Not that I'm generalizing from this, but the owner of the only FLGS I knew of in Milwaukee in the mid- to late-70s also owned the local oddball pagan stuff store, Sanctum Regnum. They didn't advertise the connection, though.
In my experience, there was not a great deal of connection between D&D and rituals, satanic or otherwise and, in all honesty, I didn't know who Jack Chick was until I was much, much older. I our community, D&D simply wasn't seen as a gateway drug to the black arts....
I'm not certain what you're trying to illustrate here. Are you trying to state that in the mid-to-late 70's that, in your experience, the community did view D&D as a gateway to black arts?
My experience is a bit later, in the mid-80's up to present, but from somewhere around when I began to play until somewhere around the mid-90's, I don't think there was much of a thing FLGS. At least in Central Ohio and then Southeast Ohio during that time period, the only place to obtain RPG books was a tiny section at the back of the "Little Professor" or whatever other bookstore was in the local shopping mall. For anything beyond that, you'd have to special order the books. You could also get some RPG books from hobby stores that catered to model airplanes and so forth, but again that was like a dozen or so books and no indication whatsoever of actual arcane practices.
I apologize if I sound inflamatory, but stating that the guy who sold RPG books also owned a Pagan store simply feeds into the hysteria. Additionally, I think the Pagans would also be offended that their religious beliefs would be associated with a fantasy game.
The first of the three concerns is a decidedly Christian objection, and you can look at, oh, the "Gods, Demigods, and Heroes" pamphlet or the front cover of the AD&D 1st Edition DMG, to get a feel for the problem. If you don't come to the issue with a Christian perspective, then you can't understand that concern, let alone address it.
The second was a more mainstream concern, and it, too, had merit. There are indeed people who start obsessing over their PCs. It's important to watch out for that, both in yourself and in your gaming buddies.
(Ask me some time about my friend L and why she decided to kill her DM with a dirk.)
The most thoughtful objections, in my experience, came in that third category. Remember, D&D is role-playing; it invites a bleed-through from in-game decisions to out-of-game personality. And in D&D, the overwhelming response to anybody who disagrees with you is to attack them until they're dead.
TSR's reaction to this concern was the famous "chair defense". You can bash somebody over the head with a chair, but that's not the chair's fault. That's not what you're supposed to do with a chair.
I don't really think it's as immersive an exercise as necessary to cause "bleed-over." At least, that's not how it's been in my three decades of experience with the game. The reason that D&D parodies like those from the Dead Alewives are so funny is because of the reality of it. The poor, harried, over-worked DM tries to provide a deep role-playing experience, which is then attacked from myriad directions by player digression, phone calls, people playing Angry Birds on their smart phone while waiting for their turn in the combat, other players yelling from the kitchen if they can have a Mountain Dew, long pauses while looking up the grapple rules for the umpteenth time to make sure you're doing it right, etc, etc.
The only times I can truly remember anyone (myself included) staying in character and being completely absorbed by the experience was during character interactions, be it PC to PC or PC to NPC. No killing going on, only communication. If combat broke out as result of those interactions, then immersion was lost as initiatives were rolled and the mechanics once more bore in on the game.
I'm not saying that it isn't possible for people to take away too much from RPGs, or to have the boundaries blurred or lost altogether. However, I think that is the sort of thing that happens with a fringe element. To apply it broadly to all gamers, or even to compare it with video games (where the mechanics are much less intrusive) is, I think, incorrect.
This, of course, is a completely different problem than escapism. I will readily raise my hand and admit to allowing myself to immerse myself in my hobby to the detriment of other areas of my life, once upon a time (mainly schoolwork.)
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I'm not certain what you're trying to illustrate here. Are you trying to state that in the mid-to-late 70's that, in your experience, the community did view D&D as a gateway to black arts?
Not that I'm generalizing from this, but the owner of the only FLGS I knew of in Milwaukee in the mid- to late-70s also owned the local oddball pagan stuff store, Sanctum Regnum. They didn't advertise the connection, though.
