Tore Nielsen To clarify, I should split up my  points a bit.

1) When you provide detailed rules for community building and influence, you’re going to make pretty clear political commitments – they might be only implicit in your rules, but they won’t be well hidden. That’s because those rules will deal with the core subject matter of most real-world politics – the matter of how our society works.

2) In my specific case, I’d be working from my own understanding, which is that individuals are primarily significant via their influence on other people, that direct violence and intimidation are very limited tools, always costly to employ (in terms of collateral damage), and that everyone who functions in society is unavoidably dependent on many other people.

That’s no going to sit with a lot of angry (and anxious) young men, who are disgusted (and a bit terrified) by dependency on others, are very attached to escapist violence and violence-as-a-robust-solution, and are very focussed on individual achievement and status. And, traditionally, it’s been those young men who have been the main audience for RPGs.

Obviously people have pointed out the politics implicit in most D&D, which do sit well with the aforementioned young men, but I don’t think they’re so obvious because the rules deal primarily with action-adventure.