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I am always ready to respect people for who they are. For what they choose to do, that most certainly depends on what it is they do. If someone is black, gay, of whatever sex and gender, is of whatever ethnicity, has whatever handicaps, I would be a qualified shithead to treat them poorly for it. If someone chooses to follow a certain religion, that is a completely different matter. Now, some are sensible and some are not among religious people, as with others. In a large organization, one person has no control over what others in it do, and it can be unfair to smear people because of thoroughly revolting actions of another. However, what you CAN do is mark your distance from it by being clear that you do not support it. That is what is expected of every member of an organization. If you do not, you ARE accepting the responsibility for what was done, even if just in a small way.
Not everyone does this. I have no idea if the anti-abortion fanatics did this after the bombings and murders against abortion clinics. The tendency is however quite clear. In religious organizations, this is by and large Not Done. A christian of a certain group does not in general mark their distance to what others of their group has done. It is seen as throwing someone under the bus. And yet, when the group is then held responsible in some way for it, it is always answered by "you can't judge the entire church because of what a few people did".
Which is not how it works.
It was funny as heck, especially when people brought the Dark Dungeons tract to gaming cons. Mostly to giggle at. We used to riff the dialogue from that regularly. Heck, sometimes we still do.
I am so looking forward to the movie.
Back in '89, one of the guys in my college RPG club bought a few hundred of the "Dark Dungeons" Chick tracts and handed them out as a joke. It was pretty funny, although he got a little flack from some gamers about actually giving money to Jack Chick.
A bunch of us started asking when we'd be able to learn to cast real spells by playing D&D. We thought that would have been an AMAZING selling point!
Growing up in New England in the '80s, I didn't really experience much of the whole "Satanic panic" thing at all. Three of the kids in my church youth group and I regularly played D&D in the youth room-- and we even got our associate pastor (who was also an avid sci-fi fan) to play a couple of times! (This was the Tom Moldvay red-book Basic D&D set from 1982.)
My mom started to question all the time I was spending playing D&D, but not out of concern over Satanism. She thought that I wasn't spending time doing anything else.
This actually wasn't true: At school, I was also in the drama club, the chess team, and marching band; I had a part-time job at a department store; and I was heavily involved with church youth group. This was while also keeping my GPA high enough to be in the top 25 of my class (of ~500 students.) From her perspective, though, I was spending most of my waking hours in her presence on D&D.
It wasn't until '85 or '86 that I caught any flack at all about D&D and Satanism. It was my aunt's fault: She's a Christian fundamentalist that generally believes every "fact" she reads or sees on TV. Unfortunately, she put a bug in my mom's ear that D&D was tantamount to devil worship. After that, my mom started the not-very-subtle disapproval of D&D that persists to this day. (Every time she comes over to my house, it's "You're still playing that game?" when she sees the extensive collection of gaming books on my shelves. Keep in mind that I'm in my late 40s, and she's pushing 80.)
But, all-in-all, the whole "Satanic Panic" wasn't much more than a curiosity in the small city in New England where I grew up.
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I responded earlier with something of a minor joke, but to be honest about the topic
I couldn't play D&D with my father at all. It was impossible. It was 1976, and I was 12. When I asked my dad if he would play with us, his answer was
"Can I be a were-wholly mammoth, that carries a .45, and flies through the air breathing fire out of my trunk?"
I answered
“No, that’s not in the rules.”
And he said
“What kind of a fantasy game is that? If I can’t be what I want to be, I don’t want to play.”
Gamma World FTW!!!!
Very cool story, he sounds like great guy with an good sense of humor.
Here in germany, nobody talked about any satanic influence in gaming back in the early/mid 80s, when I started gaming. RPGs were VERY uncommon and you were usually the only one in town when you started gaming. It took two years before I found some other players who were not the ones I "recruited".
While my parents were suspicious about me "not stopping to play games though he grows up", they got used to it over the years, going from criticising to ignoring to accepting and to respecting in the following decades (I guess my enthusiasm and engagement in producing own rpgs, making money with it, organizing some CONs, helping some publishers, etc. helped them changing their mind).
I did NEVER stumbled over any religious bullshit concerning my favorite past-time, though sometimes I would like to meet one of those fanatics (being a quite verbal-aggressive atheist ... this would be fun).
