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Message: <blockquote data-quote="S'mon" data-source="post: 841932" data-attributes="member: 463">Hi - I think Rilstone gave due weight to the value of pure escapism, 'sometimes you just want to kill some orcs', but the main point was that you can combine flash-bang action with mature themes, for a richer roleplaying experience.  A film like Conan the Barbarian does this, by showing the growth of the protagonist from child to manhood both physically & mentally, and expounding a right-wing Nietszchean philosophy that gives the movie more depth than most fantasy flicks, whether the philosophy appeals or not.  Star Wars' use of Campbellian 'heroes' journey' themes does this too, to some extent (contrast with eg 'Buck Rogers' or 'Battlestar Galactica').  Babylon-5's use of plausible politics, credible human motivations and the idea that actions have consequences, is also a candidate.  By contrast, modern Star Trek series IMO seems to deliberately shy away from anything that could be considered 'mature themes', in the sense of dealing with identifiable human motivations, politics etc, in contrast to a lot of old series Star Trek.Edit: I'm not sure why rape, torture and slavery are inherently more sophistiticated themes than mass murder, grave-robbing, assassination, and many other D&D-standards.  Any of them can be dealt with in a sophisticated way, eg dealing with their cultural and psychological ramifications, or not.   Either approach seems fine to me.   In many D&D worlds these may all be accepted parts of the campaign background, or you may have a world where mass slaughter of the enemy and the theft of their wealth is regarded as acceptable behaviour ('Good'), but enslaving them or raping their women is not.  Or killing & enslaving may be ok, rape not ok, and so on.   In a world modelled on the actual middle ages, pre-battle assassination of the enemy leaders would be a definite no-no ('evil'), while torture of captives might be fine.</blockquote>

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