No, I'm pointing out that at least in the early days of D&D, there was at least some modest degree of overlap between the gaming and Pagan communities. IME the gateway thing was far more likely to go the other way, though (Pagans getting interested in gaming).
My experience is a bit later....
I apologize if I sound inflamatory, but stating that the guy who sold RPG books also owned a Pagan store simply feeds into the hysteria. Additionally, I think the Pagans would also be offended that their religious beliefs would be associated with a fantasy game.
I just thought it was amusing more than anything else, and I apologize for not being clearer about that. No edition of D&D with which I am familiar has contained any element that originated with modern Pagan religious practice unmediated by references in fiction, myth, or other games, and I know of no one who changed religious orientation based solely on exposure to D&D gaming materials. I know some who changed religious orientation based on exposure to gamers of that orientation, but that's something else entirely. By that definition, any social activity is a potential gateway drug to changes in religious orientation if engaged in with persons of that orientation.
I think we now have a reverse-stigma (read my post above). A lot of DMs seem to like to force their atheist views on the players (i.e. disallow a Living Death character to be an old catholic bishop; the DM was openly hostile to the idea of having any Christian religious figure in his game; oddly he had no problems with buddhist monks or any other asian spiritual characters, or african shamans; he was a white boy btw, just to give you some kind of frame of reference... he hated Christianity for some reason, and probably would have like my character if I would have played him as a bumbling fool as opposed to a man of ironclad conviction and faith)
Someone mentioned anti-Christian opinion and I felt a little tingle, so here I am. :)
Anybody who recognizes my screen name is probably aware of my opinions on the matter, but they're not why I'm much more willing to use non-Christian mythological elements in my games. The reason is that I have Christian players. (I've also had Buddhist and Neopagan players in the past.)
One of my Christian players raised the subject once, suggesting that a monotheism could be really fun to have in the game. I agreed, but considering our cultural backgrounds, any monotheism would end up being either sufficiently bizarre as to negate the verisimilitude offered by having one or close enough to Christianity that it might as well be the same thing. That being the case, did he want me to be the guy deciding what is and is not proper conduct and belief for his Christian paladin or cleric?
He did not, which made for two of us. When I elected to do something similar to medieval Christianity in my homebrew, I made some sharp adjustments to avoid just this kind of problem.
I just thought it was amusing more than anything else, and I apologize for not being clearer about that. No edition of D&D with which I am familiar has contained any element that originated with modern Pagan religious practice unmediated by references in fiction, myth, or other games, and I know of no one who changed religious orientation based solely on exposure to D&D gaming materials. I know some who changed religious orientation based on exposure to gamers of that orientation, but that's something else entirely. By that definition, any social activity is a potential gateway drug to changes in religious orientation if engaged in with persons of that orientation.
Sorry if I jumped all over you for that post, I simply read into it in the wrong manner from which you had intended it. I think we're both coming from the same place and sometimes the Internet sucks for the more subtle nuances of human interaction.
Late 70s to early 80s were my HS years, and all said and done, it wasn't all that bad (place a pin someplace between That 70s Show and Freaks & Geeks...).
I started the first Gaming Club at my high school, and we had no problems finding sponsoring teachers. Mostly, we were ignored, which is how we liked it. Actually, we annoyed the Chess Club because their members would rather come to our games than theirs.
Because I was affiliated with both a high school club and a local group, I got called a few times by local police who asked about it - they were trying to figure out if it was a cultish thing or not. Likewise, there were a few psychiatrists who wanted to learn more, and we let them sit in on some games.
A few friends had troubles at home, mostly because of the MM's devils and demons.
As long as you weren't drinking and driving, getting someone pregnant (AIDs wasn't quite the public issue yet) or getting busted for smoking weed in a public place, parents weren't nearly as dialed in to what you were doing, as they are now. Of course, if you were in high school at that time, you are watching your kids all the more carefully ;-)
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Sorry if I jumped all over you for that post, I simply read into it in the wrong manner from which you had intended it. I think we're both coming from the same place and sometimes the Internet sucks for the more subtle nuances of human interaction.