I never kept my hobby hidden - some people do but I really don't care what co-workers or friends think about it. Once in my life, I had a little weird experience when I had a new job - my new bosses asked me, if I like the new town where I moved into for the job, and if I already met some people. I told them, that I had the opportunity to get to know some other roleplayers in advance via an online message board ... some days later they entered my bureau looking quite frightened, backs to the wall, FAR away from me and asked "<name>, what exactly are you doing in your role playing games?" I told them that we sit around a table, experiencing a story together using dice and pen and paper (and chips and beer). "But" they asked "you are not going outside, wearing costumes?" No, I said, there are those who do, but we are just lazy pen & paper people ... then they told me what the sister of one of them had told them: She was just back from some years in the USA and had heard stories about cat-killing, devil-worshipping, cemetery-going roleplayers who do weird rituals and are dangerous.
… if they had heard this lie before my work started, I would probably never have gotten the Job I still have since 14 years …
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The thing is for all of the so-called "hysteria" of the period, the market for RPG's was also pretty much at it's peak at the same time.
Those were among the best years for the hobby. RPGA was strong, subscriptions to Polyhedron made it a real magazine, and the clubs were everywhere. The D+D cartoon was a Saturday morning thing and people were falling over each other to make bad movies inspired by D+D. (My personal favorite still remains "Hawk the Slayer".) Companies like Lion Rampant, White Wolf, FASA, Steve Jackson, and all the rest, pretty much had their best decade during this time, even if Steve Jackson nearly went under because the CIA couldn't tell the difference between a cyberpunk fictional sourcebook and a Hacker's handbook.
The one thing the "hysteria" did was to give truth to the saying that there's no such thing as bad publicity when marketing is up to snuff.
Dude, you already came in here and made a jackass out of yourself with this same pointless comment weeks ago. Why not just go away if you don't agree with the topic premise?
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Also, let's not edit someone's quote to make it look like they wrote something offensive. There are better ways to make that point.
I understand the necessity of doing so, but man it sucks to see your post disappear after you spent twenty minutes writing it. Especially when it's a criticism of the thing that got the post chain erased!
C'est la vis.
Thing is, it's going to be hard to get through this without mention of religion. The anti-RPG hysteria was in large part caused by religious sentiment. There were people, so-called "doctors", who tried to crouch it in medical terms (much like a lot of wannabes do with video games now) but the vast majority of hatred came from the same Satanic Panic corners that unfortunately gripped a lot of the 80's.
Here in germany, nobody talked about any satanic influence in gaming back in the early/mid 80s, when I started gaming. RPGs were VERY uncommon and you were usually the only one in town when you started gaming. It took two years before I found some other players who were not the ones I "recruited".
While my parents were suspicious about me "not stopping to play games though he grows up", they got used to it over the years, going from criticising to ignoring to accepting and to respecting in the following decades (I guess my enthusiasm and engagement in producing own rpgs, making money with it, organizing some CONs, helping some publishers, etc. helped them changing their mind).
I did NEVER stumbled over any religious b@+%#@*~ concerning my favorite past-time, though sometimes I would like to meet one of those fanatics (being a quite verbal-aggressive atheist ... this would be fun).
I never kept my hobby hidden - some people do but I really don't care what co-workers or friends think about it. Once in my life, I had a little weird experience when I had a new job - my new bosses asked me, if I like the new town where I moved into for the job, and if I already met some people. I told them, that I had the opportunity to get to know some other roleplayers in advance via an online message board ... some days later they entered my bureau looking quite frightened, backs to the wall, FAR away from me and asked "<name>, what exactly are you doing in your role playing games?" I told them that we sit around a table, experiencing a story together using dice and pen and paper (and chips and beer). "But" they asked "you are not going outside, wearing costumes?" No, I said, there are those who do, but we are just lazy pen & paper people ... then they told me what the sister of one of them had told them: She was just back from some years in the USA and had heard stories about cat-killing, devil-worshipping, cemetery-going roleplayers who do weird rituals and are dangerous.
… if they had heard this lie before my...
Well, there was a small scare going on in the media (in ZDF, I believe) regarding LARPs in the 90s, including devil worship and the like. When I told my parents about my interest in D&D, my mother got rather concerned because of that and send my father with me to the store to get my first gaming materials.
The bloody clerk steered my towards The Dark Eye, because D&D allegedly was "too complicated" for my young, teenage mind.
I did, however, follow the James Dallas Egbert story very closely, and when 'Mazes and Monsters' was on TV, both my parents watched it with me and said, together
“What in the world are they talking about? That isn’t D&D. David, are you sure you are playing that game correctly?”
