11 ms·

The great 1980s Dungeons and Dragons panic

123 points by Libertatea 13y ago

aidenn0 13y ago
Ah, we lost our cleric and fighter (they were brothers) to that, since their mom heard that it was "satanic." Most ironic thing is that they were the only 2 in the group that attended the same church as me.
maldeh 13y ago
Moral objections don't just come from biblical incompatibility. Back in high-school (not-US), I once had an uncomfortable questioning from our principal because a kid's parent complained after seeing us playing with unfamiliar dice. They equated the probability-driven game mechanics to gambling, or at least believed that it led to a slippery slope. Then again I later majored in statistics, so maybe they had a point ^_^
- aidenn0 13y ago
  I've run into christian groups that ban standard playing card decks (so e.g. uno or dutch blitz is okay) due to the association with gambling.
  - pessimizer 13y ago
    That's the reason for the popularity of Rook: http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1260/rook http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1260/rook Which is basically a standard deck of cards but with four colors for four suits, and numbered from 1-14. Just getting rid of the standard symbols is enough for people to pretend that they can't gamble with them. Popular with Mormons.
    - tekalon 13y ago
      I don't know about 'popular with Mormons'. That or my friends and I are exceptions. I remember fondly having D&D/MTG/card games/board games nights. I personally love card games and usually have a deck with me. Especial during youth/single group game nights with the whole congregation. I can see this for those that are hyper conservative, but this can work for any religion.
- 6d0debc071 13y ago
  >They equated the probability-driven game mechanics to gambling, or at least believed that it led to a slippery slope. The next step in that argument being "Well, no more maths for me then!" She half jests. I've often wondered whether extremely basic statistical ability could be enhanced by having kids play those sorts of games. Dice and cards and so on.
- tempestn 13y ago
  I remember similarly getting in trouble for playing cards in middle school, because the teacher couldn't conceive of a non-gambling card game. Of course, I'm playing hold'em on my other monitor right now, so maybe he had a point too...
  - talmand 13y ago
    Nope, I once got in trouble for playing a game of Spades in school during a non-class period. Today I don't gamble with card playing so I cancel you out and invalidate his point. Wait, unless his point was that you like card games, gambling or otherwise. If so, you're on your own. Good luck!
- walshemj 13y ago
  In the past pre ww2 board games sometimes used to come with spinners or other means of random number generators due to dice's asociation with gambling.
  - talmand 13y ago
    Is that why all the board games from my childhood had those stupid spinners that eventually stopped working? That's just crap. No, that's just stupid, could you not gamble with a cardboard spinner?
- tekalon 13y ago
  I was teaching a friend how to create a character sheet in highschool (~10 years ago). Principal saw and asked if we were gambling. The principal (who also introduced me to the Hobbit) let us explain what it was, but still politely asked us to put the dice away. Apparently there was a gambling problem of some sort at the time at the school (I don't know details, just remember hearing rumors)
mercurial 13y ago
This echoes Jack Thompson's [1] crusade against video games, really. $NEW_THING will corrupt our children is a powerful meme. 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Thompson_(activist) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Thompson_(activist)
- partomniscient 13y ago
  And before him there was Jack Chick [1]. 1: http://www.chick.com/READING/TRACTS/0046/0046_01.ASP http://www.chick.com/READING/TRACTS/0046/0046_01.ASP
  - mercurial 13y ago
    Until the last panels I wanted to believe this was a parody. The intense occult training through D&D prepared Debbie to accept the invitation to enter a witches' coven.
  - bane 13y ago
    I honestly thought this was a parody for 90% of the strip, then like most religious material, instead of a punchline, there's a testimonial. I wonder if there's some kind of law about this, like how porn movies and action movies have similar ratios of story to fight/sex scenes?
  - JoshTriplett 13y ago
    The folks behind the Gamers films are currently producing a film version of that as satire: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jk2Pr9jXCr8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jk2Pr9jXCr8
throwaway13qf85 13y ago
I never played Dungeons and Dragons as a kid (born in the early 80s, so a bit too young) but I played a lot of Games Workshop games (Warhammer etc) and I played D&D-based video games (Baldur's Gate etc) heavily. I remember poring over rulebooks and probability tables for hours, and writing computer simulations (in Visual Basic or Excel) to try and find some edge in the game. I think my parents were pretty worried about me. I now write stock market simulations and come up with trading strategies for a living, using essentially the same methods that I used in the mid 1990s to win at roleplaying games, so I guess it all worked out okay?
- willvarfar 13y ago
  > I now write stock market simulations and come up with trading strategies for a living, , so I guess it all worked out okay? OMG, parents should have intervened!
  - throwaway234254 13y ago
    Now that made me laugh. Perhaps the intense occult D&D training can cause people to walk the dark path.
- Fomite 13y ago
  This is basically my story too. It's fun watching my mother wrestle with the notion that the amount of gaming I did as a kid directly led to a doctorate, a publication in Lancet Infectious Diseases and an interview on NPR.
- gregd 13y ago
  > I now write stock market simulations and come up with trading strategies for a living... So playing all those chaotic evil characters really had an affect on you eh? :)
  - throwaway13qf85 13y ago
    I like to think of it as Lawful Evil ;)
badsock 13y ago
I remember this - we had to play D&D in secret because of several of our friend's parents. It's interesting to have seen, first hand, part of our long unbroken chain of freaking out, from rock and roll to instagram; this giant perennial wave of overreaction that's done nothing but persecute innocents and make the world a less beautiful, exploratory, and lively place. Is there an example of a popular fashion that's been of actual concern? The only example I can think of off-hand is the dancing plague of 1518, and even that was probably worth the casualities. It's amazing to me that a mode of thinking that has been so consistently incorrect for so long seems to be dominant, whereas the "let kids do whatever it is they're into this week" is considered a fringe hippie thing.
- waterlesscloud 13y ago
  The early rock and roll era was a pretty interesting time. For the first time, kids had easy access to cars, and thus they could be away from their parents more often. The cultural construct we have today of teenagers being so independent from their parents didn't really exist in the generations prior. Not only were these teens in their cars, away from parents, they were listening to the radio in the those cars. Outside of adult supervision. And so white kids could hear black music for the first time. So they were crossing racial lines, and eventually the lines became more and more blurred, which is how rock music grew. And, of course, those kids were having sex in the back seats of those cars. Away from parent, and while listening to rock music. Which, in the pre-pill era, led to a lot of unplanned pregnancies. So while early rock didn't really cause negative effects, it's not hard to see how worried parents could make the associations. The kids were indeed literally out of control.
  - kbutler 13y ago