No problem, in hindsight I could see how I came across that way.
I remember the 80's.
um,......the Japanese were buying us and were going to own the U.S.A. lock, stock, and barrel by....probably right about.....tomorrow. Mid July 2011.
Their students were smarter, more disciplined, and the U.S. society and economy were just f.u.b.a.r. They were selling us perishable goods and buying all our real estate. WE WERE F**%ED! BOW TO MASTERS! NIPPON ICHI!!! ALL OUR BASE ARE BELONG TO THEM!!!
THAT was the best probable future. Because either that, or we were eventually going to M.A.D. bomb the f#~! out of the U.S.S.R. and vice versa.
Same s&*@, different day, as far as I'm concerned. Been hearing this "oh, the late, great, most recent epic f%#&ing fail version of the Roman Empire wannabe U.S.A." b@$+*#%% for as long as I can remember giving a s~*+.
The next generation of kids, though.....yeah, I look at them; society's pretty much f+#$ed. They wear those weird jeans and anime hair and don't know what real f**&ing music is, all that Crabcore b@~@#&~@ ain't music...
Oh, D&D? I never gave a s~$~ what kooks thought.
There was one kid whose mom burned all his devil books, but that was about it really. F@++em.
Nobody cares about D&D anymore. Now, Harry Potter takes all the heat from the Christian fundamentalists. I think they just attack things that are super popular ... doesn't really matter what it is.
Now that Harry Potter is over, who know what'll be next.
... Probably not nearly as bad as the 2010's, 2020's, and the 2030's are going to be.
Yeah, I'm digging a bomb shelter and stocking up on ammo and mre's and gas masks as we speak. We're so f!#~ed....
2029 (hold on, let me count and see if my old ass will be dead yet,....)
yeah, I ought to be still alive, barring a traffic accident or pulmonary embolism. Still working even.
I'll be here, if Paizo is still here with this website, and I'll pull this thread up and laugh at it just like all the imminent coming ice age b~@#$~&+ they tried to scare us about in the 70's.
And then, I'm going to drive down to the 7-11 and buy some gas.
No Road Warrior bikers will kill me and steal my car.
But the kids will be wearing a bunch of weird s@#@, listening to a bunch of weird s%!+; they'll probably bump uglies in the streets by 2029.
And,......some Asian country, like Singapore will be kicking our ass and taking all our bases because we're so socioeconomically f.u.b.a.r.
... Probably not nearly as bad as the 2010's, 2020's, and the 2030's are going to be.I'll be here, if Paizo is still here with this website, and I'll pull this thread up and laugh at it just like all the imminent coming ice age b$%%~+#~ they tried to scare us about in the 70's.
When the Principals decide it is time to retire, I don't think this site will survive. They'll cash out.
How old is Paizo's top management right now?
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As for the 80's, I started playing D&D in 1983 and not once did I ever hear about or encounter any anti-D&D / religious criticism of the game.
So my group just played on blissfully through the decades. And, it wasn't until recently, when I started hanging out on the internet, that I learned about all this anti-D&D stuff.
How great must your life be in terms of finding housing and food to be able to spend so much time attacking a game? Those are some very well off people.
Homeless people don't really care about D&D, I'm guessing.
Nobody cares about D&D anymore. Now, Harry Potter takes all the heat from the Christian fundamentalists. I think they just attack things that are super popular ... doesn't really matter what it is.
Now that Harry Potter is over, who know what'll be next.
Is "Potter" really getting all that much attention from the fundie crowd anymore? I haven't heard of an old time religion protest at one of those flicks since at least "Goblet". But maybe I just have a selective attention span and have gotten better at filtering noise from signal in the last few years.
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I remember the 80's.
um,......the Japanese were buying us and were going to own the U.S.A. lock, stock, and barrel by....probably right about.....tomorrow. Mid July 2011.
