I know its probably a sore subject, but I just can't imagine anyone more sane than Jack Chick really thinking that burning D&D books would produce howling demon voices.
I'd bet a lot of the hysteria was just bleed-over from the Satanic Ritual Abuse hoaxes, but it seems like fundies like Chick keep stirring the pot to this day, though with considerably less success.
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?
*crosses fingers that this thread doesn't become a trainwreck *
I do my best to avoid any interaction at all with fundamentalists of any stripe. So, I can't tell you what they think about this stuff nowadays, but I'll guess it's just as bad as it used to be.
The real difference is that in the 80s, the media played along because it made for good ratings. Since then, with video games and comics and fantasy novels achieving the level of cultural penetration that they have, it's just not "fringe" enough to exploit for ratings anymore.
Honestly I don't recall the hoopla about D&D being a big deal back in the 80s. I played through the decade, and never had any real issues.
I guess there was a movie about the 'evils' of D&D with Tom Hanks which probably gave people some dumb notions about the pastime, but heck all manner of things get vilified.
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I know its probably a sore subject, but I just can't imagine anyone more sane than Jack Chick really thinking that burning D&D books would produce howling demon voices.
I'd bet a lot of the hysteria was just bleed-over from the Satanic Ritual Abuse hoaxes, but it seems like fundies like Chick keep stirring the pot to this day, though with considerably less success.
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?
*crosses fingers that this thread doesn't become a trainwreck *
If anything, I find the lack of name-brand recognition raises more eyebrows. Since describing it automatically generates the "oh, like Dungeons and Dragons?" response, I'd say that that the name brand change hasn't really made a difference.
That being said... oi... the 80's...
I don't come from very religious stock. But my Step-mother paid at least nominal attention to her religious roots and felt the game was a bad-influence on me. But beyond that I was relatively left alone.
However, I did have friends that weren't allowed to play with me because I was obviously going to corrupt them to my devilish ways. I also had a series of game books confiscated from me at school, not because they weren't appropriate, but because it was, no kidding, a violation of Church and State.
I want to reiterate that. They couldn't take them away from me because they were "demonic", even though they wanted to. So they decided that because it was Satanism (obviously, there's a demon on the cover!), they could take it away because having Dungeons and Dragons books on school grounds was a violation of the First Amendment.
Meanwhile, we had a moment of silence in the morning wherein several teachers encouraged the students to pray out loud with them.
Luckly, my mother fancies herself a Wiccan. She agreed not to pursue the prayer thing if they gave back my books and left me alone. Considering how badly she could have sued them into the ground, they wisely gave in.
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It was never that bad in CA. My parents were little freaked by the Tom Hanks movie, but they bought me the damn books in the first place. We palyed at school with no trouble.
In your experience, has simply changing the name from Dungeons and Dragons to Pathfinder reduced the number of raised eyebrows among the fundamentalist community?
I have to confess I still call it D&D to non-gamers just because they'll get what I'm taking about. "D&D" is like "Xerox" or "Coke" - it means RPG to anyone who doesn't play. Actually, I try to say "Pathfinder-a-Dungeons-and-Dragons-offshoot" if I can.
I think better PR back then could've done a lot to make the whole thing blow over. Let's face it...guys like Gary Gygax were just as hostile towards the fundamentalists as vice versa.
Every generation has some kind of media frenzy over something that gets blown out of proportion. Video game violence, whatever. The media is always there to hype it up and there is always somebody who wants to make it into a crusade.
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Honestly I don't recall the hoopla about D&D being a big deal back in the 80s. I played through the decade, and never had any real issues.
I guess there was a movie about the 'evils' of D&D with Tom Hanks which probably gave people some dumb notions about the pastime, but heck all manner of things get vilified.
Mazes and Monsters was a horrible horrible atrocity. But I believe it was after seeing this that my stepmother backed off the anti-D&D rhetoric. The characters in the movie were so much the opposite of the few sessions of D&D that I'd been allowed to play in the house, she had to question the veracity of the rhetoric. I remember her asking "is this what people think you do?"
I only wish I'd had the Dead Milkmen to play for her in response...
WHERE'S THE CHEETO'S? I WANT SOME MOUNTAIN DEW! IS THERE AN OGRE THERE? I HAVE A DAGGER THAT'S +12 VS OGRES! IF THERE'S ANY GURLS THERE I WANT TO DEEEEW THEM!
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It was never that bad in CA. My parents were little freaked by the Tom Hanks movie, but they bought me the damn books in the first place. We palyed at school with no trouble.
