Quote from: Mishihari on December 03, 2022, 02:30:31 PM

Just because you didn't see it doesn't mean it didn't happen.  Things that influence sense of morality and worldview are generally subtle and slow acting

Which is why the woke SJW cult wants to control all forms of media and entertainment.

Quote from: Marchand on November 26, 2022, 11:49:45 PM

Once I learned about the ethically-dubious business model of Magic: the Gathering*, I started to wonder if wokifying D&D is a broader brand management exercise for Wizards/Hasbro. M:tG is much more financially important to them. The editorial line for D&D won't be determined in isolation.

* see other recent thread in Other Games

Once I learned about them sheltering an inordinate amount of paedophiles as volunteers and judges, while at the same time purging the existing fanbase for the crime of Autism/poor social skills, in order to promote cosplayers; I stopped giving a flying F about them.

Quote from: Chris24601 on November 27, 2022, 08:36:59 AMPundit is a dissenting voice, ergo everything he even brushed up against is bad so it was either remove the contributors from the 5e PHB credits so they no longer had to look upon the name of someone "unmutual" or stop selling the 5e PHB entirely.

Does it even need to be that personal? Corps like GW have been removing artist and writer credits from their products for years now. It could be as simple as not giving a tinker's damn about contributors anymore. Just make the Corp logo twice as big.

Quote from: nielspeterdejong on November 27, 2022, 08:51:28 AM
Ah, figured as much. The sad part is, these people unironically don't see anything wrong with this, because they are narcicistic enough to believe that whatever horrible thing they do is justified since they are "on the right side of history". Believing they are too "educated" and intelligent to be manipulated by propaganda, and don't realize they are essentially part of a cult that functions like a religion. Screaming "hate speech" instead of blasphemy.

You see it all the time when their morality flip-flops or turns on a dime, depending on what's currently expedient. Like they'll lambast corruption, then casually cover up worse corruption from their team, because they're all about the ends justifying the means, and they're always the good guys.

Quote from: Jam The MF on November 27, 2022, 12:51:54 PMThey purged the names of contributors, so that the citizens of Seattle could stop having nightmares and wetting the bed.

Well, it's the thought that counts.

Quote from: Jaeger on November 28, 2022, 07:02:50 PM

At least it's a man. Think about any movie, book or game cover from the last 6+ years. Always a woman or women front and prominent, every time.

Quote from: Naburimannu on November 29, 2022, 03:29:13 AMAre you trying to suggest an argument against female paladins? Deed of Paksenarrion was published in '88-89, and there's an adequate supply of not-literally-D&D-paladin female warriors going back through Appendix N.

When an IP has female warriors in it, no-one cares. When every group you ever see has women as the melee fighters, or heavy weapons support, the verisimilitude is destroyed. Then we care.

Quote from: Ruprecht on December 01, 2022, 07:23:47 PM
I don't really want them to go broke but I would like them to cull the excess consultants, manager, and woke scolds and get back to creating games.  Maybe let the D&D team play with online stuff while the rest resurrect campaign worlds or forgotten game.

There's no saving them from the cancer. They need to die, then eventually the Progenoid Glands will be harvested by the Apothecary of a healthier legion.

Quote from: Omega on December 03, 2022, 05:01:13 PM

Quote from: Mishihari on December 03, 2022, 02:30:31 PM

Just because you didn't see it doesn't mean it didn't happen.  Things that influence sense of morality and worldview are generally subtle and slow acting

Which is why the woke SJW cult wants to control all forms of media and entertainment.

Yup.  They're using 1984 as their guidebook

Quote from: Grognard GM on December 03, 2022, 06:43:08 PM

Quote from: Marchand on November 26, 2022, 11:49:45 PM

Once I learned about the ethically-dubious business model of Magic: the Gathering*, I started to wonder if wokifying D&D is a broader brand management exercise for Wizards/Hasbro. M:tG is much more financially important to them. The editorial line for D&D won't be determined in isolation.

* see other recent thread in Other Games

Once I learned about them sheltering an inordinate amount of paedophiles as volunteers and judges, while at the same time purging the existing fanbase for the crime of Autism/poor social skills, in order to promote cosplayers; I stopped giving a flying F about them.