    > For the first time, kids had easy access to cars, and thus they could be away from their parents more often. The cultural construct we have today of teenagers being so independent from their parents didn't really exist in the generations prior. You have a very distorted and limited view of history (but then, mine is surely as distorted, just differently!) My parents were just sharing stories of how, at age 10, a friend would take the sheep, a horse, and a dog, and literally be alone for the full day, before returning at night. I'd characterize the difference more as "large numbers of youth with no responsibilities", rather than "away from their parents more often". Industrialized societies with child labor laws tend to keep children more separate from adult responsibilities, and prevent them from having meaningful responsibilities.
bane 13y ago
This was really a crazy time, fresh off of a landslide Reagan victory and no doubt the moral hysteria boosted by it, I remember this situation really well. My parents (mostly my mother) are very religious and I remember being driven around town with the local Christian radio station on and it being just wall-to-wall fear mongering about Satanism, backmasking in rock songs and D&D. Just endless talk, hour after hour, about how all this will lead your child to drugs, pornography, satanism and suicide -- numerous "concrete" examples were included as the local Christian "research team" swept the country (pre-internet! so most of it was probably just invented whole-cloth) for police reports and court records for Satanic rituals, Rock music and D&D. All reported with deep urgency and absolute truthful authority between gentle praise songs I heard in church every Sunday. Of course they'd never play a couple seconds of Led Zeppelin back and forth so you could hear the hidden messages revealed, lest you want to kill yourself during the next commercial break or continuous praise song power hour. Terse descriptions of D&D were provided. "A game where players assume the roles of various characters, demons are involved, sometimes, like gambling, dice are used!" without any cultural context about how it's exactly like any other game where people assume different identities, like Cowboys & Indians, or super space spy or whatever. It was a perfect storm of cultural events simultaneously pumped up by various social moralists who, like most groups like this, take tiny kernels of truth and wrap them in heaping piles of agendas, fabrications and outright lies and blanket every form of sensory input to drive the masses into full foaming at the mouth hysteria. The publicity eventually leaked out into regular media and I remember seeing some of these "issues" (which had all been masterfully woven together into a single moral crisis by the religious media my mother listened to) break into the regular nightly news my father forced me to sit and watch every evening (to build culture and character). My mother was absolutely obsessed with all this and was driven to hysteria. One time pulling the car over to the side of a busy highway and making me promise, promise, I'd never roll D&D dice and risk letting Satan into my heart - tears streaming down her face while she shook like a leaf -- because I might commit suicide when the game is over. She'd listen to hour after hour of pronouncements of how the country was going to sin...I'd watch her cleaning the kitchen while this played on the radio, her scrubbing getting more and more vigorous as her emotions became more and more upset. Even at the tender age of...6 or 7, I knew the entire thing was a ridiculous pile of malarkey. I honestly had no clue what D&D was, had only heard rock music in passing (my music selection was pretty heavily regulated) and certainly wasn't involved in Satanism of any kind. I was more concerned with the severe mental instability this seemed to be drawing out in my mother...who seemed to be the only person I knew who couldn't separate fantasy from reality in this situation. When the D&D cartoon started airing, curious, I'd sneak a few minutes of it in, titillated that something so dangerous was in cartoon form and on television before bed time. The show was pretty tame so I usually got bored and turned it off and did something else with my time. (He-Man was also banned in my house). I vaguely remember the acronym BADD from those times and the name Patricia Pulling, and the claim that players would get so wrapped up in the fantasy of their characters, with reality and imagination so tangled up, that when your character died, there was some non-trivial chance you would go out and kill yourself, with probably a recently listened to Led Zeppelin tape in the boom box and with some kind of Satanic connection, or sacrificed chickens or something nearby. And suddenly, one day, the Christian "news" sources my mother listened to moved on to something else and it was all over. Rock music was still around, Led Zeppelin was still for sale, D&D was still a game, but apparently the moral crusaders had stopped something and had moved on to something else. I think this was when all the major lawsuits had concluded with BADD losing all of them. It was still on my banned list, but the hysteria was over. Like most kids I just ignored it and played a little D&D over at my friends' houses till I got bored of it and listened to rock music just the same. Years later, remembering the hysteria, a friend and I figured out how to reverse a cassette tape and we experimented listening for hidden messages in Rock Music cassettes to little success. The early 1980s were a really weird moment in American history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bothered_About_Dungeons_and_Dragons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bothered_About_Dungeons_and_Dr... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backmasking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backmasking https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8Rop4Zt-S0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8Rop4Zt-S0
tellarin 13y ago
The funny thing is that in the 90s, after the scare was mostly over, when adults would see me and my friends with rule books and pieces of paper full of numbers they'd always congratulate us for being 'studying hard'. ;)
ekianjo 13y ago
In France too there was lots of bad mouthing about role playing games in the mid to late 80s, when it was really popular (while it was nowhere as popular as in the US), and fearmongering in newspapers and media. A couple of years later, (early 90s, basically), video games were targeted, and they made it sound like people who were playing video games were retarded. There was a documentary about Eric Chahi as he was finishing his work on Another World on Amiga (one of the milestones in Gaming!) in 1991-1992, and the reporters described him almost as being autistic. The media suddenly changed their stance on video games after Sony's success with the PS1 turned most young people into gamers and gained mass approval.
- bane 13y ago
  I'm actually curious how this all happened in the French media. In the U.S. it spread like wildfire through Evangelical media.
  - DanBC 13y ago
    UK newspapers are sensationalist, so we had a bit of it over here, although it did tend to concentrate on music or satanic abuse. On a slight tangent I remember a Scottish religious group in the 1980s who did not let children use calculators because "Satan talks through screens" - they extended a ban on TVs to include calculators. This is the kind of thing that I find very hard to get results from a search engine with. So, any advice from DDG or Googlers about best way to get that info would be lovely!
- walshemj 13y ago
  How was "In Nomine" recived in france aprently it was far more anti religion than the English version.
- mattgreenrocks 13y ago
