D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[clearstream]

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.

A paper a few years ago from UC Santa Cruz found that "procedural rhetoric has psychological reality, with players accurately understanding that two games meant to have arguments have them, and the purely abstract game [that] did not". I recall other evidence of measurable psychological effects being cited in this regard, too.

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.

Changing tack, it's hard to think of another mechanic with such a specific aim of effortless (confident and powerful) mass slaughter. A few spells seem tailored to that purpose... fireball, stinking cloud. Keep in mind that I am differentiating between violence and mass slaughter.

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.

I like your thought here, as D&D rules are engaged with by players through the DM. How aware are players that minions have 1 hit point? Some posters have written that they let players know which monsters are minions. The question would be whether and how players internalize and operationalize this information. I believe some research shows analogic transfers but most or all is in the context of videogames.

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.

Agreed. Something I have noticed in this thread is that analyzing individual mechanics doesn't necessarily explain them without the fuller context of the rest of the game text. I can picture a game in which a minions mechanic would -- together with other mechanics -- have the sort of results you may be envisioning. I don't know that I take 4e D&D to be an example, although as I wrote upthread, that's only finally settled in play.

We might accept that narratives are shaped in part by rules, but that does not support narratives "emerge from" rules.

I mean that they emerge from people using the rules in a way that would be inexplicable were the rules considered inert in this equation. The rules serve as instructions that shape the narratives: stifling some, prompting others.