spectrum: Lord of the Rings has an extremely soft magic system, while Allomancy from Sanderson's Mistborn books is an equally hard magic system, but it can be anywhere inbetween.
Harry Potter is a somewhat harder magic system, since each individual spell has a specific function and potions have to be brewed according to specific rules and recipes. I'd still argue it leans softer because there are new spells introduced every five minutes and seemingly no rules on what can or can't be done by any given spell, so you just have a bottomless list of things the magic can do whenever it needs to.

Meanwhile something like bending in Avatar is a mostly hard magic system that leans slightly soft due to the very spiritual nature of accessing the magic. What bending can or can't do is pretty clearly defined, but the exact details of the ways it can affect things, especially when spirits get involved, can be a little fuzzy depending on what's needed for the story.

I've referenced Brandon Sanderson a few times in this, and I 100% recommend checking out his stuff, as well as some of the creative writing lectures he's done (free on youtube), and he has outlined three 'laws' of magic that he uses for his writing:

1: The author's ability to resolve conflicts in a satisfying way with magic is directly proportional to how the reader understands said magic.

If you want your characters to solve problems with the magic system, then it needs to be a hard magic system that the reader can understand and follow. Soft magic can get characters into problems, but only hard magic can get characters out of problems.
Good example of this: How many times in Lord of the Rings does Gandalf's magic actually save the day or fix the problem? Since the audience has no idea what spells and abilities Gandalf actually has, it would be unsatisfying for him to just pull out a spell that could poof away whatever issue the characters are facing. Magical shit gets the characters into trouble all the time in LotR, but magic, at least by itself, rarely if ever solves the issues.


2: Weaknesses are more interesting than powers.

What your magic CAN'T do is more interesting than what it CAN, and this is where you make your magic systems interesting and creative. The World in Jojo's can't stop time for longer than 5 seconds, so what can the character using this stand do in 5 seconds to give themselves an advantage? Jutsus in Naruto can't just be made stronger by pumping more raw power into them, so what do the characters have to do instead to make their abilities stronger?
How your characters work around the limits of what magic is capable of is going to be more interesting than what the magic is actually capable of to begin with.

3: Expand, Don’t Add.

More powers are not always better. Luffy from One Piece is a perfect example of this. He is made of Rubber. That's his whole thing. That is all he's got for nearly the entire series. Instead of getting new things he can do outright, he finds new ways to use that single ability in conjunction with other stuff. Force his body to pump blood faster in order to increase his speed and reaction time, store energy by stretching his rubber body and releasing it in rapid bursts, reflect bullets by blowing himself up like a balloon and catching them.
Luffy took 500 chapters to test and experiment and find the limitations of ONE superpower, never actually gaining new abilities but finding new and creative ways he could use his rubber body. Then he got one additional superpower in the form of Haki, and spent another 300 chapters JUST exploring the ways he could combine this single new superpower with his old one before getting anything else.

I think if you want to find a way to soften your magic systems, then just think about your magic more like a neutral force of nature. It exists outside of your characters' control, at least your central characters, and it might be used to their advantage or to work against them, but never with intent on the part of your characters. Magic is beyond them, whatever rules or limits it has are not logical or sensible to a regular human brain.
The works of Hayao Miyazaki tend to be pretty good at this. Spirited Away comes to mind, with a fantastical world and tons of magical shit happening at and around Chihiro, but basically none of it is under her control. When she does magical stuff, it's solely at other people's explicit instructions because she has no damn clue how any of this works. When Chihiro overcomes magical obstacles, it's not through using magic herself, it's through honesty, determination, and resourcefulness. Magic gets her into problems, but she gets herself out of them.