  > ...the PS1 turned most young people into gamers and gained mass approval. Mass approval is a means of consensual intellectual deference. Mass media is perfectly made to broadcast these messages. The story's always the same: $NEW_MEDIA is harmful, and the domain of ill-adjusted individuals. Until, of course, a vague future when it isn't, even though nothing has changed. No mention is made of the errors in perception made in the past: "we've always been accepting of gaming." Pop culture can only exist in the present. It cannot bring itself to look back in time, for in doing so it'd have to confront it's mistakes and ephemeralness.
QuantumChaos 13y ago
While the idea of teenagers literally worshiping Satan was a moral panic, I suspect many Christians would find D&D incompatible with Christianity, given its emphasis on violence, personal power, and the occult.
- throwaway234254 13y ago
  For the amount of people that profess to Christianity, its amazing how many ignore the core tenets. I'm sure Bush was praising the Lord as he set the war machine in motion, or Bernanke saying a humble prayer as he pillaged the wealth of the middle class. Ah, the land of Christian principles. Thank God I'm not there.
  - QuantumChaos 13y ago
    Bernanke was raised Jewish, but he hasn't spoken publicly about his beliefs, so it's not clear what religion if any he follows. Do you also feel the same way about Jews?
    - mercurial 13y ago
      History is replete with documentary evidence that whatever their creed (whether religious or political), men are more than willing to spill a lot of blood, as long as the blood belongs to the "wrong" group of the moment.
      - QuantumChaos 13y ago
        Well Bernanke certainly has political opinions, as do many other Americans, so I guess it is best to avoid these bloodthirsty monsters.
  - walshemj 13y ago
    From the outside it looked like the churches that where aginst DnD where fringe protestant sects.
gexla 13y ago
Case in point. The greatest item ever! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Throne_of_the_Gods http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Throne_of_the_Gods Is it so bad that my cleric is lawful evil and gets his powers from Asmodeus? Does that make me a devil worshipper? Come on Mom, it's Asmodeus, not Satan. Edit: Actually, I don't know if a cleric could get powers from a devil rather than a god. Dungeon Master's Guide check please? Ah, well. It's an RPG. We could do whatever we wanted as long as the DM approved.
- talmand 13y ago
  From my memories, a devil would be interpreted as a demon so they might be able to give you limited abilities if they happened to be particularly powerful. But not the full abilities a god could provide. I was more into Dragonlance so things might be a tad different for you. Plus, as you say, whatever the DM decides if there's no specific rule defining the outcome.
  - gexla 13y ago
    > From my memories, a devil would be interpreted as a demon so they might be able to give you limited abilities if they happened to be particularly powerful. But not the full abilities a god could provide. That's how I understood it as well. In the base AD&D 1st Edition, you had a cleric and no other backstory. There wasn't a backstory to go with the game, it was just the base rules to be applied to any world. Then there were different worlds which came later in expansion sets. In Forgotten Realms, I believe your cleric could get certain unique powers based on which god your priest followed. For example, if you followed the god of magic, you would gain the ability to cast minor spells as you gained levels. I also seem to recall the same info about following a devil. I believe you could follow certain major devils (probably had to control their own "circle" of Hell) but that you actually took a hit to your powers. Because these beings were less powerful than gods, you got less powerful abilities. I imagine this was much the same no matter what expansion you went with. You needed the expansions to get a backstory and fill-in for the "lore." It's was a bit of a strange situation. There were specific gods for each setting, but each setting had access to the same "planes" with Hell being one of those. The way I remember this being setup is that each setting had a different world but they all literally shared the same planes. A Dragonlance player might actually be able to meet a Forgotten Realms if they bumped into each other in the planes. I think this was all intentionally left a bit blurry because it wasn't fully fleshed out.
kbutler 13y ago
> In an era of potent concern over internet pornography, cyber-bullying, and drugs, it is hard to imagine a game being controversial. Really? GTA? Every FPS ever? Video games in general? This "moral panic" behavior is by no means limited to conservative/traditionally religious causes. As an example that will likely challenge many here, try comparing environmental panics (historical and present) with religious ones. There is a very similar pattern of catastrophic predictions, frantic hyperbole, disregard of contradictory data (usually combined with demonizing those pointing it out), and the inevitable eventual shift to a new topic for panic.
- brazzy 13y ago
  > try comparing environmental panics (historical and present) with religious ones. Care to name some examples? Because the past ones I can think of (acid rain, ozone hole) do not fit the pattern AT ALL, they were well grounded in reality and abated because things were done that actually eliminated or mitigated the causes of the problem.
  - kbutler 13y ago
    The easiest, most clearly falsified example is probably Paul Ehrlich's alarmist population bomb. Already too late to avoid hundreds of millions of people dying from starvation in the 70s. Didn't happen. Food production increased. Later editions said 70s and 80s. Didn't happen, food production increased. Instead of backing off the catastrophic rhetoric, he increased it, and was ignored by the community. Oh, wait, no, he got a MacArthur genius grant... Peak oil (oh, we just mean "conventional oil"). Many resource exhaustion forecasts (it will happen, just wait). Mass species extinctions (it's happening! Dozens per day! Which species?) Each of these is based on an element of truth, extrapolated without allowing any mitigating factors, and published with forecasts of imminent doom. Declaring victory over the ozone hole appears premature. Nasa says current changes are driven by wind and temperature, not changes in chlorine levels. http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/new-results-from-inside-the-ozone-hole/#.U0jKh8vnaAg http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/new-results-from-inside-...
- talmand 13y ago
jqm 13y ago
This brought back some memories.. D&D was great. I was absolutely obsessed with it as an early teenager in the mid 80's. I carried the rule books around all times and even had a club at the school lunch table. I remember the vice principal...a bearded guy who was probably like 28 coming over and congratulating us saying he played D&D also and he believed only smart people played the game. I also remember the ridiculous religious hysteria and my parents becoming concerned after someone at church giving them a cassette of some guy warning of demonic possession from rock music and D&D. The were reasonable though eventually let it go after investigating the rule books and my father actually playing a game (he frankly thought it was dumb which in retrospect is understandable). It all seems so tame compared to what is around now. D&D was my great love at that time. Well... that and my TSR 80:)
- gregd 13y ago
  RIGHT in the feels man. D&D (and the subsequent Arduin rules) were a HUGE part of my teenage years in the 80s. I had to sell all of my collection to buy tires for my car when I was about 19. Come to think of it, it was more or less my coming of age moment. I've since purchased almost every book I had as a young kid on eBay, but it's incredibly hard to find anyone who still plays with these rules. Kind of a bummer actually.
chiph 13y ago