Quote from: Chris24601 on November 27, 2022, 08:36:59 AMPundit is a dissenting voice, ergo everything he even brushed up against is bad so it was either remove the contributors from the 5e PHB credits so they no longer had to look upon the name of someone "unmutual" or stop selling the 5e PHB entirely.

Does it even need to be that personal? Corps like GW have been removing artist and writer credits from their products for years now. It could be as simple as not giving a tinker's damn about contributors anymore. Just make the Corp logo twice as big.

Quote from: nielspeterdejong on November 27, 2022, 08:51:28 AM
Ah, figured as much. The sad part is, these people unironically don't see anything wrong with this, because they are narcicistic enough to believe that whatever horrible thing they do is justified since they are "on the right side of history". Believing they are too "educated" and intelligent to be manipulated by propaganda, and don't realize they are essentially part of a cult that functions like a religion. Screaming "hate speech" instead of blasphemy.

You see it all the time when their morality flip-flops or turns on a dime, depending on what's currently expedient. Like they'll lambast corruption, then casually cover up worse corruption from their team, because they're all about the ends justifying the means, and they're always the good guys.

Quote from: Jam The MF on November 27, 2022, 12:51:54 PMThey purged the names of contributors, so that the citizens of Seattle could stop having nightmares and wetting the bed.

Well, it's the thought that counts.

Quote from: Jaeger on November 28, 2022, 07:02:50 PM

At least it's a man. Think about any movie, book or game cover from the last 6+ years. Always a woman or women front and prominent, every time.

Quote from: Naburimannu on November 29, 2022, 03:29:13 AMAre you trying to suggest an argument against female paladins? Deed of Paksenarrion was published in '88-89, and there's an adequate supply of not-literally-D&D-paladin female warriors going back through Appendix N.

When an IP has female warriors in it, no-one cares. When every group you ever see has women as the melee fighters, or heavy weapons support, the verisimilitude is destroyed. Then we care.

Quote from: Ruprecht on December 01, 2022, 07:23:47 PM
I don't really want them to go broke but I would like them to cull the excess consultants, manager, and woke scolds and get back to creating games.  Maybe let the D&D team play with online stuff while the rest resurrect campaign worlds or forgotten game.

There's no saving them from the cancer. They need to die, then eventually the Progenoid Glands will be harvested by the Apothecary of a healthier legion.

what if the setting allows for female warriors to be common? for instance everyone gets strength increasing magic that works in a way that both males and females have equal strength

Quote from: MeganovaStella on December 04, 2022, 04:48:03 AM

Quote from: Grognard GM on December 03, 2022, 06:43:08 PM

Quote from: Marchand on November 26, 2022, 11:49:45 PM

Once I learned about the ethically-dubious business model of Magic: the Gathering*, I started to wonder if wokifying D&D is a broader brand management exercise for Wizards/Hasbro. M:tG is much more financially important to them. The editorial line for D&D won't be determined in isolation.

* see other recent thread in Other Games

Once I learned about them sheltering an inordinate amount of paedophiles as volunteers and judges, while at the same time purging the existing fanbase for the crime of Autism/poor social skills, in order to promote cosplayers; I stopped giving a flying F about them.

Quote from: Chris24601 on November 27, 2022, 08:36:59 AMPundit is a dissenting voice, ergo everything he even brushed up against is bad so it was either remove the contributors from the 5e PHB credits so they no longer had to look upon the name of someone "unmutual" or stop selling the 5e PHB entirely.

Does it even need to be that personal? Corps like GW have been removing artist and writer credits from their products for years now. It could be as simple as not giving a tinker's damn about contributors anymore. Just make the Corp logo twice as big.

Quote from: nielspeterdejong on November 27, 2022, 08:51:28 AM
Ah, figured as much. The sad part is, these people unironically don't see anything wrong with this, because they are narcicistic enough to believe that whatever horrible thing they do is justified since they are "on the right side of history". Believing they are too "educated" and intelligent to be manipulated by propaganda, and don't realize they are essentially part of a cult that functions like a religion. Screaming "hate speech" instead of blasphemy.

You see it all the time when their morality flip-flops or turns on a dime, depending on what's currently expedient. Like they'll lambast corruption, then casually cover up worse corruption from their team, because they're all about the ends justifying the means, and they're always the good guys.

Quote from: Jam The MF on November 27, 2022, 12:51:54 PMThey purged the names of contributors, so that the citizens of Seattle could stop having nightmares and wetting the bed.

