Still, seeing as our culture historically and today actually does justify mass slaughter to itself, in part through the stories it tells itself, there seems to me evidence more for rather than against.
I believe you would still have the "correlation does not imply causation" issue to contend with there.
If we accept that our culture justifies mass slaughter to itself, one still has to establish that the game is used for that same justification, and that the game's justification then causes further harm.
For example, you would have to empirically demonstrate that the set of folks causing harm with the justification is not disjoint from the set of people playing the game.
That seems like catastrophisizing. I've limited my worries to one mechanic that does not even appear in the latest version of D&D.
Cherry-picking a single mechanic, in the 50 year history of game violence, is going to seem at best like missing the forest for one particular tree.
Asserting that a game mechanic, in and of itself, regardless of application, is an ethical or moral failure calls for an argument that remains coherent however it is applied.
This is a good example of what I described upthread (playful irony etc.)
This thread is 2200 pages long. I am not going to hunt for what you said upthread in that morass, since I did not enter the morass to counter your argument.
Procedural rhetoric -- i.e. rhetorics embodied in game mechanics -- is something that has been argued for and by many accepted.
Appeal to popularity is not a solid rhetorical position. Especially popularity among unnamed masses. This is among the weakest appeals to authority extant.
The idea is roughly that players must assimilate and go along with the mechanic to play the game,
The players are not required or expected to have read the encounter building rules, or, in fact, anything in the DMG or MM. So, this is not accurate. They do not have to be aware of it, much less assimilate it.
and are in that way persuaded by it.
I play games in which characters can psionically control the force of gravity to enable flight. I am a physicist, and not in the least persuaded that this reflects real life.
The idea that accepting use of a mechanic in a game equates to having our moral and ethical stances changed would require empirical support.
Moreover, it would call for considering the mechanic in the full context of the game to find the
net result of influence, and determine that net result is negative.
As in - even if minion mechanics are ethically questionable. If the net result of the game is dedication to building a more ethical world, then the mechanic is justified. The ethical whole can be more than the sum of the parts.
Or less - rare are ethical measures that can be applied generally, without context.
Post-classical narratology puts TTRPG within the circle of narrative... and to some extent its implicit in the notion of narrativism that narratives emerge from rules... in turn implying that those rules will give shape to those narratives
So, this is doubly asserting without support. We might accept that narratives are shaped in part by rules, but that does not support narratives "emerge from" rules.
Narratives have their start in people, not rules.
On balance my current view is that it's mistaken to suppose rules can't have moral implications. (One could even say that morality is to some extent down to or amounts to rules!)
This includes equating game rules to overall societal behavior rules, and equation I do not accept as presented.
I strongly agree. Where perhaps I diverge from other posters here is in counting it among the proper topics for conversation about D&D.
Broadly speaking, sure. But there is a time and place and method for things.
).