Their students were smarter, more disciplined, and the U.S. society and economy were just f.u.b.a.r. They were selling us perishable goods and buying all our real estate. WE WERE F$~&ED! BOW TO MASTERS! NIPPON ICHI!!! ALL OUR BASE ARE BELONG TO THEM!!!
THAT was the best probable future. Because either that, or we were eventually going to M.A.D. bomb the f$#! out of the U.S.S.R. and vice versa.Same s#!+, different day, as far as I'm concerned. Been hearing this "oh, the late, great, most recent epic f$!@ing fail version of the Roman Empire wannabe U.S.A." b~$&+!+* for as long as I can remember giving a s$$#.
The next generation of kids, though.....yeah, I look at them; society's pretty much f@$+ed. They wear those weird jeans and anime hair and don't know what real f##*ing music is, all that Crabcore b*@~&#+~ ain't music...Oh, D&D? I never gave a s#&% what kooks thought.
There was one kid whose mom burned all his devil books, but that was about it really. F!$@em.
I lived in Sacramento, California as a very young tyke of about 7 or 8 around the time people were truly worried about the bolded above. Some guy went as far as to lay out a plan on how the Japanese were going to drop tanks on us all and drive them through the streets, proclaiming true victory years after the A-bomb and WWII. However, I wasn't really into all of that. All I knew was that Robotech was on TV and I thought it was actually going to happen. I wanted my Veritech and to be a part of Skull Squadron and go out into space and explore. I couldn't wait for my Japanese overlords to arrive.
Of course, none of this happened. And thank god for that. Because I'm embarrased to say I loved Robotech when in truth I was and still am a fan of the original Macross.
In many ways, things were better for gamers in the 1980s than they are now. Game stores were generally more plentiful and fellow gamers were easier to find. The only exceptions would be if you lived at home with parents who had fallen for the "D&D is sstanic" nonsense -- but that would be an issue related to your own age and circumstances, not to the times.
For those of you who do live at home with your parents -- the best time for gaming is that all too brief time between the time that you are living with your parents and the time that you are the parents that your children are living with -- and even the latter can be made to work.
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Growing up in France, I did not experience that kind of nonsense, right until two events happened and were mediatized :
- A cemetary was defamed in southern France, and the local RPG club was framed. media hysteria. (Oh, right until the police found it was in truth done by the local neo-nazi group, friends of the mayor ... no apologies ever made).
- A guy in northern France comitted suicide "over RPGs". Mass media hysteria. Okay in truth, he was a drug addict, had been abandoned by his parents, was nearly homeless, and had just been dumped by his girlfriend, so he had plenty of other reasons besides RPGs.
When the second story was rightfully debunked as a framing attempt after a few weeks, it cost the main campaigning Anchor woman her job at the TV station. (Good riddance, her shows were crap).
Nothing more, until a few years later when I am at uni, and I discuss my hobbies with a non-playing pal.
"Oh, D&D ... the game where you climb to the rooftop of churches at night ...."
He was disappointed when I told him the truth. He might have joined us if that had actually been true.
Sorry... I'm from England, and the Church of England just can't get that extreme these days... ;)
Likewise, D&D wasn't very scandalous in western Canada.
Many of the folks who went all-in on 4e were too young to remember that stuff, so I figured the Paizo boards would be a good place to hunt for answers.
In your experience, has simply changing the name from Dungeons and Dragons to Pathfinder reduced the number of raised eyebrows among the fundamentalist community?
So you're saying we're old huh?
80s were not that bad, but it depends on your community (I grew up Canada, in Ottawa and the east coast). I only had one friend who wouldn't play D&D because of his (highly religious parents), but he was allowed to RPG Star Trek. Go figure.
Today, people are a little more enlightened (or maybe I should say carefree), and I don't feel the name change from D&D to Pathfinder helps or hurts any.
The D&D name recognition is both helpful and a deterrent at times, it's helpful for explaining, but then not helpful because of the stigma attached and misinformation. Did you know people actually think we run around in the woods looking like goblins hitting each other with weapons? Yeah, so people think it's a big LARP basically, and when I say people, I mean the majority of people I talk to. That's how pervasive the brainwashing that occurred in the 80s was. Bow to your TV sucka!!!!