Well, it's the thought that counts.

Quote from: Jaeger on November 28, 2022, 07:02:50 PM

At least it's a man. Think about any movie, book or game cover from the last 6+ years. Always a woman or women front and prominent, every time.

Quote from: Naburimannu on November 29, 2022, 03:29:13 AMAre you trying to suggest an argument against female paladins? Deed of Paksenarrion was published in '88-89, and there's an adequate supply of not-literally-D&D-paladin female warriors going back through Appendix N.

When an IP has female warriors in it, no-one cares. When every group you ever see has women as the melee fighters, or heavy weapons support, the verisimilitude is destroyed. Then we care.

Quote from: Ruprecht on December 01, 2022, 07:23:47 PM
I don't really want them to go broke but I would like them to cull the excess consultants, manager, and woke scolds and get back to creating games.  Maybe let the D&D team play with online stuff while the rest resurrect campaign worlds or forgotten game.

There's no saving them from the cancer. They need to die, then eventually the Progenoid Glands will be harvested by the Apothecary of a healthier legion.

what if the setting allows for female warriors to be common? for instance everyone gets strength increasing magic that works in a way that both males and females have equal strength

You still would realistically only see lots of women warriors in societies with a social safety net and/or facing utter destruction. Strength isn't the issue. In desperate times societies have thrown young teen boys into battle who are nowhere near the strength they'd have with just a few more years of development.

Rather, in pre-modern societies, your children were your only reliable means of support in old age and to birth a child takes a few minutes for a man, but 9 months for a woman (and someone has to spend at least a dozen years raising them to self-sufficiency after that). Similarly, if situations are truly desperate, one male survivor from a group can have children with many women from the group at once while women can generally only have children with one man at a time. You need more surviving women than men to rebuild a society; that's just biology.

In short, the ability of women to bear children is far more valuable to a society than their ability to be an extra body on the battlefield. Nor would risking a child in the womb by putting their mother on the battlefield. If such magic to make all men of equal strength existed they'd give it first to the elderly (of both sexes) and then to younger boys before employing women of childbearing age on the front line.

Any society doing otherwise is either desperate or insane.

Note; this is in reference to mass combat and organized militaries. Adventurers are invariably exceptions to the general order, but the existence of a four-leaf clover doesn't mean half the clover has four-leaves.

Quote from: Mishihari on December 03, 2022, 02:30:31 PM

Quote from: Anon Adderlan on December 02, 2022, 04:45:06 PM

Quote from: Mishihari on October 31, 2022, 04:59:53 PM

Quote from: jhkim on October 31, 2022, 01:09:44 PM
Children aren't taught right and wrong from D&D alignment. My son grew up sometimes playing D&D and other RPGs, but while they were positive and creative, I think his moral center came from real-world living and instruction, and not at all from game mechanics. Neither D&D alignments nor the non-alignment-using mechanics of other RPGs were important either way in his learning to be a good person. I think trying to use D&D alignments to teach real-world morality is a bad idea, because the real world is vastly different than most D&D worlds.

I think your comment here misses the point.  Using vanilla D&D to teach actual morals would indeed be a bad idea.  However playing D&D, with its objective good and evil, accustoms and gives practice to kids in thinking in terms of right and wrong being important in making decisions,  and good and evil being objective.  That's all good IMO.

I've never seen an RPG influence anyone's moral worldview one way or the other, and attempting to use them for such is a fool's errand. Games are inherently about choice, and as such horrible tools for indoctrination.

Just because you didn't see it doesn't mean it didn't happen.  Things that influence sense of morality and worldview are generally subtle and slow acting

All of this still rests on the unsupported assumption that RPGs (and specifically, going by your claims, the use of alignment with the assumption of objective good and evil) can influence people's morality. Telling people that just because they didn't see that doesn't mean that it didn't happen still begs the question. And in my experience using alignment only led to arguments about how other people are supposed to play X or Y alignment, and imposing someone's subjective opinion on how that should be done on other players, which if anything highlights how subjective these concepts are.

Quote from: Chris24601 on December 04, 2022, 08:43:22 AM

Quote from: MeganovaStella on December 04, 2022, 04:48:03 AM

Quote from: Grognard GM on December 03, 2022, 06:43:08 PM

Quote from: Marchand on November 26, 2022, 11:49:45 PM

Once I learned about the ethically-dubious business model of Magic: the Gathering*, I started to wonder if wokifying D&D is a broader brand management exercise for Wizards/Hasbro. M:tG is much more financially important to them. The editorial line for D&D won't be determined in isolation.