I grew up in the same town as Bob Jones University. So they were really frothing at the mouth over the game (I picked it up just after AD&D came out). They were into picketing at the time, and protested outside a couple of bookstores that sold the game (they also protested Monty Python's Life of Brian, which I am proud of having crossed their picket line into 94 minutes of sin & depravity). It was pretty counter-culture for the time. Some of my friends would have been called "goth" in later years, but this was before all that. In college I drove down to Jacksonville for GenCon South, and got eliminated from the tournament pretty quickly (our party wandered the desert, got lost and died - we never even found the temple. Bah.) But it was amazing how many other people were into the game, way more than just the 4-5 people who played that I knew.
- AUmrysh 13y ago
  I grew up in Greer (about 20 minutes down Wade Hampton Blvd from BJU), and my mother, even in 2005, still believed that D&D was satanic. She had converted to Judaism, never went to BJU, and still she held that belief because of the moral panic in the 80s. It's amazing to me how easily some people will accept a moral position on something they know nothing about simply because someone else told them they should. I actually got her to play D&D with me. It was interesting. We sat down and set up the game, had little tokens for our characters (it was the starter set), and dice and all of that. We selected our characters, entered the dungeon, and were promptly killed by the first orcs we came across. We stopped playing after that, but I think it opened her eyes to the misconceptions she had of the game. BJU would go into K-Mart and demand they stop playing certain radio stations because the students couldn't shop there if they played rock music. They also caused a shitstorm when they tried to expel some students for holding hands when walking across campus because one was black and the other white, and this was in 2001. I even had a guy in my high school get into their weird religious beliefs trying to tell us in Biology class that the world was 3000 years old and the devil put dinosaur bones there to test us. This is similar to the moral panic that happened around pokemon and harry potter in the 90s, and the daycare rape panic that happened in the 80s. It seems like moral outrage is a way that some people band together and identify. It's still happening now, my university I went to is being attacked for giving a summer reading book that is about a lesbian. People are viciously attacking faculty and alumni from the university, and the state legislators have even taken to fining the schools for it.
dekhn 13y ago
I was introduced to D&D at my local library. I spent a great deal of time in my youth studying the demons and devils sections of the Monster Manual. Only years later did I learn that the devils were all sourced from actual religions (tiamat, beelzebub, etc). It helped spur my interest in ancient civilizations. These days, I get calls from friends- all successful, happily married with family and kids- to play D&D. The people who complained about this back then had NO IDEA how powerful games and myths can be to developing children- in a very positive way.
njharman 13y ago
I grew up in middle class, suburban Kansas. But, did not experience any of this hysteria. I guess I'm lucky. I've been playing RPGs for 30 years. Lots of people play today. I strongly encourage anyone even slightly interested to visit local game shops, look for meetup.com rpg meetup and try it out. If you happen to be in austin http://www.meetup.com/dnd-823/ http://www.meetup.com/dnd-823/ I'm happy to answer any questions about that meetup (which I organize), finding / starting a game, or RPGs in general. Here or email njharman@gmail.com
- jaegerpicker 13y ago
  I continue to play today as well, it's a REALLY great hobby for a software engineer in particular, since it involves heavy and somewhat complex rulesets, some minor math, and a great way to socialize with staring at a computer screen. It really makes it easier to connect and talk to others as there is a built and fun subject to talk about. Playing RPG's has improved my life quite a bit since I picked it up again.
bunderbunder 13y ago
When I got into Dungeons and Dragons, I remember my mother getting worried about something she heard on the news about kids going and playing D&D-inspired make believe in sewers, and lecturing me at length about how I should never ever that. We lived really far out in the country at the time. Nothing but wells and septic systems for 20 miles in any direction.
filmgirlcw 13y ago
One of the various crimes that the media tried to tie to D&D was the murder of Lieth Von Stein. It became the subject of a few books and made-for-TV movies. Basically the guy's stepson and friends murdered him for insurance money/inheritance, and although they were really into D&D, the real vector (other than greed and malice) was LSD and coke. One of the books about the case is called Cruel Doubt[1] and in 1997, I listened to the audio book in a road trip with my parents (I was like 14). It's a really well-done book (skip the made-for-TV movie starring Blythe Danner and a 16-year old Gwyneth Paltrow), but it focused a lot on the D&D controversy, because that was so much a part of the D&D narrative. Anyway, I share all this because a) the book is really good (I got the Kindle version a few years ago and re-read it for the first time in 15 years) and b), my own mother still harbors negative feelings about D&D because of how the book explained the controversy and the supposed associations between the game and the murder. She'd missed the whole brouhaha in the 1980s, because she had two daughters and the only one who could ever be interested in D&D (me) was born in the early 80s, and thus a toddler during most of the media maelstrom. Yet the narrative of that book (which again, really isn't against D&D and doesn't make it out to be a catalyst for the murder, beyond sharing the real fact that yes, the murderers did lots of LSD and played D&D all day instead of going to work or school), was enough for my mom to give me a lecture at 17 when I happened to go hang out with my then-boyfriend and his college friends who happened to be playing a tabletop game. Anyway. This comment adds nothing to the discussion, I just wanted to plug Cruel Doubt because it's a really good true crime book. And I associate it with helping corrupt my otherwise intelligent mother into believing a game was the product of the devil and evil. Don't worry, I set her straight. [1]:http://www.amazon.com/Cruel-Doubt-Joe-McGinniss-ebook/dp/B008H7KH6A/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=&qid= http://www.amazon.com/Cruel-Doubt-Joe-McGinniss-ebook/dp/B00...
ergoproxy 13y ago
Gary Gygax was a Christian. In February 1969, he wrote an article in IFW Monthly explicitly stating he was a Christian and making an argument why Christians shouldn't celebrate Christmas; he justified his argument with Biblical sources. See http://boingboing.net/2012/12/24/gary-gygax-explains-why-christ.html http://boingboing.net/2012/12/24/gary-gygax-explains-why-chr... Original D&D included Christian symbolism: Clerics used holy water and a cross. Gygax's 1975's D&D Supplement I: GREYHAWK (page 34) states: "All Vampires are affected by the cross, despite any former religious background, as it is sovereign against them." Furthermore, the demons and devils in early D&D were presented as adversaries, not as role models. I started playing D&D in the early 80s. I went to Catholic grammar school. We were taught by priests and nuns. We played D&D in the schoolyard. Nobody discouraged us from playing. I was also bullied quite a bit in grammar school and high school, and I think I would have gone nuts if I didn't have D&D as an outlet. D&D also got me interested in reading books and studying probability. D&D helped improve my grades from Cs and Ds to straight As. I eventually got a B.S. in math with a 4.0 GPA. As a grown up, I played in a group DM'd by a fundamentalist Christian, who didn't see any conflict between his religious beliefs and fantasy role playing games.