It wasn't really a "Tom Hanks" movie. At that point, Tom Hanks was best known as "the other guy" on "that show where the guys dress up like chicks". He wouldn't really make a in Hollywood for another couple of years.
I spent a lot of time in the 80s defending the game from people who, thanks to folks like Chick and the movie Mazes and Monsters (no, Mr. Hanks, I still haven't quite forgiven you for taking that role...), had the wrong idea about the game. Most were fairly understanding.
Some, however, are too comfortable holding onto their fear and ignorance. We had a great teacher who let us use her lab room as a gaming room hangout during lunches. There was one guy who felt it was his Christian duty to come by on a regular basis and implore us to give up the game so we wouldn't go to Hell. We tried to be civil, but he just wouldn't give up. So we ended up just asking him if he'd please go there first and keep a seat warm for us.
All in all, the 80s weren't a terrible time, but there were a few bad apples. Heck, one of the gamers in my current group had a friend of hers move in with her for a while (she's a Southern Baptist) and she had to ask why "such a sweet lady was playing such a Satanic game." So there's still some holdover from all the hooplah that occurred decades ago.
For me, the anti-D&D hysteria wasn't too bad, although there were a few teachers at my school who reacted negatively to it. I grew up in Atlanta (which despite being in the South, is much more Northern/Cosmopolitan in outlook).
For my husband, though, it was very difficult. He grew up in rural Michigan, and some people at the church his family attended were extremely judgemental. Jeff's parents bought him the gaming books and had no problem with him playing, but parents of many of his friends wouldn't let them play (or insisted they - the parents - be present whenever the game was being played so they could intervene if they decided it was necessary).
While things are far better than they were in the '80s, the damage and misinformation still lingers. We currently live in Tennessee, right in the heart of the Bible Belt. Even in the last few years, I've had co-workers react with astonishment when I mention that I play D&D, asking me "Isn't that the Satanic game...?" (On the plus side, they generally do listen when I explain, and seem somewhat open to being corrected.) And every so often, a member of one of the local churches comes into the Friendly Local Game Store where we run our games, looking to see if the store sells particular items, although in recent years they mostly seemed concerned about White Wolf products (Vampire the Masquerade in particular).
For the record, the game store owner does NOT carry in inventory the specific products those folks are checking on, as the church members really would spread the word that his store is "evil" or something, and severely damage his business. It just isn't worth it. (A nearby office supply store got black-listed by the members of one of the local churches for signing up to sell lottery tickets, and went out of business within a few months even though they changed their minds and stopped selling the lottery tickets.)
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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 !
It's maybe worth mentioning that the place of D&D in (at least American) culture was in kind of a different place in the 80's, in that, on one hand, it was in some ways a much bigger cultural phenomenon than it is now, but on the other hand, geek cultural in general was probably less pervasive than it is now.
In the 80's, you could buy D&D stuff at a Toys R Us, but things like Pokemon cards just didn't exist, if that puts it into any kind of contrast.
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I always found teachers pretty supportive of role-playing too - after all, if it was a choice between pupils voluntarily reading stuff and doing maths and suddenly becoming interested in history and classics, or pupils hanging around and beating up other pupils, then RPGs do seem like a pretty good choice...
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! :)
Guess he needed an outlet for talking about confessions.
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LOL! and vice-versa: in a Living Death campaign game, I brought a character that was a 80-year old Catholic Bishop... due to his great age he had very high mental stats, but with a pathetic STR and DEX, and could actually hold his own against the Cthulu monsters, madness saves, etc., which is usually bloody impossible in a Living Death game, where you are supposed to show up with stacks of alternate PCs due to the high death rate.
My DM was so mad he contacted the campaign staff and had them come up with a campaign ruling to disallow middle age, old and venerable characters! LOL! (there was no such rule before I stumbled into that campaign... sorry folks... :) )
I never played in that campaign again because I refuse to play characters without a shred of suspension of disbelief: events that involve Cthulu lore, in the modern day, should be investigated, IMO, by scholars, priests, experts, etc. which means people with experience and [gasp!] a bit of age behind them... to force characters to be under 35 year old was to me, akin to pronounce that the campaign was from now on only playable with PCs that should ride in a big green van called the Mystery Machine, along with a big brown sandwich-eating great dane dog...
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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)
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Mazes and Monsters did more PR damage to the game than the Satanic Panic ever did. The book was a piece of trash that was written in under a month in order to cash in on a sensationalized news story that had briefly captured the public attention. It bore only a passing resemblance to the actual events it was based on, and sadly it had a much more lasting cultural impact as well. I remember my mother (who was not at all religious) getting all worked up about D&D and making me sit down to watch the TV movie and then talking to me about it.
