Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="DrunkonDuty" data-source="post: 9419495" data-attributes="member: 54364">There's a strong cathartic element to the violence in games and media in general. People like catharsis. It's a thing.But how any one person feels about the framing of that violence in any given situation is going to vary a lot. Which is to say, the catharsis one can get from a piece of media is going to vary depending on the person and the media. Me, I don't like the way GTA frames violence. But I recently finished Baldur's Gate 3 and I promise you I left a massive body count behind.If one is just playing a beer'n'pretzels kick in the door and kill the monsters game then there's not really much more framing than you get out of a board game. Playing in such a game provides the players with some easy, uncomplicated fun. Let's them blow steam and all that.If one is more into the role play side of things you'll want better reasons than a character being tagged "good" or "evil" to reach a satisfactory level of catharsis. For myself I always feel more satisfied with a game where the baddies have a chance to really get under the players' skins. That's whether I'm player side or GM side. The vast majority of people I've played with feel that way too.But part of having more fleshed out enemies is that the framing of the violence runs the risk of modelling/resembling/paralleling real-world violence. And how one feels about and specific example of that is going to vary on one's life experience and a host of other things.Me, I long ago found the "kill orcs coz they're orcs" thing problematic. Therefore, nowadays, most of my adventures are not set on frontiers where societies rub up against each other. They are set within a society and the villains are in some manner acting from within to destroy/take over/re-shape that society in ways that are just plain wrong. And sure, some (many?) people might find my repetitive use of the rich and powerful as villains to be problematic. This would be one of those specific examples that varies with one's life experience.</blockquote>

Verification