Generally speaking, all the same shit applies to Sci-fi as well: Hard sci-fi is stuff based on real, actual science, soft sci-fi doesn't give a shit about the laws of physics. Something like The Martian or The Expanse are great examples of harder sci-fi, while Futurama, Rick and Morty, and Star Wars are just about as soft as Sci-fi can possibly get.
There's other principles and ideas to apply to the genre that aren't quite applicable to fantasy, but the gist is generally the same. Only have alien physiology be the key to solving an issue if the audience actually understands that alien physiology. If it suddenly turns out that the Glaknoo people have a special Blarflag Gland which makes them immune to plasma rifles that is only revealed immediately after being shot with a plasma rifle, that's about the same as the wizard casting 'nuh-uh no you didn't' because you never actually defined what the magic system is capable of.
The harder the sci-fi or the magic system, the more effectively you can use it for a combat system, for duels like a shounen battle series, or for outright problem solving. The softer the system, the more your story will need to focus on character conflict and relationships, using the sci-fi or fantasy elements as a backdrop and atmosphere more than as a direct agent in the narrative's resolution.

Hi, Aqua03. I think you can write anything you want to, even hard sci-fi. Perhaps, the best approach is patience and research. The first novel I wrote, and I worked on it for years, was a fantasy about fairy youths stuck in the world of the humans. I had no systems for world-building or magic, I simply wrote.

However, by the time I began writing The Space Bum, I had some definite ideas. The story is set in another arm of the Milky Way after the earth was destroyed and mankind took to space travel. Millennia later, my MC lives in a future with flying vehicles and high-tech weaponry. Of course, I made everything up off the top of my head, but I made extensive notes and worked from an outline. In that future, a person might slap a charge into their gun like we would slap a magazine into a gun.

If you take the time to think things through, anything is possible in your writing. Well, years have gone by. I have gained some writing experience. I am currently working on the third book of that series. I have moved from the more organic approach to writing scenes and writing imagery. Fiction is all made-up stuff anyway. Don't worry so much about nitpickers. If you enjoy what you do, let patience and research be your companions.

Hmm... it's a complicated thing, and obviously different people have different tastes, but I think some core ingredients are:

It's About People:

Soft Sci Fi and Fantasy have the advantage of not needing to perfectly follow the logic of the real world, and so it's a lot easier to explore big mythological tropes and archetypes and to put characters in absurd, dreamlike scenarios. Like in real life, or in hard sci-fi, it's probable that if we ever met aliens, they'd be absolutely bizarre looking, not roughly human sized with two legs they walk on, two arms, a head with two eyes and a mouth they use to speak and the ability to talk to us and also conveniently be comfortable in the same atmospheric composition, pressure and gravity as us. In hard sci-fi, the question would be "how could people realistically learn to even communicate with or relate to this weird gigantic starfish that can only live in air we can't breathe and which "talks" by flashing pulses of bioluminescence in ultra-violet wavelengths?" But in soft sci-fi, it's a more approachable question like, "could I, a soldier, fall in love with this blue skinned alien from a planet that has no concept of war?"
Because soft sci-fi and Fantasy aren't necessarily about the sciency part of science; they're more about the human part of stories. By removing the precise detail and nitty-gritty of exactly how the world works, and allowing metaphors to become real you have this freedom to explore very big questions. Superman isn't a realistic story about what an alien would be like, it's an exploration of the big question: "What if somebody had the powers of a god, but had been raised to embody the very best values of a humble farming couple from small town america and resisted being corrupted?" and then The X-Men explores, "what if society treated people with super-powers with the same oppression, fear and violence they do other people who are different, like racial minorities or queer people?" It's not about the mechanics of how super-powers could work; it's about what emotions and human or social topics you can explore.

Appealing Core Fantasy:

The things you can do with the magic or tech in a setting should be appealing and cool. This is frequently more important than them being practical or realistic. It's a bit like with jokes; if you have to explain why an ability was cool, it isn't cool (which is why most people struggle to enjoy hard sci-fi). This is something the Harry Potter or "Wizarding World" franchise seems to have forgotten, especially by the time of the Fantastic Beasts films; the ability to just shoot "pew pew!" out of your wand like it's a gun isn't interesting! The things that magic can do in Harry Potter that people actually liked were things like "summon a magical animal spirit that scares away evil and also the animal is uniquely tied to you and says something about your personality" (very appealing!) or "fly around on a broomstick!" (classic witch imagery, very appealing).
The best way to think about core fantasy is "how would a kid play at this?" or "What would be the fun unique things a person could do in a tabletop or videogame version of this?"