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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)
I have no real problems with Christianity, but I'd still be wary about using real-world religion in a game unless I know the players very well. I don't want to have to worry about accidentally offending somebody at the table with heresy or making light of matters of faith or spirituality.
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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
Your experience does not match mine. I'm not saying you didn't experience what you experienced, merely that mine run counterpoint, and therefore your experience may be localized to your vicinity. Or you've just had some bad luck meeting d-bags. Of course, I guess it could swing both ways and I just happen to live in a pocket utopia of love and understanding... :)
The gamers in my area run the gamut of various religious/agnostic/atheist and we all seem to get along just fine without proselytizing (sp?).
It may have something to do with the fact that we atheists and monotheists are coming together and both pretending to be pantheists...
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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)I have no real problems with Christianity, but I'd still be wary about using real-world religion in a game unless I know the players very well. I don't want to have to worry about accidentally offending somebody at the table with heresy or making light of matters of faith or spirituality.
And in the US, at least, you're a lot more likely to game with an RC than with a practicing Buddhist, Taoist, Shintoist, or practitioner of pretty-much any real-world shamanic faith.
That said, PDK's DM sounds like a dick, but the religious angle just gave him something to be dickish about.
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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)I have no real problems with Christianity, but I'd still be wary about using real-world religion in a game unless I know the players very well. I don't want to have to worry about accidentally offending somebody at the table with heresy or making light of matters of faith or spirituality.
Believe me: lessons were learned by yours truly! :) I now much prefer campaigns like Pathfinder where the gods/goddesses are fictitious, rather than campaigns like Living Death set in a Victorian or modern era, real-world setting...
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RPG Superstar 2009 Top 32, 2010 Top 8
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Well as I said elsewhere, my parents fought to keep the school from 'cracking down' on we gamers (Especially after our physics teacher took a new job. He actually ran the gaming club). So for a kid in Backwoods SE Ohio (Redneck and proud!) it wasn't that bad.
(Allen, if you're reading this, care to tell me what it was like after I graduated?)
I think the most 'disturbing' thing was my mom was always wigged out when I'd refer to my characters as 'me' and use the names interchangably. It was ok for her to hear "Then rolf the mighty set the orcs on fire, and Ivalisan started sniping at the survivors" then "Then Dave popped off a fireball and I started drilling the survivors of that with my darts..."
I got into gaming in the early 1990s, and the stigma was still pretty strong then. I brought a rulebook with me to an extended-family dinner and my cousin proceeded to tell me that the game was evil and was endangering my soul by allowing me to pretend to use magic or worship gods other than the Judeo-Christian one. I attempted to show her the book to explain to her how misguided her concerns were, but she refused to look at them, vigorously pushing me away when I tried to cross the room with an open book in my hand.
I suspect that my aunts and uncles of a fundamentalist stripe expressed their concerns to my father as well, but he always encouraged my gaming, believing that it was good for my imagination and figuring it was a better way to pass time than less savory activities.
What really had a negative impact on my family's tolerance for my love of gaming was that I grew up in the Raleigh area, and we had a close family friend who knew Chris Pritchard - an NCSU student and avid D&D player who had a history of mental instability and drug use, and conspired with two of his friends to murder his parents in order to get an early inheritance. A true crime novel and made-for-TV movie popularized the case and cast the game in the worst possible light, and that definitely left a negative impression of the game on a lot of people in North Carolina.
I think it was a lot easier for people to believe that D&D made Chris do what he did than it would have been to accept that human beings sometimes do terrible things to each other. This family friend definitely chose to blame the game for Pritchard's actions - and it's hard to blame him for that viewpoint, honestly, because the media was reporting on it for the ratings, and the defense attorneys in the case certainly advanced the idea repeatedly in court in an attempt to absolve their client of responsibility. (I think one reason that my father took all that with a big grain of salt is because he worked as a criminal defense attorney for a number of years, and knew all too well the strategy they were employing.)
As I've gotten older and my family sees that I still enjoy this hobby, AND I have a steady, decent-paying job, a beautiful wife, and a house in a good neighborhood, and have yet to murder or mutilate anyone to appease Orcus, I think their perception of gaming has warmed a bit. Some of them may still think it's weird, but I don't think any of them view it as evil.
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RPG Superstar 2010 Top 16
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Like Shadowborn, I spent a good chunk of time in the mid-80's serving as a spokesman for TSR and the D&D phenomenon, and addressing concerns. There are some very old threads on these boards discussing those days.
