8 ms·

I once attended a Church presentation on D&D with my D&D group - all atheists - to figure out what was going on. This was back in, what, 1995? Anyway the gist

I once attended a Church presentation on D&D with my D&D group - all atheists - to figure out what was going on. This was back in, what, 1995? Anyway the gist of it was that they were opposed to D&D (and any entertainment) that presented the occult and paganism (from their perspective) as anything other than unadulterated evil. D&D was only a small part of it. Their main objection was to television shows; the example they cited was in all seriousness an episode of Duck Tales that featured "pyramid energy" in a positive light. Strangely, this made some sense to me - if you start from their premises that the Bible is literal truth and is an instruction manual for a moral life. We wrote it off as another example of religion - or indeed any irrational philosophy - corrupting the minds of otherwise good and intelligent adults ;)

simonh 11y ago
Measured concern about something unfamiliar, or with elements contrary to one's beliefs is certainly reasonable, as long as it's proportionate. My parents are devout Christians and were a little concerned about D&D and were aware of the controversy, but we had a few short conversations on the subject and that was that. Fair enough. I did have a really good laugh at some of the Jack Chick comics. That was the extreme end of the ant-D&D looney fringe, but it was so infantile in it's extreme depictions and outrageous in it's claims that I saw it as a valuable tool. I'm sure he did do a lot of damage and caused some harm, but for me being able to point to something so clearly absurd seemed helpful. I was confident that anyone in my circle of family or acquaintances would be able to see the absurd side of the claims by Chick and his kind. That meant anyone agitating against D&D or roleplaying games in general could be put on the defensive because they would need to show that their objections weren't absurd in the same way.
- duncan_bayne 11y ago
  > as long as it's proportionate Serious question: what's proportionate, if you believe that your children are engaged in a 'game' that will literally cost them their souls?
  - macintux 11y ago
    That reminds me of one of the most unintentionally hilarious things I've ever heard on a news program. One year when Halloween rolled around on a Sunday, a local woman was interviewed who said she'd send her daughter out on Saturday instead because Sunday was the Lord's day and Halloween was a day for the devil. A: Why are you allowing your daughter to participate at all, if that's how you feel? B: Saturday is the Sabbath!
  - VLM 11y ago
    A significant part of the genre of satan-fearing or whatever you call it, is the devil is quite lazy, but its still worth banning. For the standard HN car analogy, driving while drunk is perhaps only 10 times more dangerous than driving sober. So ten times practically nothing is still close to zero. So when the ball game lets out and 40K fans drive home and at least half are legally drunk, there are no bodies stacked like cordwood, because its just not that dangerous. However, virtually everyone agrees the cost/benefit ratio, especially in the long term, is such that drunk driving should be illegal. A standard HN golf analogy would be holding up your golf club during a lightning storm, where the odds of getting lit up are extremely low because a spark that jumped 10 kft isn't going to care about a primate waving a stick, yet only an idiot would intentionally do it.
    - tamana 11y ago
      You are saying that DUI is not a meaningful danger?
      - VLM 11y ago
        Yeah, obviously. The rate isn't that much higher than sober drivers, and the odds of being caught are extremely low. Its problem is the cost/benefit ratio is extremely low. There's nothing to gain by permitting it (maybe more booze sales, not really worth it) and plenty to gain by making it illegal (because every death due to it is pointless). Paradoxically most of our legal system is based on risk/reward ratios, not level of risk. For example speeding is illegal although the odds of an accident are extremely low. On the other hand climbing Mt Everest isn't illegal at all, even though the death rate is about 50% or whatever it is now. Smoking is not illegal although the odds of smoking killing a smoker are pretty good, yet psychedelics are illegal despite the actual death rates and counts being pretty close to zero.