123 points by Libertatea 13y ago

Ah, we lost our cleric and fighter (they were brothers) to that, since their mom heard that it was "satanic." Most ironic thing is that they were the only 2 in the group that attended the same church as me.

maldeh 13y ago

Moral objections don't just come from biblical incompatibility. Back in high-school (not-US), I once had an uncomfortable questioning from our principal because a kid's parent complained after seeing us playing with unfamiliar dice. They equated the probability-driven game mechanics to gambling, or at least believed that it led to a slippery slope. Then again I later majored in statistics, so maybe they had a point ^_^

aidenn0 13y ago
I've run into christian groups that ban standard playing card decks (so e.g. uno or dutch blitz is okay) due to the association with gambling.
- pessimizer 13y ago
  That's the reason for the popularity of Rook: http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1260/rook http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1260/rook Which is basically a standard deck of cards but with four colors for four suits, and numbered from 1-14. Just getting rid of the standard symbols is enough for people to pretend that they can't gamble with them. Popular with Mormons.
  - tekalon 13y ago
    I don't know about 'popular with Mormons'. That or my friends and I are exceptions. I remember fondly having D&D/MTG/card games/board games nights. I personally love card games and usually have a deck with me. Especial during youth/single group game nights with the whole congregation. I can see this for those that are hyper conservative, but this can work for any religion.
6d0debc071 13y ago
>They equated the probability-driven game mechanics to gambling, or at least believed that it led to a slippery slope. The next step in that argument being "Well, no more maths for me then!" She half jests. I've often wondered whether extremely basic statistical ability could be enhanced by having kids play those sorts of games. Dice and cards and so on.
tempestn 13y ago
I remember similarly getting in trouble for playing cards in middle school, because the teacher couldn't conceive of a non-gambling card game. Of course, I'm playing hold'em on my other monitor right now, so maybe he had a point too...
- talmand 13y ago
  Nope, I once got in trouble for playing a game of Spades in school during a non-class period. Today I don't gamble with card playing so I cancel you out and invalidate his point. Wait, unless his point was that you like card games, gambling or otherwise. If so, you're on your own. Good luck!
walshemj 13y ago
In the past pre ww2 board games sometimes used to come with spinners or other means of random number generators due to dice's asociation with gambling.
- talmand 13y ago
  Is that why all the board games from my childhood had those stupid spinners that eventually stopped working? That's just crap. No, that's just stupid, could you not gamble with a cardboard spinner?
tekalon 13y ago
I was teaching a friend how to create a character sheet in highschool (~10 years ago). Principal saw and asked if we were gambling. The principal (who also introduced me to the Hobbit) let us explain what it was, but still politely asked us to put the dice away. Apparently there was a gambling problem of some sort at the time at the school (I don't know details, just remember hearing rumors)

mercurial 13y ago

This echoes Jack Thompson's [1] crusade against video games, really. $NEW_THING will corrupt our children is a powerful meme. 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Thompson_(activist) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Thompson_(activist)

partomniscient 13y ago
And before him there was Jack Chick [1]. 1: http://www.chick.com/READING/TRACTS/0046/0046_01.ASP http://www.chick.com/READING/TRACTS/0046/0046_01.ASP
- mercurial 13y ago
  Until the last panels I wanted to believe this was a parody. The intense occult training through D&D prepared Debbie to accept the invitation to enter a witches' coven.
- bane 13y ago
  I honestly thought this was a parody for 90% of the strip, then like most religious material, instead of a punchline, there's a testimonial. I wonder if there's some kind of law about this, like how porn movies and action movies have similar ratios of story to fight/sex scenes?
- JoshTriplett 13y ago
  The folks behind the Gamers films are currently producing a film version of that as satire: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jk2Pr9jXCr8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jk2Pr9jXCr8

throwaway13qf85 13y ago

I never played Dungeons and Dragons as a kid (born in the early 80s, so a bit too young) but I played a lot of Games Workshop games (Warhammer etc) and I played D&D-based video games (Baldur's Gate etc) heavily. I remember poring over rulebooks and probability tables for hours, and writing computer simulations (in Visual Basic or Excel) to try and find some edge in the game. I think my parents were pretty worried about me. I now write stock market simulations and come up with trading strategies for a living, using essentially the same methods that I used in the mid 1990s to win at roleplaying games, so I guess it all worked out okay?

willvarfar 13y ago
> I now write stock market simulations and come up with trading strategies for a living, , so I guess it all worked out okay? OMG, parents should have intervened!
- throwaway234254 13y ago
  Now that made me laugh. Perhaps the intense occult D&D training can cause people to walk the dark path.
Fomite 13y ago
This is basically my story too. It's fun watching my mother wrestle with the notion that the amount of gaming I did as a kid directly led to a doctorate, a publication in Lancet Infectious Diseases and an interview on NPR.
gregd 13y ago
> I now write stock market simulations and come up with trading strategies for a living... So playing all those chaotic evil characters really had an affect on you eh? :)
- throwaway13qf85 13y ago
  I like to think of it as Lawful Evil ;)

badsock 13y ago

I remember this - we had to play D&D in secret because of several of our friend's parents. It's interesting to have seen, first hand, part of our long unbroken chain of freaking out, from rock and roll to instagram; this giant perennial wave of overreaction that's done nothing but persecute innocents and make the world a less beautiful, exploratory, and lively place. Is there an example of a popular fashion that's been of actual concern? The only example I can think of off-hand is the dancing plague of 1518, and even that was probably worth the casualities. It's amazing to me that a mode of thinking that has been so consistently incorrect for so long seems to be dominant, whereas the "let kids do whatever it is they're into this week" is considered a fringe hippie thing.

waterlesscloud 13y ago
The early rock and roll era was a pretty interesting time. For the first time, kids had easy access to cars, and thus they could be away from their parents more often. The cultural construct we have today of teenagers being so independent from their parents didn't really exist in the generations prior. Not only were these teens in their cars, away from parents, they were listening to the radio in the those cars. Outside of adult supervision. And so white kids could hear black music for the first time. So they were crossing racial lines, and eventually the lines became more and more blurred, which is how rock music grew. And, of course, those kids were having sex in the back seats of those cars. Away from parent, and while listening to rock music. Which, in the pre-pill era, led to a lot of unplanned pregnancies. So while early rock didn't really cause negative effects, it's not hard to see how worried parents could make the associations. The kids were indeed literally out of control.
- kbutler 13y ago
  > For the first time, kids had easy access to cars, and thus they could be away from their parents more often. The cultural construct we have today of teenagers being so independent from their parents didn't really exist in the generations prior. You have a very distorted and limited view of history (but then, mine is surely as distorted, just differently!) My parents were just sharing stories of how, at age 10, a friend would take the sheep, a horse, and a dog, and literally be alone for the full day, before returning at night. I'd characterize the difference more as "large numbers of youth with no responsibilities", rather than "away from their parents more often". Industrialized societies with child labor laws tend to keep children more separate from adult responsibilities, and prevent them from having meaningful responsibilities.

