Sacrosanct
Legend
Everyone is different, I'll give you that. I've long held a saying (even if it's not related to RPGs): "For vets who have seen war, when they return home, they either become more of pacifist liberals, or the become right wingers infatuated with weapons. Centrists are lost in war." That's a bit hyperbolic, but only a bit. With RPGs, I'm not sure if I'd call it therapeutic though. You either avoid the modern combat ones, or you embrace it as much as you can. It's kinda hard to explain, but I'll try. This might be a bit lengthy.
RPGs are (or at least were when I was in) pretty popular in the military. We played them a lot. Of all genres, although D&D and Vampire were the most popular when I was in. So that's the baseline. Playing in a fantasy land, where you encounter things that you would never encounter in real life had a clear distinction of separation from reality. In a lot of ways, this is good, especially if real life sucks. It's escapism. We even played modern RPGs (I even designed one we played).
And then you go to a war zone. You see things up close and personal, like dead bullet riddled bodies laying in the ditch that have been there for days. Or bodies blown apart. Or seeing your good friend's head suffer an extreme fatal head trauma only a few feet away from you, or the mass graves, or the sounds of bullets whizzing by while you're trying to take cover behind anything you can, even if it's a piece of helicopter sheet metal you know won't stop anything but you do anyway.
That changes things. RPGs are descriptive and narrative. So when you go back to playing a modern combat rpg, and the GM has to describe the scenario? Yeah, it's not a good thing. For years just the thought of playing a modern combat rpg made me a bit ill. Fantasy rpgs were perfectly fine for some reason, but not modern ones. I play them now, because over the past 20 years there's been a lot of rationalization and coming to grips, and my PTSD was pretty minor.
So then why would a combat vet still play them then right after? Many reasons. For some, maybe it brings back feelings or flashbacks of trying to capture the rush of combat they had experienced in real life. For others, they still are in a "fight fight fight" mental state combined with fear and anger, and need a release. And for others still, they need to keep remembering. This last one is a lot of what I experienced. For years (and still going on), whenever I tell people that I still think about once a week of my experiences (above and beyond any trigger, or dreams that also happen), they look at me funny and say, "If it was so bad, why do you keep intentionally thinking about it?" And my answer is the same, "Because I lost friends. They didn't make it home. I did. I can't allow myself to forget them. Going through re-living the experience is a small price to pay to remember them compared to what they gave up."
Anyway, as it relates to ST, if a bunch of teenagers experienced what they experienced in season 1 and 2, where their fantasy D&D world became reality, it would make perfect sense for them to not want to play D&D. I suspect that isn't the case because the show never addressed that. Instead, I suspect it was the case based on what usually happens (at least in the 80s where it totally happened to my gaming group when our gaming went from every couple days in Jr. High to once a month or so in high school): As you get older, hormones take over and girls become a priority, and you become more mobile (as soon as someone gets a car, that opens a whole new world).
Most of my nitpicking of realism is against movies that utterly suck (I couldn't watch 10 minutes of San Andreas because I yelled at the screen "Helicopters can't do that! Not even close!") So yeah, I'm guilty lol. With games, I am a bit, but I understand with games you have to give up a lot of realism in order to make the game work and flow. Believe me, I've written RPGs that factor in all kinds of realism (ballistics, ammo types, weapons types, etc) and I ended up with pages and pages of charts and tables and it just slowed the game way up to be unplayable. So with games, I'm a lot more chill.