- themodelplumber 11y ago
  Very similar to what my parents (actually just my mom) did initially. Mom's complaints later faded as she encouraged me to befriend some neighbor kids who were being ostracized because of general nerdiness & neediness. In fact at that point she was asking me if I wanted to go play games at their house, not to convert them but rather to ease their social pain a bit. To this day I am glad she raised me. And I play RPGs with my kids and find alternate non-satan-involving scenarios just by default :D
- cowpewter 11y ago
  My experience was similar. This was the early 90s and I was 11 or 12. I told my mom that I wanted to play D&D with my friends, and she looked a little nervous for a moment (for which I blame daytime tv, all the talkshows went on about D&D and satanism back then), then said, Alright, as long as you can still tell the difference between fantasy and reality, you can play. Then not too long after that we wound up playing at my house a few times and she saw it was really just us being silly and playing a very fancy form of pretend and she came all the way around to approving, since it kept me social and imaginative, and it was pretty hard to get in actual trouble when me and my friend group spent all our time sitting around the dining room table at one or another's house.
mcv 11y ago
D&D does actually deal with remarkably clear lines between Good and Evil. Demons, devils and undead are all clearly in the evil category, as are most of the monsters you need to kill. Of course you can play it with a lot more moral ambiguity than that, but out of the box, D&D is very suitable for a black & white world view.
- techdmn 11y ago
  I once worked for some people with a similar belief system to that above. A big part of it was that there were only two powers in the world - Christ & God vs. Satan. ANY power that was not explicitly that of Christ was implicitly the devil, regardless of how good it sounded. Harry Potter for example, was clearly an agent of Satan.
- duncan_bayne 11y ago
  The moral ambiguity was the best part! Put the party into a situation where they could ally with a profoundly evil power to achieve a great good. Or maybe give them a powerful magical item that they discover is slowly corrupting them as they start wielding it for the right reasons... I wish more of our current crop of politicians had played RPGs that way...
VLM 11y ago
Its something to unite against, and its the business model. At least in part. I had a roommate who's parents were NOT into D&D resulting in some conversations on this topic. We'll all unite against it, regardless if it exists or is even a problem. Its been the bane of minorities for centuries, although it works pretty well. So you get 100 teens in church holding up their hand or praying or whatever they did to promise, well, it doesn't matter, the point is they got them unified. From memory his mom worked the unity angle, what matters is every teen in the congregation made the same pledge. To some folks unity and conformity is more important than the rights of minorities. "well, maybe its not fair and maybe they're good people at heart, but what really matters is they're them and we're us". Again from memory, his Dad was freaked out by the business model. So wait... you're saying that its possible for a very small number of people to sit around and write a completely fictional work of vast size that is creative and interesting mythology and publish numerous books about it and it becomes crazy popular and culturally influential? You're not, uh, implying anything about the development process of a certain book we consider holy from 2000+ years ago, are you? So this annoys the parents twofold, first of all its highly unfavorable direct analogy with their favorite business model aka religion, and secondly no one likes weasel words and if you're trying to say holy books are works of fiction then just spit it out don't talk around it. To those parents it sounds a lot like "I'm not coveting my neighbor's wife, I just want a one night stand with her, so technically I'm off the hook WRT sin and commandments, right, I mean the words don't literally match up so its OK, right?"