Oh, and in general, the 80s were:
- A much nicer, SAFER, cleaner place to live
- Silly, people didn't take themselves so seriously
- Way better original music (yeah some sucked, but it's wasn't 'formula' like it is today, songs were actually different)
- Some decent, original, movies
- The worst TV you can imagine
Honestly, I miss the 90s the most, it had everything. For a while there, I thought music was never going to suck again (after the 70s and 80s). I was wrong.
RPG Superstar 2010 Top 16
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Well, as I mentioned a while ago, that was my first professional sale to TSR (I'd done some work for Mayfair's DC HEROES game previously). Bruce Heard was looking for freelancers to write a light-hearted, funny piece that would close the door on Greyhawk.
It was, as this thread suggests, a different time, with different sensibilities. Greyhawk was "old AD&D, Gary's work", and Gygax was at that point suing TSR; his cronies were promising that when he got control of the company back, he was going to fire everybody and go back to publishing nothing but Greyhawk supplements. The company was planning on shelving Greyhawk, turning out the lights, and nailing that closet door shut. The idea that people might, at some point, be nostalgic for Greyhawk, let alone find it better than the Forgotten Realms, would have been dismissed out of hand.
And TSR was putting out a lot of odd, "funny" products at the time. Anybody ever pick up the Books of Wondrous Inventions? (Think: "D&D magic meets Flintstones technology.") Basically, anything with Jim Holloway art promised to be "wacky".
Well, as I mentioned a while ago, that was my first professional sale to TSR (I'd done some work for Mayfair's DC HEROES game previously). Bruce Heard was looking for freelancers to write a light-hearted, funny piece that would close the door on Greyhawk.
It was, as this thread suggests, a different time, with different sensibilities. Greyhawk was "old AD&D, Gary's work", and Gygax was at that point suing TSR; his cronies were promising that when he got control of the company back, he was going to fire everybody and go back to publishing nothing but Greyhawk supplements. The company was planning on shelving Greyhawk, turning out the lights, and nailing that closet door shut. The idea that people might, at some point, be nostalgic for Greyhawk, let alone find it better than the Forgotten Realms, would have been dismissed out of hand.
And TSR was putting out a lot of odd, "funny" products at the time. Anybody ever pick up the Books of Wondrous Inventions? (Think: "D&D magic meets Flintstones technology.") Basically, anything with Jim Holloway art promised to be "wacky".
Wow. Just Wow.
I've been playing since the red box, and I remember the scare, although it had little impact on me. I actually did a paper in Junior High on the real story behind the Mazes and Monster movie. My parents asked me about D&D and the devil worshiping scare once, I explained the game to them, and from then on they defended it to anyone that asked them. My mom always figured I was far better off playing D&D in the basement with my friends, than any other mischief I could get in.
It was only later in life that I ran into people that had gone through more difficult times with the game. My first wife had her mother buy her books off of her so she could burn them etc.
...TSR was putting out a lot of odd, "funny" products at the time. Anybody ever pick up the Books of Wondrous Inventions? (Think: "D&D magic meets Flintstones technology.") Basically, anything with Jim Holloway art promised to be "wacky".
Yeah, Castle Greyhawk definitely had a "pie in the face" mentality. I'm glad the dungeon got its true due in the "Expedition" series near the end of 3e.
I also remember hearing about a product called "Greyhawk Ruins" that was a more serious take on the subject... can anyone confirm/correct me on that?
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Of course over in England in the 80s I ran RPGs for the local church youth, and the vicar was a player. He played the most psycho murdering character I've ever seen - I kid you not... it was hilarious! :)Makes a bit of sense. It's a way that he could let his worse impulses out, without any actual harm coming to anyone.
RPG Therapy - Church of England approved !
There's a CofE vicar who posts over on rpg.net. He lives near me.
