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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Havrik Stoneskimmer" data-source="post: 5580341" data-attributes="member: 6670929">This is an interesting topic, and it's great to see a lot of nuance here.I can kind of see both sides. I can imagine a group of immature teenagers or young adults using D&D (or other RPGs) as a way of indulging violent or destructive urges. Not in a "release valve" sense, but in a sense that the activity is creating a positive feedback effect on these urges. I don't think those people are necessarily any more likely to be violent, but I don't know that it does any good for their personal character to stoke those kinds of feelings.But that's one type of gamer, and I've frankly met very few of them in my life.Now to speak for myself. I'm practically a pacifist. If I was running the country the military budget would be slashed in half, all of our overseas forces would return home to guard our borders and assist in natural disasters, and our all of our nuclear weaponry would be dismantled.So you might not think I would be a fan of games like D&D. But that's the whole point of fantasy: to be able to pretend to have an exciting adventure that you wouldn't actually want to have in real life. I do narrate combat in D&D, so there is a degree of "your crossbow bolt hits him square in the forehead and he dies instantly", but I try to keep the violence level at a sort of Indiana Jones feel. It's over the top and we don't dwell on the more visceral aspects of it. We generally play a heroic game battling against the forces of unambiguous evil (although even there, if you really deconstruct the genre you can consider that even evil masterminds have families that love them, and the mooks are just doing their job - but that kind of analysis does not make the game more fun for me).Basically, I don't feel there is any inherent problem with D&D or violence in movies, provided the player/viewer has the maturity to clearly separate real life and fantasy. I wouldn't be inviting children to play D&D until I was confident that they understood the nature of "pretend" at a reasonably sophisticated level (depends on the child, but maybe at 8 or so?).</blockquote>

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