simonh 11y ago

Measured concern about something unfamiliar, or with elements contrary to one's beliefs is certainly reasonable, as long as it's proportionate. My parents are devout Christians and were a little concerned about D&D and were aware of the controversy, but we had a few short conversations on the subject and that was that. Fair enough. I did have a really good laugh at some of the Jack Chick comics. That was the extreme end of the ant-D&D looney fringe, but it was so infantile in it's extreme depictions and outrageous in it's claims that I saw it as a valuable tool. I'm sure he did do a lot of damage and caused some harm, but for me being able to point to something so clearly absurd seemed helpful. I was confident that anyone in my circle of family or acquaintances would be able to see the absurd side of the claims by Chick and his kind. That meant anyone agitating against D&D or roleplaying games in general could be put on the defensive because they would need to show that their objections weren't absurd in the same way.

duncan_bayne 11y ago
> as long as it's proportionate Serious question: what's proportionate, if you believe that your children are engaged in a 'game' that will literally cost them their souls?
- macintux 11y ago
  That reminds me of one of the most unintentionally hilarious things I've ever heard on a news program. One year when Halloween rolled around on a Sunday, a local woman was interviewed who said she'd send her daughter out on Saturday instead because Sunday was the Lord's day and Halloween was a day for the devil. A: Why are you allowing your daughter to participate at all, if that's how you feel? B: Saturday is the Sabbath!
- VLM 11y ago
  A significant part of the genre of satan-fearing or whatever you call it, is the devil is quite lazy, but its still worth banning. For the standard HN car analogy, driving while drunk is perhaps only 10 times more dangerous than driving sober. So ten times practically nothing is still close to zero. So when the ball game lets out and 40K fans drive home and at least half are legally drunk, there are no bodies stacked like cordwood, because its just not that dangerous. However, virtually everyone agrees the cost/benefit ratio, especially in the long term, is such that drunk driving should be illegal. A standard HN golf analogy would be holding up your golf club during a lightning storm, where the odds of getting lit up are extremely low because a spark that jumped 10 kft isn't going to care about a primate waving a stick, yet only an idiot would intentionally do it.
  - tamana 11y ago
    You are saying that DUI is not a meaningful danger?
    - VLM 11y ago
      Yeah, obviously. The rate isn't that much higher than sober drivers, and the odds of being caught are extremely low. Its problem is the cost/benefit ratio is extremely low. There's nothing to gain by permitting it (maybe more booze sales, not really worth it) and plenty to gain by making it illegal (because every death due to it is pointless). Paradoxically most of our legal system is based on risk/reward ratios, not level of risk. For example speeding is illegal although the odds of an accident are extremely low. On the other hand climbing Mt Everest isn't illegal at all, even though the death rate is about 50% or whatever it is now. Smoking is not illegal although the odds of smoking killing a smoker are pretty good, yet psychedelics are illegal despite the actual death rates and counts being pretty close to zero.
themodelplumber 11y ago
Very similar to what my parents (actually just my mom) did initially. Mom's complaints later faded as she encouraged me to befriend some neighbor kids who were being ostracized because of general nerdiness & neediness. In fact at that point she was asking me if I wanted to go play games at their house, not to convert them but rather to ease their social pain a bit. To this day I am glad she raised me. And I play RPGs with my kids and find alternate non-satan-involving scenarios just by default :D
cowpewter 11y ago
My experience was similar. This was the early 90s and I was 11 or 12. I told my mom that I wanted to play D&D with my friends, and she looked a little nervous for a moment (for which I blame daytime tv, all the talkshows went on about D&D and satanism back then), then said, Alright, as long as you can still tell the difference between fantasy and reality, you can play. Then not too long after that we wound up playing at my house a few times and she saw it was really just us being silly and playing a very fancy form of pretend and she came all the way around to approving, since it kept me social and imaginative, and it was pretty hard to get in actual trouble when me and my friend group spent all our time sitting around the dining room table at one or another's house.

mcv 11y ago

D&D does actually deal with remarkably clear lines between Good and Evil. Demons, devils and undead are all clearly in the evil category, as are most of the monsters you need to kill. Of course you can play it with a lot more moral ambiguity than that, but out of the box, D&D is very suitable for a black & white world view.

techdmn 11y ago
I once worked for some people with a similar belief system to that above. A big part of it was that there were only two powers in the world - Christ & God vs. Satan. ANY power that was not explicitly that of Christ was implicitly the devil, regardless of how good it sounded. Harry Potter for example, was clearly an agent of Satan.
duncan_bayne 11y ago
The moral ambiguity was the best part! Put the party into a situation where they could ally with a profoundly evil power to achieve a great good. Or maybe give them a powerful magical item that they discover is slowly corrupting them as they start wielding it for the right reasons... I wish more of our current crop of politicians had played RPGs that way...

VLM 11y ago

Its something to unite against, and its the business model. At least in part. I had a roommate who's parents were NOT into D&D resulting in some conversations on this topic. We'll all unite against it, regardless if it exists or is even a problem. Its been the bane of minorities for centuries, although it works pretty well. So you get 100 teens in church holding up their hand or praying or whatever they did to promise, well, it doesn't matter, the point is they got them unified. From memory his mom worked the unity angle, what matters is every teen in the congregation made the same pledge. To some folks unity and conformity is more important than the rights of minorities. "well, maybe its not fair and maybe they're good people at heart, but what really matters is they're them and we're us". Again from memory, his Dad was freaked out by the business model. So wait... you're saying that its possible for a very small number of people to sit around and write a completely fictional work of vast size that is creative and interesting mythology and publish numerous books about it and it becomes crazy popular and culturally influential? You're not, uh, implying anything about the development process of a certain book we consider holy from 2000+ years ago, are you? So this annoys the parents twofold, first of all its highly unfavorable direct analogy with their favorite business model aka religion, and secondly no one likes weasel words and if you're trying to say holy books are works of fiction then just spit it out don't talk around it. To those parents it sounds a lot like "I'm not coveting my neighbor's wife, I just want a one night stand with her, so technically I'm off the hook WRT sin and commandments, right, I mean the words don't literally match up so its OK, right?"