Exceptional power should have an exceptional cost:

The rules may be fluffy and not necessarily follow scientific logic (a science-savvy friend of mine once calculated the energy that'd be required to conjure even a small ball of fire from nowhere and shoot it at an enemy. They said was enough to blow up a planet), but there still needs to be a sense that the more valuable or powerful a skill or item, the bigger the limitations, cost or sacrifice you need to attach to its use. This creates tension even when people have access to very powerful abilities. Examples:
Limited stock: ie. You only have three wishes or five magic arrows or one asteroid-destroying missile. The character should definitely always end up using their entire stock by the end of the story or a tough encounter.
Recharge: Similar to limited stock but it's times per day or per hour an ability or item can be used. Maybe it also needs special circumstances to refuel like "crap! My solar ray gun is out of power, we need to find a source of sunlight!"
The Price: Basic guns use bullets, basic spells use magic, getting an airship might cost gold... but then exceptional things like "The legendary sword that can kill the demon king", saving somebody's soul from the underworld or bringing someone back from the dead should always have a huge price like "You must go on a quest", "you must complete a series of impossible tasks", "You must sacrifice your own life", "you must become the servant of a demon". Intermediate costs might be things like "A piece of your soul", "your voice", "your left arm". This is why Blood Magic is often more powerful and feared than other forms of magic; because it uses life, and in a Fantasy setting, life has a very high value.

So the cost for acquiring of using any kind of object or power needs to feel limited by a sort of... emotional logic, where the highest price a person can pay is their life or soul. 100 gold pieces is only an interesting price if it's all the money the character has, or more than they have, while their beloved locket that was a gift from their dead mother feels like a much more valuable price to pay in most cases.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

You don't need to explain the exact mechanics of devices, transportation, power watches,etc.....only that they work, what they do and optionally, if they need any source of energy......that's easily justifiable by making up a material like power crystals, vibranium or whatever.

Honestly I think the only requirement is consistency. There doesn't have to be rules, per se, but if the protagonists always discover some new aspect of their "soft" magic system/technology to get themselves out of trouble, it very quickly becomes boring for the audience. So, if there's some magical, not well understood phenomenon that your characters NEED to progress the plot along, it needs to be introduced to the audience (even just in terms of hints) well before it needs to be used in the context of the plot.

Also you don't need a ton of rules to make a magic system appear "hard". Like, in Fullmetal Alchemist the singular rule was "nothing is created or destroyed, transmutation will always require an input equivalent to its output". The rest of the alchemy magic is VERY soft, but because everything always circles back this rule, it looks, to the audience, like a very complex system.

I posted my big-ass essay earlier, but I came back to this thread and remembered a thing for dealing with hard magic systems that mostly relates to Sanderson's third law:

Simple systems are much better for Hard magic

If you want a soft magic system, then magic can be vast, all-encompassing, weird, and limitless, but the harder the magic system (especially if being used for combat or action sequences), the more it benefits from being limited in scope.

Take for example Brandon Sanderson's magic system of Allomancy: By ingesting metals (usually small shavings that they keep in vials of liquid), you can use them as a fuel system for various magical powers. This is already an interesting limitation as you literally have a sort of ammunition to limit how much the magic can be used, but each type of metal is also tied to one specific power.

Most people only have access to 1 metal and that metal's specific ability: if you can burn Steel, then you can telepathically push (ONLY push, not pull) on metal items around you. If you can burn Iron, then you can ONLY pull (not push) metal items around you.
Some very rare people have access to all metal abilities at once, but even then, that caps out at 18, and among those, only 5, maybe 6 are regularly useful for combat, 1 of them literally drains all your metals to nothing, one of them is basically a radar, 2 others only have really esoteric fringe-case uses, and 2 others are so rare even the most powerful fighters in the world only get to use them once in a blue moon.
Once you learn all the powers and understand the general principles, everyone has a specific 'set' of things they can do that is pretty clearly defined and easy to follow. It stops being about which abilities there are and becomes more about how the characters use them.