bane 13y ago

This was really a crazy time, fresh off of a landslide Reagan victory and no doubt the moral hysteria boosted by it, I remember this situation really well. My parents (mostly my mother) are very religious and I remember being driven around town with the local Christian radio station on and it being just wall-to-wall fear mongering about Satanism, backmasking in rock songs and D&D. Just endless talk, hour after hour, about how all this will lead your child to drugs, pornography, satanism and suicide -- numerous "concrete" examples were included as the local Christian "research team" swept the country (pre-internet! so most of it was probably just invented whole-cloth) for police reports and court records for Satanic rituals, Rock music and D&D. All reported with deep urgency and absolute truthful authority between gentle praise songs I heard in church every Sunday. Of course they'd never play a couple seconds of Led Zeppelin back and forth so you could hear the hidden messages revealed, lest you want to kill yourself during the next commercial break or continuous praise song power hour. Terse descriptions of D&D were provided. "A game where players assume the roles of various characters, demons are involved, sometimes, like gambling, dice are used!" without any cultural context about how it's exactly like any other game where people assume different identities, like Cowboys & Indians, or super space spy or whatever. It was a perfect storm of cultural events simultaneously pumped up by various social moralists who, like most groups like this, take tiny kernels of truth and wrap them in heaping piles of agendas, fabrications and outright lies and blanket every form of sensory input to drive the masses into full foaming at the mouth hysteria. The publicity eventually leaked out into regular media and I remember seeing some of these "issues" (which had all been masterfully woven together into a single moral crisis by the religious media my mother listened to) break into the regular nightly news my father forced me to sit and watch every evening (to build culture and character). My mother was absolutely obsessed with all this and was driven to hysteria. One time pulling the car over to the side of a busy highway and making me promise, promise, I'd never roll D&D dice and risk letting Satan into my heart - tears streaming down her face while she shook like a leaf -- because I might commit suicide when the game is over. She'd listen to hour after hour of pronouncements of how the country was going to sin...I'd watch her cleaning the kitchen while this played on the radio, her scrubbing getting more and more vigorous as her emotions became more and more upset. Even at the tender age of...6 or 7, I knew the entire thing was a ridiculous pile of malarkey. I honestly had no clue what D&D was, had only heard rock music in passing (my music selection was pretty heavily regulated) and certainly wasn't involved in Satanism of any kind. I was more concerned with the severe mental instability this seemed to be drawing out in my mother...who seemed to be the only person I knew who couldn't separate fantasy from reality in this situation. When the D&D cartoon started airing, curious, I'd sneak a few minutes of it in, titillated that something so dangerous was in cartoon form and on television before bed time. The show was pretty tame so I usually got bored and turned it off and did something else with my time. (He-Man was also banned in my house). I vaguely remember the acronym BADD from those times and the name Patricia Pulling, and the claim that players would get so wrapped up in the fantasy of their characters, with reality and imagination so tangled up, that when your character died, there was some non-trivial chance you would go out and kill yourself, with probably a recently listened to Led Zeppelin tape in the boom box and with some kind of Satanic connection, or sacrificed chickens or something nearby. And suddenly, one day, the Christian "news" sources my mother listened to moved on to something else and it was all over. Rock music was still around, Led Zeppelin was still for sale, D&D was still a game, but apparently the moral crusaders had stopped something and had moved on to something else. I think this was when all the major lawsuits had concluded with BADD losing all of them. It was still on my banned list, but the hysteria was over. Like most kids I just ignored it and played a little D&D over at my friends' houses till I got bored of it and listened to rock music just the same. Years later, remembering the hysteria, a friend and I figured out how to reverse a cassette tape and we experimented listening for hidden messages in Rock Music cassettes to little success. The early 1980s were a really weird moment in American history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bothered_About_Dungeons_and_Dragons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bothered_About_Dungeons_and_Dr... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backmasking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backmasking https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8Rop4Zt-S0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8Rop4Zt-S0

tellarin 13y ago

The funny thing is that in the 90s, after the scare was mostly over, when adults would see me and my friends with rule books and pieces of paper full of numbers they'd always congratulate us for being 'studying hard'. ;)

ekianjo 13y ago

In France too there was lots of bad mouthing about role playing games in the mid to late 80s, when it was really popular (while it was nowhere as popular as in the US), and fearmongering in newspapers and media. A couple of years later, (early 90s, basically), video games were targeted, and they made it sound like people who were playing video games were retarded. There was a documentary about Eric Chahi as he was finishing his work on Another World on Amiga (one of the milestones in Gaming!) in 1991-1992, and the reporters described him almost as being autistic. The media suddenly changed their stance on video games after Sony's success with the PS1 turned most young people into gamers and gained mass approval.

bane 13y ago
I'm actually curious how this all happened in the French media. In the U.S. it spread like wildfire through Evangelical media.
- DanBC 13y ago
  UK newspapers are sensationalist, so we had a bit of it over here, although it did tend to concentrate on music or satanic abuse. On a slight tangent I remember a Scottish religious group in the 1980s who did not let children use calculators because "Satan talks through screens" - they extended a ban on TVs to include calculators. This is the kind of thing that I find very hard to get results from a search engine with. So, any advice from DDG or Googlers about best way to get that info would be lovely!
walshemj 13y ago
How was "In Nomine" recived in france aprently it was far more anti religion than the English version.
mattgreenrocks 13y ago
> ...the PS1 turned most young people into gamers and gained mass approval. Mass approval is a means of consensual intellectual deference. Mass media is perfectly made to broadcast these messages. The story's always the same: $NEW_MEDIA is harmful, and the domain of ill-adjusted individuals. Until, of course, a vague future when it isn't, even though nothing has changed. No mention is made of the errors in perception made in the past: "we've always been accepting of gaming." Pop culture can only exist in the present. It cannot bring itself to look back in time, for in doing so it'd have to confront it's mistakes and ephemeralness.

