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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Remathilis" data-source="post: 9416920" data-attributes="member: 7635">Oh, THIS can of worms.Mark my words, THIS will be the next fight in the TTRPG scene. Its an inevitable consequence. D&D alignment went from White Hats and Black Hats to moral relativism, and the end point of this discussion will be how RPGs (and in reality, ALL media) casually uses violence in ways that are desensitizing and harmful.I still recall an article I read 30 years ago on a website called <a href="https://johntynes.com/revland2000/rl_powerkill.html" target="_blank">POWER KILL.</a> It's a bit of a read (about 1.5 Snarfs long) and it's written like an RPG ruleset for a simple RPG you play alongside a regular RPG. The short version is if you took your last RPG session and then rewrote the actions of it to exist in our real world (for example, going into a goblin warren to hunt goblins and take their treasure becomes going into a low rent tenement and attack and steal from the residents) your PCs would be monsters. Absolutely wretched beings. But we excuse this fantasy because goblins, or vampires, or demon worshippers. The game rewards it. The sands have shifted since 1996. Orcs are for playing, not slaying. Goblins are people too. And the excessive violence used in the game feels a little antiquated as well. You can certainly try to back away from elements of it (D&D has danced away from humanoids being used only for killing, but hasn't from undead, demons, or aberrations being unredeemably evil. Yet.) But I feel as people begin to look hard at how media portraying violence as good (and the tacit condoning of acceptable violence in media used to justify violence in the real world) gets more scrutinized, I feel the game (and in fact, a lot of gaming) will have to look at what options and mechanics it has for peaceful, non-violent (or at least non-fatal) resolution. Put simply, D&D will at some point have to stop ignoring how it encourages players to commit war crimes as part of routine play.</blockquote>

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