Trivia aside, I remember the roleplaying community being much more worked up about it than the mainstream media. There was a very minor moral panic spurred by Pat Pulling - a few US talk shows jumped on the bandwagon - but the major impact seemed to be across the Forum page of Dragon magazine.
My parents asked me about D&D and the devil worshiping scare once, I explained the game to them, and from then on they defended it to anyone that asked them. My mom always figured I was far better off playing D&D in the basement with my friends, than any other mischief I could get in.
I'm glad to know my parents weren't the only sane ones in the mid-80's. Imagine what might have happened if all of the hysterical parents had taken this route to deal with the problem...
Where I lived, a lot of that notion continued into the early 90's. I was first exposed to gaming in the sixth grade in 92, I wanna say, and at one point that year one of the other students in our class threw a fit over a couple of the students bringing their AD&D books to school. And since her mother was the teacher and her grandmother was the principal (not a particularly small school, just rotten luck on our parts) the books were banned and the students got suspended for giving her grief about it. Once, when talking to a parent chaperone on a field trip about the whole mess (she was simply more curious about the hype than anything else), a friend of mine related the story of how his mother had freaked out over the whole thing so severely she threw out his Toon books.
Hell, when I was in high school in the late 90's, a bunch of us got in trouble for playing Magic: The Gathering in the library during lunch because the school thought it promoted demon worship. This wasn't a religious school, just a really conservative area.
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I also remember hearing about a product called "Greyhawk Ruins" that was a more serious take on the subject... can anyone confirm/correct me on that?
Yeah, it was a 2E product. I think it detailed about 25 levels of Castle Greyhawk. While it admittedly was not Gygax's Castle Greyhawk, it was the first thing published about the castle that wasn't meant as a joke product.
Gygax himself had planned to finally publish his version as Castle Zagyg for Castles and Crusades, only a few levels were ever published before the project died off.
There's also quite a few fan-created projects that explore "what could have been". The Castle of the Mad Archmage is probably my favorite.
Bruce Heard was looking for freelancers to write a light-hearted, funny piece that would close the door on Greyhawk.
However this one may have been received by the public at large, I had a great time running it as a one-shot deal. My players still occasionally spout off with "Hey, watch me pull a Tarrasque out of my hat!" and one in particular was very proud of having a uniduck companion, and greatly aggrieved when it died saving her life.
I was not born in the 90s but if it was pagan then shouldn't I be able to play it from the first amendment?
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I owned a hobby store at the time (I actually opened it because of my interest in D&D). I recall a few church ladies stopping in to complain about it.
My most vivid memory, though, was a preacher who came by (possibly from the same church) to inquire on what the game was really about. I told him there was a group playing that evening and invited him to come watch. The D&D groups played in the back of the store but it wasn't closed off to other customers and the players were used to people hanging around watching.
About an hour into the session the preacher arrived and asked if it was alright for him to watch. Naturally I told him to go on back there. He spent about an hour sitting to the side watching the game, then came back up to the counter. I asked him what he thought, did it look like kids involved in Satanism?
He said, "It looks like people having fun playing a game with dice. Nobody even pretended to actually cast a spell, they just rolled dice, added them up, and announced the total. One of them even asked if I wanted to play."
I never got another visit from church members to complain about the game, and suspect the preacher might have had a rational talk with the members who believed the Chick Track trash.
I was not born in the 90s but if it was pagan then shouldn't I be able to play it from the first amendment?
That never stops holier-than-thou folk from telling you what you should or (more often) shouldn't do.
I also remember hearing about a product called "Greyhawk Ruins" that was a more serious take on the subject... can anyone confirm/correct me on that?
It was actually a fun dungeon crawl, but extremely tough. There were three buried towers and you could go from tough fight to TPK just by going down one flight of stairs.
For example, in one section that was supposedly for around 3rd level, there was a group of trolls in plate armor behind an illusionary wall that were to ambush the party as they came down the stairs. Not hard enough? Well, there was also a fountain on that level that gave the monsters who drank from it over time +2 levels. So the trolls were not only in plate armor, they were level 8.