* see other recent thread in Other Games

Once I learned about them sheltering an inordinate amount of paedophiles as volunteers and judges, while at the same time purging the existing fanbase for the crime of Autism/poor social skills, in order to promote cosplayers; I stopped giving a flying F about them.

Quote from: Chris24601 on November 27, 2022, 08:36:59 AMPundit is a dissenting voice, ergo everything he even brushed up against is bad so it was either remove the contributors from the 5e PHB credits so they no longer had to look upon the name of someone "unmutual" or stop selling the 5e PHB entirely.

Does it even need to be that personal? Corps like GW have been removing artist and writer credits from their products for years now. It could be as simple as not giving a tinker's damn about contributors anymore. Just make the Corp logo twice as big.

Quote from: nielspeterdejong on November 27, 2022, 08:51:28 AM
Ah, figured as much. The sad part is, these people unironically don't see anything wrong with this, because they are narcicistic enough to believe that whatever horrible thing they do is justified since they are "on the right side of history". Believing they are too "educated" and intelligent to be manipulated by propaganda, and don't realize they are essentially part of a cult that functions like a religion. Screaming "hate speech" instead of blasphemy.

You see it all the time when their morality flip-flops or turns on a dime, depending on what's currently expedient. Like they'll lambast corruption, then casually cover up worse corruption from their team, because they're all about the ends justifying the means, and they're always the good guys.

Quote from: Jam The MF on November 27, 2022, 12:51:54 PMThey purged the names of contributors, so that the citizens of Seattle could stop having nightmares and wetting the bed.

Well, it's the thought that counts.

Quote from: Jaeger on November 28, 2022, 07:02:50 PM

At least it's a man. Think about any movie, book or game cover from the last 6+ years. Always a woman or women front and prominent, every time.

Quote from: Naburimannu on November 29, 2022, 03:29:13 AMAre you trying to suggest an argument against female paladins? Deed of Paksenarrion was published in '88-89, and there's an adequate supply of not-literally-D&D-paladin female warriors going back through Appendix N.

When an IP has female warriors in it, no-one cares. When every group you ever see has women as the melee fighters, or heavy weapons support, the verisimilitude is destroyed. Then we care.

Quote from: Ruprecht on December 01, 2022, 07:23:47 PM
I don't really want them to go broke but I would like them to cull the excess consultants, manager, and woke scolds and get back to creating games.  Maybe let the D&D team play with online stuff while the rest resurrect campaign worlds or forgotten game.

There's no saving them from the cancer. They need to die, then eventually the Progenoid Glands will be harvested by the Apothecary of a healthier legion.

what if the setting allows for female warriors to be common? for instance everyone gets strength increasing magic that works in a way that both males and females have equal strength

You still would realistically only see lots of women warriors in societies with a social safety net and/or facing utter destruction. Strength isn't the issue. In desperate times societies have thrown young teen boys into battle who are nowhere near the strength they'd have with just a few more years of development.

Rather, in pre-modern societies, your children were your only reliable means of support in old age and to birth a child takes a few minutes for a man, but 9 months for a woman (and someone has to spend at least a dozen years raising them to self-sufficiency after that). Similarly, if situations are truly desperate, one male survivor from a group can have children with many women from the group at once while women can generally only have children with one man at a time. You need more surviving women than men to rebuild a society; that's just biology.

In short, the ability of women to bear children is far more valuable to a society than their ability to be an extra body on the battlefield. Nor would risking a child in the womb by putting their mother on the battlefield. If such magic to make all men of equal strength existed they'd give it first to the elderly (of both sexes) and then to younger boys before employing women of childbearing age on the front line.

Any society doing otherwise is either desperate or insane.

Note; this is in reference to mass combat and organized militaries. Adventurers are invariably exceptions to the general order, but the existence of a four-leaf clover doesn't mean half the clover has four-leaves.

ERMAHGERD! Are you suggesting that the role of wimmyn is to serve as broodmares for society. So sexist and supportive of the enactment of systems of oppreshun. This is why we need feminism!

