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Message: <blockquote data-quote="T. Foster" data-source="post: 2253210" data-attributes="member: 16574">The notion of 'maturity' or 'sophistication' in D&D/rpgs is oxymoronic, and anyone who thinks otherwise is either very naive or delusional. If anything, devoting countless hours to detailing fictional worlds, characters, and adventures in a 'realistic' or 'sophicticated' manner is generally a sign of less maturity than someone hacking his way through a randomly-generated dungeon, because the person doing the latter has much more free-time available to devote to other, truly mature and sophisticated, activities than the person wasting his time and efforts on the former. The rpg experience can serve a legitimate educational/theapeutic role, for adults as well as children, in that rpgs enable people to reenact the archetypal mythical cycle (as detailed by Campbell et al.-- cross the threshhold to the otherworld, battle the guardian, outwit the villain, achieve the reward, and return home wiser) on their own terms, but this archetypal pattern is present just as much (if not moreso) in even the simplest and most arbitrary of dungeon-crawls than in the most carefully-crafted and ostensibly sophisticated roleplaying-based scenario.</blockquote>