Briefly, there were several different concerns, which we'd do well to not lump together. The three most popular:
- Dungeons and Dragons presents a pagan world and urges players to pretend to worship pagan gods. Also, there are devils and demons, and ways for PCs to summon them and command them.
- Dungeons and Dragons is very immersive and can lead people into dangerous obsessions.
- Dungeons and Dragons is violent.
All of these concerns have a common element, though. D&D is role-playing, in the psychological as well as popular meaning of the term. If you constantly put yourself in situations where you pretend to be a brave starship-pilot, it will grow easier for you to behave that way in more general circumstances. So all of these concerns have to do less with "behavior at the gaming table" and more to do with "more generalized behavior, influenced by D&D."
There's a segment of the gaming fandom that pooh-poohs this argument entirely. Running a character in D&D, or playing "Grand Theft Auto", doesn't make you think that way outside the game, they assure people. But study after study shows that any sort of situation where you get rewarded for making a certain kind of decision will bleed over into your general reactions to things, for at least an hour or two.
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.
But TSR kept putting out written adventures, where killing everybody who disagreed with you was exactly what you should do. So I didn't think the Chair Defense was all that solid a response. (My response, as I was a freelancer for TSR at the time, was to write adventures where "kill them; kill them all" was not the right answer. In fact, it would probably end badly for you.)
The 80's were so rough on D&D that when the 2nd edition came out the Assasin class, and all references to the names "devil" and "demon" were removed to help give the game a better image.
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RPG Superstar 2009 Top 32, 2010 Top 8
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I grew to find my fellow Christians' arguments about the pagan deities in the game kind of funny.
Christian: Putting those 'gods' in a book will make Billy want to worship them!
Non-Christian: Putting my gods in those books mocks and belittles them! You can't give Vishnu hitpoints!
D&D, evil anti-Christian propoganda or Christianist mocking of other faiths? Next on Springer!
That said, PDK's DM sounds like a dick, but the religious angle just gave him something to be dickish about.If the word "peckish" means to be hungry for food, then "dickish" sounds about right as a description for that DM from these days of future past... :)
Peckerish?
I started playing D&D when I was 8 in the very late eighties. Young and naive, I found it very confusing when 2nd edition and removed the demons and devils for awhile and then later renamed them. I had gotten my 1e Monster's Manual when I was nine, and was fascinated by the sections on demons and devils. There pictures and the way they were described in the game were kind of scary for me, but a good way, like a good horror movie-scary, yet entertaining. As a child, I couldn't imagine how people could think having them in the Monsters Manual was evil as in my mind, if it was in the Monster Manual, it wasn't meant to be killed. Still, one of my friends wasn't allowed to play D&D until his junior year in highschool. But he was allowed to play any other roleplaying games like Marvel Superheroes, MERP, and even Rolemaster. I always thought that was strange, but I guess his mother had just targeted D&D because that was one game everyone knew about.
Most of my gang (soon going to the 4th Decade) went threw that worried that the whole game would go away.
We had made the links with the "glorification of evil worship" that a some heavy-metal showmanship had made. We figured it was seen as equaly important for some people to get the gamers away from the D&D stuff as stoping people from listening to the "madening damaging music".
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That said, PDK's DM sounds like a dick, but the religious angle just gave him something to be dickish about.If the word "peckish" means to be hungry for food, then "dickish" sounds about right as a description for that DM from these days of future past... :)
I agree, he does sound like a dick. But equating his behavior with being gay implies that being gay would make him a bad person, an ironic and inappropriate choice in a thread discussing how horribly we feel about people being intolerant of our lifestyles...
...just sayin'...
That said, PDK's DM sounds like a dick, but the religious angle just gave him something to be dickish about.If the word "peckish" means to be hungry for food, then "dickish" sounds about right as a description for that DM from these days of future past... :)I agree, he does sound like a dick. But equating his behavior with being gay implies that being gay would make him a bad person, an ironic and inappropriate choice in a thread discussing how horribly we feel about people being intolerant of our lifestyles...
...just sayin'...
Um... I must be missing something. What did any of those comments have to do with being gay?
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Um... I must be missing something. What did any of those comments have to do with being gay?That said, PDK's DM sounds like a dick, but the religious angle just gave him something to be dickish about.If the word "peckish" means to be hungry for food, then "dickish" sounds about right as a description for that DM from these days of future past... :)I agree, he does sound like a dick. But equating his behavior with being gay implies that being gay would make him a bad person, an ironic and inappropriate choice in a thread discussing how horribly we feel about people being intolerant of our lifestyles...