QuantumChaos 13y ago

While the idea of teenagers literally worshiping Satan was a moral panic, I suspect many Christians would find D&D incompatible with Christianity, given its emphasis on violence, personal power, and the occult.

throwaway234254 13y ago
For the amount of people that profess to Christianity, its amazing how many ignore the core tenets. I'm sure Bush was praising the Lord as he set the war machine in motion, or Bernanke saying a humble prayer as he pillaged the wealth of the middle class. Ah, the land of Christian principles. Thank God I'm not there.
- QuantumChaos 13y ago
  Bernanke was raised Jewish, but he hasn't spoken publicly about his beliefs, so it's not clear what religion if any he follows. Do you also feel the same way about Jews?
  - mercurial 13y ago
    History is replete with documentary evidence that whatever their creed (whether religious or political), men are more than willing to spill a lot of blood, as long as the blood belongs to the "wrong" group of the moment.
    - QuantumChaos 13y ago
      Well Bernanke certainly has political opinions, as do many other Americans, so I guess it is best to avoid these bloodthirsty monsters.
- walshemj 13y ago
  From the outside it looked like the churches that where aginst DnD where fringe protestant sects.

gexla 13y ago

Case in point. The greatest item ever! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Throne_of_the_Gods http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Throne_of_the_Gods Is it so bad that my cleric is lawful evil and gets his powers from Asmodeus? Does that make me a devil worshipper? Come on Mom, it's Asmodeus, not Satan. Edit: Actually, I don't know if a cleric could get powers from a devil rather than a god. Dungeon Master's Guide check please? Ah, well. It's an RPG. We could do whatever we wanted as long as the DM approved.

talmand 13y ago
From my memories, a devil would be interpreted as a demon so they might be able to give you limited abilities if they happened to be particularly powerful. But not the full abilities a god could provide. I was more into Dragonlance so things might be a tad different for you. Plus, as you say, whatever the DM decides if there's no specific rule defining the outcome.
- gexla 13y ago
  > From my memories, a devil would be interpreted as a demon so they might be able to give you limited abilities if they happened to be particularly powerful. But not the full abilities a god could provide. That's how I understood it as well. In the base AD&D 1st Edition, you had a cleric and no other backstory. There wasn't a backstory to go with the game, it was just the base rules to be applied to any world. Then there were different worlds which came later in expansion sets. In Forgotten Realms, I believe your cleric could get certain unique powers based on which god your priest followed. For example, if you followed the god of magic, you would gain the ability to cast minor spells as you gained levels. I also seem to recall the same info about following a devil. I believe you could follow certain major devils (probably had to control their own "circle" of Hell) but that you actually took a hit to your powers. Because these beings were less powerful than gods, you got less powerful abilities. I imagine this was much the same no matter what expansion you went with. You needed the expansions to get a backstory and fill-in for the "lore." It's was a bit of a strange situation. There were specific gods for each setting, but each setting had access to the same "planes" with Hell being one of those. The way I remember this being setup is that each setting had a different world but they all literally shared the same planes. A Dragonlance player might actually be able to meet a Forgotten Realms if they bumped into each other in the planes. I think this was all intentionally left a bit blurry because it wasn't fully fleshed out.

kbutler 13y ago

> In an era of potent concern over internet pornography, cyber-bullying, and drugs, it is hard to imagine a game being controversial. Really? GTA? Every FPS ever? Video games in general? This "moral panic" behavior is by no means limited to conservative/traditionally religious causes. As an example that will likely challenge many here, try comparing environmental panics (historical and present) with religious ones. There is a very similar pattern of catastrophic predictions, frantic hyperbole, disregard of contradictory data (usually combined with demonizing those pointing it out), and the inevitable eventual shift to a new topic for panic.

brazzy 13y ago
> try comparing environmental panics (historical and present) with religious ones. Care to name some examples? Because the past ones I can think of (acid rain, ozone hole) do not fit the pattern AT ALL, they were well grounded in reality and abated because things were done that actually eliminated or mitigated the causes of the problem.
- kbutler 13y ago
  The easiest, most clearly falsified example is probably Paul Ehrlich's alarmist population bomb. Already too late to avoid hundreds of millions of people dying from starvation in the 70s. Didn't happen. Food production increased. Later editions said 70s and 80s. Didn't happen, food production increased. Instead of backing off the catastrophic rhetoric, he increased it, and was ignored by the community. Oh, wait, no, he got a MacArthur genius grant... Peak oil (oh, we just mean "conventional oil"). Many resource exhaustion forecasts (it will happen, just wait). Mass species extinctions (it's happening! Dozens per day! Which species?) Each of these is based on an element of truth, extrapolated without allowing any mitigating factors, and published with forecasts of imminent doom. Declaring victory over the ozone hole appears premature. Nasa says current changes are driven by wind and temperature, not changes in chlorine levels. http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/new-results-from-inside-the-ozone-hole/#.U0jKh8vnaAg http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/new-results-from-inside-...
talmand 13y ago

jqm 13y ago

This brought back some memories.. D&D was great. I was absolutely obsessed with it as an early teenager in the mid 80's. I carried the rule books around all times and even had a club at the school lunch table. I remember the vice principal...a bearded guy who was probably like 28 coming over and congratulating us saying he played D&D also and he believed only smart people played the game. I also remember the ridiculous religious hysteria and my parents becoming concerned after someone at church giving them a cassette of some guy warning of demonic possession from rock music and D&D. The were reasonable though eventually let it go after investigating the rule books and my father actually playing a game (he frankly thought it was dumb which in retrospect is understandable). It all seems so tame compared to what is around now. D&D was my great love at that time. Well... that and my TSR 80:)

gregd 13y ago
RIGHT in the feels man. D&D (and the subsequent Arduin rules) were a HUGE part of my teenage years in the 80s. I had to sell all of my collection to buy tires for my car when I was about 19. Come to think of it, it was more or less my coming of age moment. I've since purchased almost every book I had as a young kid on eBay, but it's incredibly hard to find anyone who still plays with these rules. Kind of a bummer actually.

chiph 13y ago

I grew up in the same town as Bob Jones University. So they were really frothing at the mouth over the game (I picked it up just after AD&D came out). They were into picketing at the time, and protested outside a couple of bookstores that sold the game (they also protested Monty Python's Life of Brian, which I am proud of having crossed their picket line into 94 minutes of sin & depravity). It was pretty counter-culture for the time. Some of my friends would have been called "goth" in later years, but this was before all that. In college I drove down to Jacksonville for GenCon South, and got eliminated from the tournament pretty quickly (our party wandered the desert, got lost and died - we never even found the temple. Bah.) But it was amazing how many other people were into the game, way more than just the 4-5 people who played that I knew.

