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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dykstrav" data-source="post: 3169268" data-attributes="member: 40522">I've never seen anyone engage in D&D specifically with the idea of debate or exploring some real life issue. The people I play with generally want to kill critters and sack dungeons. That's been in almost 20 straight years of playing.I'm not saying that D&D can't or shouldn't be used for such things, but people that want to discuss issues usually just discuss them instead of divorcing them from their context by placing them in a fantasy paradigm. Sure, there are issues and beliefs and all that in D&D, but they're more basic. Themes might be the cost of war and imperialism, for example, but without setting up a fantasy empire that's a direct analogue to the U.S. and the countries where the troops are. D&D tends to be a very personal experience, and much of this intimacy and flavor is lost when you "zoom out" onto a social level. It's really terrible when it becomes obvious and forced. Think some episodes of the later Star Trek series when it flip-flopped between zany space adventures and high-ideal futurist soapboxing. I've seen some D&D games like this and they just fall flat. They force the players to confront themselves and the DM when they'd rather just kick back, drink a few cold ones and pretend to hack orcs into stewmeat. One game I saw involved a new philosophy that all the organized religions of the game outright hated, called the Divinity of Humanity. Essentially, the Divinity of Humanity was a cult of atheists that had managed to train people as clerics while denying the power of every established god in the campaign's pantheon. We as the players assumed it was a hook- maybe an archdevil or some other intellectual evil was trying to seduce people away from religion? Maybe some unknown, newly forming god was emerging and had yet to reveal itself? Boy, were we let down. Turns out the DM wanted to establish that he personally thinks all religion (in game and out of game) was hogwash and wanted to make sure everybody knew it. There could be clerics in his campaign because the game needs healers, but he didn't want to hear anything about prayers or gods or anything like that. We were all supposed to be enlightened secular humanists, and he strongly discouraged us to take religion seriously if our Intelligence scores were 10 or above. The only people of faith were concretely of below-average Intelligence. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the campaign began to see more and more 'demented cultists' and 'bigoted paladins' attacking the Divinity of Humanity. The party wasn't interested in getting involved. We figured the Divinity of Humanity made its choice and had to deal with it. The DM then proceeded to get upset that we weren't interested in "killing stupid fundamentalists instead of orcs, at least the fundamentalists deserve it." (Paraphrased for brevity and content.)The players didn't want to deal with this stuff. We wanted to kick in some doors and crack some skulls, not listen to a DM lecture us for four hours about his opinions. Our group consisted of some Christians, some atheists and some 'undecided,' nobody really cared about that. I think it spoke volumes when that particular game petered out. Last time I heard from that DM, he was trying to get together a game that was basically the civil war with half-orc slaves. Never heard how that one turned out though.</blockquote>

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