Quote from: VisionStorm on December 04, 2022, 09:52:13 AM
ERMAHGERD! Are you suggesting that the role of wimmyn is to serve as broodmares for society. So sexist and supportive of the enactment of systems of oppreshun. This is why we need feminism!

I know it's being said sarcastically towards the woke, but to further clarify regardless it's actually more a case of the historical disposability of men in society (particularly second sons and similar who have little to inherit). The normal order of society for both men and women is centered around family; i.e. the raising of children. Men's role in pre-modern society is to provide for and protect his mate and children.

War is a disruption of and danger to the normal order. When the order is threatened you do your best to protect critical infrastructure while risking only what you can most afford to lose. In general, that means men of fighting age whereas women are held to be more valuable to society and so are protected.

Basically, just about any civilization in history will prioritize its children, then it's women and only lastly it's men in terms of value and importance to protect (and those societies which invert those priorities are typically presented as corrupt to outright wicked).

The existence of magic, even combat magic, in a setting doesn't change this typically unless magic is something exclusive to women (or to children). Even then it would depend greatly upon the nature and potency of said magic... something that only lets a woman or child be as strong as a man wouldn't generally alter the risk/reward calculations... magic that lets a single woman or child be as potent as a hundred normal men is another matter entirely.

Quote from: MeganovaStella on December 04, 2022, 04:48:03 AMwhat if the setting allows for female warriors to be common? for instance everyone gets strength increasing magic that works in a way that both males and females have equal strength

Then males would only have the advantages of larger hearts, greater height and weight, greater reach, vastly superior stamina and pain tolerance, enhanced aggression, and (in the case of the young men that fight most wars) a contempt for the idea that they will die.

The magic women would need, in essence, would be Testosterone, from the womb onwards, at which point they'd be men.

There's also the fact that these women in fiction are being given these roles, and being pushed to the fore, usually stepping on weak male characters; not for reasons of lore, but real world ideology.

No-one has an issue with classic Wonder Woman, or Super Girl.

Quote from: Chris24601 on December 04, 2022, 08:43:22 AM

In short, the ability of women to bear children is far more valuable to a society than their ability to be an extra body on the battlefield. Nor would risking a child in the womb by putting their mother on the battlefield. If such magic to make all men of equal strength existed they'd give it first to the elderly (of both sexes) and then to younger boys before employing women of childbearing age on the front line.

Exactly this. Western countries filling the military with women is a sign of how disconnected we are from REAL war, the kind where you take massive casualties AND CAN LOSE. And by lose I mean be conquered/enslaved/wiped out, not give up and go home because it has become too costly.

Feminists always ignore the fact that, historically and now, men are always at the bottom of society and disposable. They focus on the tiny amount of men at the top, and see all of history through the lens of male privilege and female oppression.

Quote from: VisionStorm on December 04, 2022, 09:52:13 AM

Quote from: Mishihari on December 03, 2022, 02:30:31 PM

Quote from: Anon Adderlan on December 02, 2022, 04:45:06 PM

Quote from: Mishihari on October 31, 2022, 04:59:53 PM

Quote from: jhkim on October 31, 2022, 01:09:44 PM
Children aren't taught right and wrong from D&D alignment. My son grew up sometimes playing D&D and other RPGs, but while they were positive and creative, I think his moral center came from real-world living and instruction, and not at all from game mechanics. Neither D&D alignments nor the non-alignment-using mechanics of other RPGs were important either way in his learning to be a good person. I think trying to use D&D alignments to teach real-world morality is a bad idea, because the real world is vastly different than most D&D worlds.

I think your comment here misses the point.  Using vanilla D&D to teach actual morals would indeed be a bad idea.  However playing D&D, with its objective good and evil, accustoms and gives practice to kids in thinking in terms of right and wrong being important in making decisions,  and good and evil being objective.  That's all good IMO.

I've never seen an RPG influence anyone's moral worldview one way or the other, and attempting to use them for such is a fool's errand. Games are inherently about choice, and as such horrible tools for indoctrination.

Just because you didn't see it doesn't mean it didn't happen.  Things that influence sense of morality and worldview are generally subtle and slow acting

All of this still rests on the unsupported assumption that RPGs (and specifically, going by your claims, the use of alignment with the assumption of objective good and evil) can influence people's morality. Telling people that just because they didn't see that doesn't mean that it didn't happen still begs the question. And in my experience using alignment only led to arguments about how other people are supposed to play X or Y alignment, and imposing someone's subjective opinion on how that should be done on other players, which if anything highlights how subjective these concepts are.

