“Violent games” and the question of whether or not they, in turn, cause violence has been a hallmark of pop cultural panics for decades, though the scientific founding of these fears is still very much up for debate. But regardless of their impact on the real world, the catharsis that violence provides in some video games and online role-playing games is clear: players get to watch things (or heads) explode in real time, engage in hand-to-hand combat, feel the controller react in their hands. Even in LARP (live action role-playing), the distant “real world” cousin of D&D, you get to bonk other players over the head with your boffer.

What makes the tendency towards in-game violence—murder, torture, even rape—in D&D so intriguing, on the other hand, is that it’s almost entirely a game of imagination: your play tools are paper and pencil, some dice, maybe a miniature character model or two if you’ve really splashed out. Unlike video games, where players experience the images others create, action that occurs in D&D happens only if you (or the DM) suggest it. The question arises: is D&D violence more sinister because we are the ones manifesting it?

Clinical psychologist and games designer Dr. Owen Spear is not so sure. “Rather than playing an extension of who you or I are within the game,” he says, “I see it more as playing a fantasy character who can do whatever they want, and who doesn’t feel inhibited by social anxiety or fear of punishment or rejection. It’s an exaggerated version of how [the player] would like to be, but can’t. The game is a safe way to be this other person.”

And while D&D can get exceptionally violent, it’s rare that the DM will simply send forth row upon row of identical NPCs to be obliterated; a good, or even an average, game of D&D should not play out like the scene in South Park’s masterful, Emmy-winning episode, “Make Love Not Warcraft," in which the group endlessly slay low-level hogs in order to level up. Instead, in a good D&D game, the gameplay, and the violence, should encourage players to think deeply about where their characters’ choices might lead.

“[Considering] how your character's personality and alignment (good or evil, lawful or chaotic) would affect its behavior is a sort of thought experiment,” Ethan Gilsdorf, author of Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms, says. “How does evil work? Is it free will? Bad upbringing? Or just a ruthless selfishness? If your character is a mercenary and was brought up to not value human life, that's an interesting point of view to consider. And maybe, over time, that character's ideas and morals can change, just as we all change over time.”