On another level there were, if I recall correctly, 800 invisible stalkers. (Yep, 800)
I talked for a couple hours with Dave Arneson and we discussed the original Greyhawk Castle. He said Gary's D&D group was a lot like Knights of the Dinner Table during that time and it was a matter of could the DM kill them off before they wrecked the adventure? As a DM could naturally just have the ceiling collapse and kill everyone you'd think the players had no chance, but Dave said Gary stuck to the rules and to what he had written for the encounters, which gave the players a fighting chance. And, Gygax generally included on the adventure the items or hints you needed to defeat the encounters. My players used to say about modules that Gygax wrote, "If you find a burnt out torch, keep it, because you'll probably need it later for something."
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I grew up in NC and have been playing since the mid/late 70's. My dad gave my brother and I the original small boxed set because it was an 'imagination game'. As such, my folks never had an issue with either of us playing the game.
I never had any serious instances of being accused of playing a satanic game, though there were some minor ones. The biggest run ins I had were (1) a roommate in college who told my friends and I we were going to hell for playing it several times. We did not hang out with him much at all. And (2) a confrontation with a 'pit preacher' (bible thumping evangelical type preaching on campus) who said I was going to hell for having long hair and wearing torn jeans. When I told him I also played D&D he went off on an even bigger tear. I have to admit I got a chuckle out of that one.
I grew up in the 80s, and in my town, a boy named Jagodka (the older brother of one of my classmates and friends) killed his mother with a shotgun to the back of the head. This may have actually been in the early 90s, but my hometown was always a bit slow to catch on to what was hip to hate.
The church however, went wild with allegations about them being deep into DnD, and that the game had convinced them to murder the mother. One of the older boys in the church was pontificating about how he personally talked with "the top DnD dealer in town" and that the man had said that he had "lost his two best customers". The story of course has two points, one that the boys were obviously into DnD, and two that those who deal this dangerous entity are callous and amoral. (The dealer was upset that his customers were gone, not that a woman was murdered)
My sister, who was probably 11 at the time asked him "How do you know who the number one DnD dealer is in town if you're Christian?"
He didn't have an answer.
For my part, I actually never questioned that the game was an evil satanic influence (although like my sister, I had my doubts it played any part in the Jagodka murders) until I was in the Army (in '99), and a corporal friend of mine asked me to play. I was fairly disappointed that the game didn't turn out to be the gateway drug into true magic power, but somehow I've survived.
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I had a friend from grade school who used to tell me that D&D was satanic. Being Christian myself, I knew there was no truth to that whatsoever- so, I invited him to watch a game or two. He seemed to enjoy it, but for a year or two he never seemed to get the hint that it was just a game involving dice and some things that happened to be called "demons" and "magic spells". But I'll never forget something he said to me one day. This is his exact quote:
"Hey, Gabe- I just played this video game called Balder's Gate. Ever heard of it? It's a lot of fun- it's just like D&D, but not as satanic."
I was literally speechless after hearing that.
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80`s? 90's? Doesn't matter. I live in Europe. RPGs are almost unknown here, and even if they weren't, if some religious nut is spewing crumbs shouting at something he believes evil, we shake our heads and walk away, problem solved.
Unless playing along means we get a chance to get nekkid for a bit. Then we wait a while before walking away.
Unless playing along means we get a chance to get nekkid for a bit. Then we wait a while before walking away.
I'd say that depends. Who is getting nekkid? Who else is getting nekkid? I mean I have no problems with people getting nekkid, but I don't want to look at all of them. :P
Unless playing along means we get a chance to get nekkid for a bit. Then we wait a while before walking away.I'd say that depends. Who is getting nekkid? Who else is getting nekkid? I mean I have no problems with people getting nekkid, but I don't want to look at all of them. :P
Jacques Chirac, Göran Persson, and Helmuth Kohl.