AUmrysh 13y ago
I grew up in Greer (about 20 minutes down Wade Hampton Blvd from BJU), and my mother, even in 2005, still believed that D&D was satanic. She had converted to Judaism, never went to BJU, and still she held that belief because of the moral panic in the 80s. It's amazing to me how easily some people will accept a moral position on something they know nothing about simply because someone else told them they should. I actually got her to play D&D with me. It was interesting. We sat down and set up the game, had little tokens for our characters (it was the starter set), and dice and all of that. We selected our characters, entered the dungeon, and were promptly killed by the first orcs we came across. We stopped playing after that, but I think it opened her eyes to the misconceptions she had of the game. BJU would go into K-Mart and demand they stop playing certain radio stations because the students couldn't shop there if they played rock music. They also caused a shitstorm when they tried to expel some students for holding hands when walking across campus because one was black and the other white, and this was in 2001. I even had a guy in my high school get into their weird religious beliefs trying to tell us in Biology class that the world was 3000 years old and the devil put dinosaur bones there to test us. This is similar to the moral panic that happened around pokemon and harry potter in the 90s, and the daycare rape panic that happened in the 80s. It seems like moral outrage is a way that some people band together and identify. It's still happening now, my university I went to is being attacked for giving a summer reading book that is about a lesbian. People are viciously attacking faculty and alumni from the university, and the state legislators have even taken to fining the schools for it.

dekhn 13y ago

I was introduced to D&D at my local library. I spent a great deal of time in my youth studying the demons and devils sections of the Monster Manual. Only years later did I learn that the devils were all sourced from actual religions (tiamat, beelzebub, etc). It helped spur my interest in ancient civilizations. These days, I get calls from friends- all successful, happily married with family and kids- to play D&D. The people who complained about this back then had NO IDEA how powerful games and myths can be to developing children- in a very positive way.

njharman 13y ago

I grew up in middle class, suburban Kansas. But, did not experience any of this hysteria. I guess I'm lucky. I've been playing RPGs for 30 years. Lots of people play today. I strongly encourage anyone even slightly interested to visit local game shops, look for meetup.com rpg meetup and try it out. If you happen to be in austin http://www.meetup.com/dnd-823/ http://www.meetup.com/dnd-823/ I'm happy to answer any questions about that meetup (which I organize), finding / starting a game, or RPGs in general. Here or email njharman@gmail.com

jaegerpicker 13y ago
I continue to play today as well, it's a REALLY great hobby for a software engineer in particular, since it involves heavy and somewhat complex rulesets, some minor math, and a great way to socialize with staring at a computer screen. It really makes it easier to connect and talk to others as there is a built and fun subject to talk about. Playing RPG's has improved my life quite a bit since I picked it up again.

bunderbunder 13y ago

When I got into Dungeons and Dragons, I remember my mother getting worried about something she heard on the news about kids going and playing D&D-inspired make believe in sewers, and lecturing me at length about how I should never ever that. We lived really far out in the country at the time. Nothing but wells and septic systems for 20 miles in any direction.

filmgirlcw 13y ago

One of the various crimes that the media tried to tie to D&D was the murder of Lieth Von Stein. It became the subject of a few books and made-for-TV movies. Basically the guy's stepson and friends murdered him for insurance money/inheritance, and although they were really into D&D, the real vector (other than greed and malice) was LSD and coke. One of the books about the case is called Cruel Doubt[1] and in 1997, I listened to the audio book in a road trip with my parents (I was like 14). It's a really well-done book (skip the made-for-TV movie starring Blythe Danner and a 16-year old Gwyneth Paltrow), but it focused a lot on the D&D controversy, because that was so much a part of the D&D narrative. Anyway, I share all this because a) the book is really good (I got the Kindle version a few years ago and re-read it for the first time in 15 years) and b), my own mother still harbors negative feelings about D&D because of how the book explained the controversy and the supposed associations between the game and the murder. She'd missed the whole brouhaha in the 1980s, because she had two daughters and the only one who could ever be interested in D&D (me) was born in the early 80s, and thus a toddler during most of the media maelstrom. Yet the narrative of that book (which again, really isn't against D&D and doesn't make it out to be a catalyst for the murder, beyond sharing the real fact that yes, the murderers did lots of LSD and played D&D all day instead of going to work or school), was enough for my mom to give me a lecture at 17 when I happened to go hang out with my then-boyfriend and his college friends who happened to be playing a tabletop game. Anyway. This comment adds nothing to the discussion, I just wanted to plug Cruel Doubt because it's a really good true crime book. And I associate it with helping corrupt my otherwise intelligent mother into believing a game was the product of the devil and evil. Don't worry, I set her straight. [1]:http://www.amazon.com/Cruel-Doubt-Joe-McGinniss-ebook/dp/B008H7KH6A/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=&qid= http://www.amazon.com/Cruel-Doubt-Joe-McGinniss-ebook/dp/B00...

ergoproxy 13y ago

Gary Gygax was a Christian. In February 1969, he wrote an article in IFW Monthly explicitly stating he was a Christian and making an argument why Christians shouldn't celebrate Christmas; he justified his argument with Biblical sources. See http://boingboing.net/2012/12/24/gary-gygax-explains-why-christ.html http://boingboing.net/2012/12/24/gary-gygax-explains-why-chr... Original D&D included Christian symbolism: Clerics used holy water and a cross. Gygax's 1975's D&D Supplement I: GREYHAWK (page 34) states: "All Vampires are affected by the cross, despite any former religious background, as it is sovereign against them." Furthermore, the demons and devils in early D&D were presented as adversaries, not as role models. I started playing D&D in the early 80s. I went to Catholic grammar school. We were taught by priests and nuns. We played D&D in the schoolyard. Nobody discouraged us from playing. I was also bullied quite a bit in grammar school and high school, and I think I would have gone nuts if I didn't have D&D as an outlet. D&D also got me interested in reading books and studying probability. D&D helped improve my grades from Cs and Ds to straight As. I eventually got a B.S. in math with a 4.0 GPA. As a grown up, I played in a group DM'd by a fundamentalist Christian, who didn't see any conflict between his religious beliefs and fantasy role playing games.