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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5575189" data-attributes="member: 4937">I'm going to guess without looking that the guys politics are very far removed from my own so I'd normally be disinclined to provide him any support.  On the other hand, everyone here seems to be providing an echo chamber so I'll go ahead and pitch my tent in his direction.I think the answer to this question is it depends.I tend to find that fantasy games tend to reflect the existing biases and beliefs of their creators and often have plot lines and themes which - usually unintentionally - are designed to help inculcate those beliefs in themselves and others.  But very rarely are those beliefs and biasees literally something obvious like racism, and since the game reflects a wholly different set of beliefs and biases it would be surprising if a wholly unrelated belief arose from it.  I would find it even more surprising if a belief that the game creator was highly unsympathetic to arose unwilling in response to playing a game.However, I think there is some merit to the argument that how you RP can effect how you view the world.  Role Playing is and was after all, long before the term was associated with gaming, a form of pyschotheraphy and a form of training which was very much designed to alter the way people behave in real life.  I know that on occasion I've played characters where my emersion into the character and use of method acting techniques ended up subtly altering my out of game behavior.So while I would be surprised if RPing ended up altering or basic beliefs, I would not at all be surprised if RPing could be used to reinforce more strongly something we were initially sympathetic to.  I wouldn't be too surprised if people began to use the evidence of a fantasy game as additional evidence in favor of what they already believed.You see this sort of argument being advanced by opponents and detractors of the D&D alignment system in virtually every thread where we argue alignment.  And I've seen a lot of people who seemed to make the argument that this sort of behavior in the game which could be translated into real world behavior was 'good' on the basis of the evidence that their character was 'good'.  Moreover, while every violent imagining need not necessarily be practice for committing real violent deeds, violently imagining things can in fact be mental practice for committing real deeds of violence.  I don't think it is very common in gaming first because I rarely see groups that are comfortable with lingering over vile and violent details, and because ultimately PnP games are far less viceral aids to violent imaginings than much of the media that is available, but I do think it can happen.  In fact, I think the fact that most groups implicitly or explicitly discourage dwelling on certain details of the game world, and in fact get very uncomfortable when these unspoken rules are breached, indicates that there is very widespread acceptance at the unconscious level that there are some topics which are unhealthy to dwell too much on.  Maybe they won't explain themselves in the same terms, but typically when they do explain themselves, I find the terms ("I just don't feel comfortable...") amount to much the same thing.I think it is very much possible to have a sociopathic game table that encourages sociopathic violence in its participants.  But, I seriously doubt that any table is going to be comfortable with the resulting game unless a bit of that prediliction is already present in the participants.Nonetheless, I wouldn't allow my children to game with a group unless I was very familiar with the people involved and the sort of game they were running.  The odds of a conversion to a set of beliefs different than your existing ones increases with the impressionablity of the person involved and with the number of peers you have that are accepting of the environment (this latter is not something that adults are immune to).</blockquote>

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