The Gaming Den

It sounds very much like an awesome Fantasy RPG version of Breaking Bad . A show whose moral is that, when you're over the hill, without dignity, self-respect, money, relevance, or power, are in general a loser, and also have terminal lung cancer, well, things can always get worse. And when you have...

Here's the thing. I have no way of evaluating or knowing other peoples' brain states. The only 'happiness' I can provably induce is my own. So what if I decided to maximize my own wellbeing, as opposed to everyone's? Why shouldn't I? Hell, even take out all the giant Philosophy Of Mind problems Harr...

Anyway, this video will clear up the whole 'why does K, Lago, and Frank have sand in their sandginas' for those who aren't completely clear. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80nhqGfN6t8 It came about as a criticism to creationism, but it pretty much applies to all anti-science philosophies. I just wa...

As people have explained in this thread, that concept is the crown jewel in the bullshit crown of anti-science even if people advocating that policy don't particularly mean to push anti-science. If you're going to do such a thing you should go out of your way to say that you're just recreating a fi...

Wow, Xenologer managed a truly boneheaded strawman and an appeal to that recidivist Is/Ought retard Sam Harris in only, like, three sentences. I've seen better, but not much.

I liked how you swapped out the adjective 'offensive' or 'harmful' with the euphemism 'weird', even though it's the former two which are more tangential to our rant. I mean, how can you be against something that has simply weird implications?! Well, I find the entire idea that the Mage universe bei...

On A) I don't care. Its a fallacy to assume that because a given person does something bad (in this case, D&D writers writing D&D), its moral for everyone to do it. Pass me your liver so I can eat it with a fine Chianti, Hannibal did it so its fine. Aight, at least the hypocrisy is cheerful...

Sure D&D like any work of fiction comes with its own set of hidden messages - whether anyone wishes to actually rant about them depends on whether they actually find them offensive. People have already pointed out in this thread that Mage's core beliefs are more offensive than the default rules...

Well the whole idea behind, say "literature" is that books are trying to tell you something on some level. RPG writers may or may not deliberately include their themes (I can't definitely determine that the Mage writers had occult beliefs, though they certainly read up on it) but certainl...

If your metric is that the cosmology of a fictional world implicitly exhorts its readers to believe that thing about the real world, then yes, you ought to criticize DND for implying that killing people and worshipping your deity hard enough will give you magic powers. It's absolutely ludicrous to f...

I'm not sure I've got enough virulent hate to do the topic justice, but the same idea - belief reshaping reality - is one that you see IRL, particularly in people saying stuff like "god exists if you believe he does!", or people with occult interests. If someone has that idea they lose th...