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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Great Umbrage" data-source="post: 345567" data-attributes="member: 4063">Arrogance and elitism go hand-in-hand with the type of game that RPGs are--namely, games that each group, both players and the DM, makes their own.  That we provide the impetus and the input to create our own worlds lends itself naturally to an inflation of the ego.  That said, there is also a faction of people who swear by the "canon" material, whatever it may be, and there are those even within that faction who swear by the game material and others who uphold the novels as the ultimate authority.There are significant similarities between D&D and religion insofar as every person has his or her own relationship to the game as every faithful has a particular relationship to his deity; every group shares in a communal imagination to create the world in which they play just as every person's idea of a god or gods are truly created by that person's perceptions of the faith.Thus, one only has to look at religious intolerance in the world to see a profound correlation in gaming intolerance as well.  When something, be it faith or role-playing, requires on the part of the participant the imagination in order to conceive, the belief in order to take part in, and the communal sharing in order to make prolific a faith or an imaginary world, then it becomes so ingrained into our psyche that it can override the conscious, logical aspect of our minds that disbelieves such fantastical things as swords & sorcery in RPGs or actual miracles in faith by convincing the subconscious part of our minds into accepting these things on faith, because in truth, there is a part of us that wants to believe that such fantastical happenings are indeed real and that we can witness or participate in them.So when someone else brings forth a contradictory view of the world, real or not, it challenges the foundations of our imagination as surely as it does the precepts of our faith.</blockquote>

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