...just sayin'...
"If peckish means to be hungry for food, then dickish..."
anyone whose taken the SAT's knows that the follow up would logically be "... means to be hungry for dick". Now, while he didn't *say* "hungry for dick", the implication is there.
I was assuming "Hungry for Dick" was a reference to being Gay. If not, I would really like to see how it could otherwise be interpreted.
I'm not trying to start a war, or even an argument. It's part of our culture to instinctively say such things. 90% of jokes jab at one culture/society/ethnicity/orientation or another. I catch myself doing it all the time. So I don't think he meant any harm in it so much as he was taking the opportunity to make a clever word play, and as such I take no offense.
In any other thread, I would overlook it and not say anything. I would probably even laugh at the cleverness of it. But here, well, the irony was a little too much to ignore...
EDIT: Before this goes further, I should point out that I am not angry, do not think he meant anything inflammatory, neither hold anything against PDK nor think poorly of him, nor do I expect or desire an apology.
I just thought it was ironic and opened my mouth when it probably would have been just as well not to say anything...
Oh, I suppose I get it. Missed that entirely... glad I did, too. Sorry to call attention to it.
Thank you poizen37. Your post was far better than the one I was working on.
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Thank you poizen37. Your post was far better than the one I was working on.
I watched my uncle get beaten to within an inch of his life in 1984, just because people didn't like the way he lived his life behind closed doors. In retrospect, I don't feel so bad about having to deal with the anti-D&D crowd.
After decades of defending him, I had to realize one day that those times were pretty much over, and most people who say something that could be considered offensive don't see the connection because the terminology is still there, even though the mentality behind it is gone.
Wow... the 80's really did suck, now that I think about it...
Sorry for the threadjack folks. I did try and bring it back around. Can we talk about Jack Chick now?
I know its probably a sore subject, but I just can't imagine anyone more sane than Jack Chick really thinking that burning D&D books would produce howling demon voices.
I'd bet a lot of the hysteria was just bleed-over from the Satanic Ritual Abuse hoaxes, but it seems like fundies like Chick keep stirring the pot to this day, though with considerably less success.
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?
*crosses fingers that this thread doesn't become a trainwreck *
I've scrolled through the various responses and thought I'd weigh in. I was born in '75, and by the mid-80's was playing the Red Box with a few friends that I'd stumbled across in Central Ohio.
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. However, with that said, geek culture and being a geek and having friends that were geeks was not at all where it is today. In my personal experience, stumbling through school was much more about being a "cool" kid than anything to do with Tunnels and Mazes.
When we would play in the cafeteria for 30 minutes or so, whenever anyone walked near, conversation would universally drop off to a whisper until that person had passed by. It wasn't because we were afraid of being considered devil-worshippers, it was because we didn't want to be considered un-cool. Since those halcyon days, we've seen the explosion of WoW, the popularity of Harry Potter, and the cinematically rendered glory of the Lord of the Rings. Hell, even Star Trek has been re-engineered into some degree of popularity.
So, as I remember it, the 80's were not so much as associating D&D (or roleplyaing in general) with evil as much as they were about being considered a nerd. Mind you, geeks and their relative counter-culture coolness had not yet been invented, and those of us whole played D&D were most certainly nerds, the absolute lowest rung of the social ladder.
Well, except for those poor bastards in Show Choir.
Then again, they've had their own resurgance with Glee.
My evangelical stepfather outright banned D&D. I played anyway. :)
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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....
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.
...I spent a good chunk of time in the mid-80's serving as a spokesman for TSR and the D&D phenomenon, and addressing concerns.
Would that make you the same Chris Mortika who wrote the preface for WG7 Castle Greyhawk? I knew I'd seen your name before somewhere...
I belong to a fairly conservative Christian denomination, and it was interesting to hear the "D&D is satanism in sheep's clothing" thing go through the community. Luckily for me, my parents were actually sane about it, and did something unusual for the time... they actually watched me play a game.
I don't remember their exact response, but they never bothered me about it after that. I presume that after a few hours of rolling dice, moving minis, and hearing discussion about various arcane topics, they got bored and wandered off.
Of course, that didn't stop my sister in law, when she found out I was a gamer, from encouraging my wife to burn all of my role-playing books (because apparently making them all disappear was not good enough) while I was out. This was in 1996. Luckily, my wife is also sane, has seen me play many times, and has no fear for my immortal soul on that point.