My mom knew that I played DnD with a couple of friends but didn't know much about it other than stuff read in the newspaper. I don't think she was really OK with it but didn't stop me from playing. After watching the movie E.T., on the drive home from the theater I said in the scene at the beginning the kids were playing DnD. The next week my mom said that we could use the kitchen table to play if we wanted. She hung around and watched for a while. She even asked a couple of questions about stuff (like what an orc was) in the game and thought the dice were neat.
After that she never had a problem with it. A few years later when the Monster Manual 2 was released she bought it for me for Christmas. :)
When I was a sophmore in high school in '84, I had a friend who wanted to learn how to play. He came over after school and I let him use one of my characters and ran an encounter for him. He had a blast and wanted to play next time our group did. I let him borrow my players handbook to read that night to pick a class and race and he'd return it to me the next day at school.
The next day he returned the book and said that his parents saw it and took it away saying it was 'devil worship' and he was not to play.
He played for about 4 months on the 'down low' until he was cought. His mom saw the character sheet and dice I gave him in his room.He was grounded for a month. :(
-Flea
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The 80s were bad news man. We had to game uphill in the snow, both ways! Dice were cast iron, and weighed 400 pounds each. I knew a guy who rolled a natural 20 once, but crushed his car in the process.
It was so bad, that if you tried to look up an obscure rule in the massive rulebooks, there was a real risk that you'd be eaten by a grue. Try explaining that to your friend's parents!
/good times
In your experience, has simply changing the name from Dungeons and Dragons to Pathfinder reduced the number of raised eyebrows among the fundamentalist community?
It is an interesting thread. It is nice that we can actually have this discussion without some of the emotional baggage that it would have conjured up 25 years ago.
The 700 Club and Mr. Chick were extreme points on the curve ..
. we have to be careful not to paint all fundementalist Christians with the same brush.
That said, Role-playing Games (RPGs) in the early days were really fring activities. I started playing in the mid-70s, and some of the stereotypes of the geek gamer are not entirely inaccurate.
Society changed around the gaming community. First, many, many folks experienced RPGs in the intervening 25-30 years. The crowned princes of Great Britain played D&D with the Archbishop of Canterbury as their DM. Robin Willians, Vin Diesel, Al Gore, Mike Meyers, et.al. all played RPGs. Most people under age 25 have likely played an RPG on a game console or I-device at this point.
Going back to the 80s, most people were suspicious of RPGs due to lack of knowledge.
Tom Hanks first major movie was "Mazes and Monsters." (Check out my review at Amazon. The premise of the film is that a group of young role-playing gamers become a bit *too* involved with a game called "Mazes and Monsters," a blatant reference to Dungeons and Dragons.
Tom Hanks plays the boy that falls hard for the role-playing game and comes out psychotic and suicidal. (One of the climatic scenes eerily takes place on the observation deck of the Twin Towers in New York city.)
Back to Mr. Chick and the 700 Club; not all fundementalist Christians believe that D&D summons demons, but many of the fundementalists believe that one should focus one's imagination on "things of good and light." It is not a stretch that focusing on mayhem and many of plots in many RPGs do not fall in that category.
We have to be careful to not be as intolerant the other direction, i.e., gamers towards fundementalist Christians, as some of what occured to gamers.
When I was a youth pastor, I used to use role-playing games as young adult education vehicles. While I did not have the group going around running into demons, I did use RPGs as teaching devices.
I did not do that in my first, second, or third year as a teacher. I had to get credibility with the parents and with the kids.
In the end though, it worked out very, very well.
In service,
Rich
www.drgames.org
The 80s were bad news man. We had to game uphill in the snow, both ways! Dice were cast iron, and weighed 400 pounds each. I knew a guy who rolled a natural 20 once, but crushed his car in the process.
It was so bad, that if you tried to look up an obscure rule in the massive rulebooks, there was a real risk that you'd be eaten by a grue. Try explaining that to your friend's parents!
/good times
I was a newt, but I got better.
How bad were the 80s? Apart from Thatcherism and electropop it was brillant - White Dwarf was a decent magazine for a start.