Other series, even with soft magic systems, will have stuff like this in it: Harry Potter's magic might be fairly soft overall, but when an actual wands-out duel happens, it becomes a lot more limited: Fixed spells, precise effects, and only so many getting used at any given time, more like it's video game characters selecting moves from a list. As the post above me mentioned, Fullmetal Alchemist has a great example of a very simple system that is very rigid and easy to understand in combat with only a single 'rule' to follow, but a ton of flexibility outside of actual fights.

So, as Sanderson's third law states: Don't add, expand.
In addition to being easier for the audience to follow if there's only a few concepts/ideas, it also forces you as the author to be more creative. You have to put yourself in the character's shoes and think like them: How do I get the most mileage out of this one ability? How can I use this tool to my advantage?

if your issue is that your magic system has become too bloated and complex, then it may not be a need to soften up the magic in your story that's the issue: you may just be better off paring down the total number of powers/spells/magic artifacts/et al. involved and instead focus on what fun and creative ways a smaller set of fantastical elements can interact with one another.

The rules of your videogame setting need to feel consistent, and they need to actually pay off. A lot of these "it's set in a game world!" stories, it's like... literally just a few things have a damage counter on them, or a sword has a label that says "+1", but it's all just shallow dressing.

Weirdly, the movie "Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle" gets a lot of this right. They have a clear way players see their stats, established rules about player death, how NPCs behave within the limits of their programming and then it uses those rules to impact the story; the players exploit the death mechanics, like how you keep everything you're holding on death and are teleported to a spot outside of the danger, and the player weaknesses that are brought up all eventually pay off.

So when you establish a game-like rule in your game, like how the death mechanic works in a way different from literally dying, it's a chekov's gun that has to pay off. Scott gets an extra life in both the comic and movie of Scott Pilgrim for it to then later pay off, and it pays off in a different way in each, but in both, him getting the extra life is treated almost like a gag at the time, but then it turns out to have been important.

So if you establish a rule, like... let's say the Mario/ Prince of Persia rule applies: If you drink or get submerged in water, you restore all your HP.
First, you need to establish this in a very obvious way so the reader knows the rule. Have the characters explicitly point out that water cures everything, maybe say something funny about it at the time.
Then have it pay off in a funny or interesting way later. Character seems to have fallen off a cliff, characters are all like "Oh no... the fall damage, that was her last life!" and then the character they thought was dead shouts from the bottom like "hey, guys...? Anyone got a rope?" and they get her up and she's like "yeah. I landed in the puddle the water dragon made with that aqua cannon attack earlier. Bleh, my feet are all wet!"

Apply this approach to everything. Have mechanics be each like a checkov's gun on the wall. If levelling up creates a big, dazzling glow around the person, they should use it to distract an enemy at some point. If nobody can hurt each other or fight, or even draw their weapons in a town, that should be used for a tense encounter with the big bad where all anyone can do is talk... but the baddie makes it clear somebody important has been kidnapped, or there's a bomb set somewhere. If dying always causes the person to be resurrected at the nearest graveyard, use that in a clever, cheesy way to reach a place they shouldn't have been able to reach.

As you mentioned that your magic system gets too complicated or out of control, there are two general approaches to world building. You can either create everything top down or bottom up. If you choose the top down approach you set everything that exists in your world regarding magic, creatures and so on. This takes a lot of preparation but so you make sure that everything makes sense and is balanced. If you take the bottom up approach you more or less invent everything you need when it comes up in your story. This way you can start much faster but there is a bigger risk of creating inconsistencies. If your worldbuilding style is similar to the bottom up method maybe it might help if your try the top down-method for once and see if this helps you solve your problems. Good luck

For me, I think the biggest factor is realizing that your story doesn't have to be complicated. I've noticed that a lot of people think sci-fi has to be the next Star Trek/Wars and fantasies have to mirror Brandon Sanderson. The Magic School Bus is sci-fi/fantasy. A story about an inventor building a robotic friend - sci-fi/fantasy. One of my favorite MG/YA book "Scumble" is sci-fi/fantasy. The book is about a young girl a born to a family of superhumans anxiously waiting to gain her own powers only to have her father have a stroke on her birthday. She believes its her mission in life is to save her father from a coma. It's a simple story with a lot of heart. Write the story first and let the sci-fi/fantasy elements come in second.