Yeah. I'm even leaving some doubt about RPGs overall, but I can't see how alignment mechanics teach morality. I think RPGs do have positive impact of helping kids actively imagine rather than passively consume, and that may help with moral development. But that applies just as much to a kid playing Traveller, Ars Magica, or Champions as one playing D&D.

Quote from: Omega on November 30, 2022, 10:20:19 PM

Quote from: Ruprecht on November 30, 2022, 06:02:29 PM

Quote from: nielspeterdejong on November 27, 2022, 04:20:50 AM
Did they even give a reason why that entire section was wiped?

I think they cut the section when the Zack accusations arose. i don't remember if they used that as a rational specifically or if that was my assumption.

The Consultant section?
Yes they seem to have used that as an excuse to remove mention of all of them. Have bot seen the entry in later print runs and they even removed them from the basic rules along the way?

They removed the entire consultant section because they wanted to remove Zak, but if they had kept the rest of us and removed only him, he could sue. They did not make a specific statement about the reason for removing the consultant section, but it was obviously because of the Zak scandal. Of course, a lot of leftists in and out of WoTC were happy to get rid of my name too, as a bonus. 

Quote from: RPGPundit on December 04, 2022, 03:05:40 PMthe Zak scandal.

Where may I learn of this lore?

Quote from: Grognard GM on December 04, 2022, 03:10:06 PM

Quote from: RPGPundit on December 04, 2022, 03:05:40 PMthe Zak scandal.

Where may I learn of this lore?

LOL where to start?

Quote from: Grognard GM on December 04, 2022, 03:10:06 PM

Quote from: RPGPundit on December 04, 2022, 03:05:40 PMthe Zak scandal.

Where may I learn of this lore?

There are some references on his Wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zak_Smith#Sexual_assault_allegations

Quote from: MeganovaStella on December 04, 2022, 04:48:03 AM

Quote from: Grognard GM on December 03, 2022, 06:43:08 PM
what if the setting allows for female warriors to be common? for instance everyone gets strength increasing magic that works in a way that both males and females have equal strength

Aside from AD&D that is pretty much every edition of D&D. I think AD&D was the only edition that set a limit on STR on females. But of course to the woke that's patriarchy racist opressionistic whateverthefuckwehallucinatedtoday-ism.

Quote from: VisionStorm on December 04, 2022, 09:52:13 AM

Quote from: Mishihari on December 03, 2022, 02:30:31 PM

Quote from: Anon Adderlan on December 02, 2022, 04:45:06 PM

Quote from: Mishihari on October 31, 2022, 04:59:53 PM

Quote from: jhkim on October 31, 2022, 01:09:44 PM
Children aren't taught right and wrong from D&D alignment. My son grew up sometimes playing D&D and other RPGs, but while they were positive and creative, I think his moral center came from real-world living and instruction, and not at all from game mechanics. Neither D&D alignments nor the non-alignment-using mechanics of other RPGs were important either way in his learning to be a good person. I think trying to use D&D alignments to teach real-world morality is a bad idea, because the real world is vastly different than most D&D worlds.

I think your comment here misses the point.  Using vanilla D&D to teach actual morals would indeed be a bad idea.  However playing D&D, with its objective good and evil, accustoms and gives practice to kids in thinking in terms of right and wrong being important in making decisions,  and good and evil being objective.  That's all good IMO.

I've never seen an RPG influence anyone's moral worldview one way or the other, and attempting to use them for such is a fool's errand. Games are inherently about choice, and as such horrible tools for indoctrination.

Just because you didn't see it doesn't mean it didn't happen.  Things that influence sense of morality and worldview are generally subtle and slow acting

All of this still rests on the unsupported assumption that RPGs (and specifically, going by your claims, the use of alignment with the assumption of objective good and evil) can influence people's morality. Telling people that just because they didn't see that doesn't mean that it didn't happen still begs the question. And in my experience using alignment only led to arguments about how other people are supposed to play X or Y alignment, and imposing someone's subjective opinion on how that should be done on other players, which if anything highlights how subjective these concepts are.

Roleplaying is proven as a tremendously powerful technique when used in therapy to change feelings and behavior and overcome various problems.  Positing that it has no mental effect just because it's in a game rather than a counseling session is just silly.