HA! I love it. If only more people had that reaction at the time...
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I live in the south, so the D&D iz eebul thing is alive and well. While RPGs are more popular than ever, there are still those who will purse their lips and look at me with apprehension or pity when they find out that I play them (I'm 50 years old. It shouldn't get to me by now but it still does).
A. RPGs aren't "more popular than ever". That peaked in the Eighties. We're a healthy niche hobby, WAY behind CCGs, board games and video games, but still commercially viable.
B. I live in the South as well. That look you're getting? It's for being a fifty year old man playing a "kids" game (which is how a lot of non-gamers see it). I'm forty-four and get the same looks from some of my friends. Who are all pretty much atheists. I actually have more religious people at my table than not, interestingly enough.
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Reading a lot of these stories, I realize I am happy I grew up mostly in really poor places of big cities. Everyone I knew was too busy trying to make rent and put food on the table to give a crap what kinds of games anyone was playing.
The only time I experienced anything negative in the '80s was living in a small town in Upstate New York. One mom (and only one) wouldn't let her son play D&D with us, but she had no problem with Top Secret and Champions.
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I played RPGs at school in the 1980s and no one turned a hair (this is in the UK, which is much less overtly religious than the US - probably much less religious full stop). The first I heard about the devil-worship angle was when I went to a university interview and, as it was down as one of my hobbies on my form, the interviewer asked about it. I didn't know what she was talking about, she clearly didn't believe it anyway and had probably asked just to have something to talk about, the interview moved on and I got a place at the university. No one has ever made a comment about devil-worship and D&D to me again. RPGs are considered the epitome of geekiness but it has no other negative connotations. I remember my mum went to the RPG shop to buy me a present I'd asked for and found the people weird; but then again, they were (by the standards of the 80s - goths with eyeliner and so on).
I live in the south, so the D&D iz eebul thing is alive and well. While RPGs are more popular than ever, there are still those who will purse their lips and look at me with apprehension or pity when they find out that I play them (I'm 50 years old. It shouldn't get to me by now but it still does).A. RPGs aren't "more popular than ever". That peaked in the Eighties. We're a healthy niche hobby, WAY behind CCGs, board games and video games, but still commercially viable.
B. I live in the South as well. That look you're getting? It's for being a fifty year old man playing a "kids" game (which is how a lot of non-gamers see it). I'm forty-four and get the same looks from some of my friends. Who are all pretty much atheists. I actually have more religious people at my table than not, interestingly enough.
A: It depends on how expansive you take "RPGs." If you include RPG video games like WoW or Dragon Age, then we are indeed far, far more popular than ever.
B: This is a big reason why I've only gone to two PFS games in my area. I was probably twice the age of the next-oldest player. The majority of players and GMs were in high school or early college-- and a plenty were younger than that. I got the 'hairy eyeball" from more than one parent dropping off their 12-year-old, wondering why a guy in his mid-40s was playing games with children. (And, honestly, I might have done the same if I were in those parents' shoes!)
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A: Haladir, I include "WoW" and Dragon Age with video games. I should have specified TTRPG, sorry.
B: Exactly. In this age of "Catch a Predator" and a hysterical media (and the reality of Fed prisons being overrun with geek gamer kiddie porn lovers), parents can definitely give the stink eye to grown men playing games with twelve year olds they aren't related to. Nothing about the religious scare from the '80s need be present.
I used to play at a game store, and Magic and Pokemon CCGs were popular there. We were running PFS concurrently, and I know one guy at the table was an SO (ran him through the DPS data base). I didn't know if the PFS rules allowed me to exclude him, so I didn't, but I felt very uncomfortable knowing he was in a room full of kids.
It's a big reason I only play home games with people I know now.
My parents went to the gaming stores and bought miniatures for my birthday. Despite growing up in a somewhat conservative town, the kids around me were reasonable and didn't believe any of the "D&D/heavy metal/Madonna will make you a Satanist/druggie/sex fiend" nonsense that media foisted upon us. All was well in my neck of the woods. :)
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We've transitioned from being "Is that the weird game your son plays?" to "It's the game my dad plays with his geezer friends."
A. RPGs aren't "more popular than ever". That peaked in the Eighties. We're a healthy niche hobby, WAY behind CCGs, board games and video games, but still commercially viable.
Reminds me of one of my nights on DDO. Guy says over voice chat that he "would imagine only poor people still play using pen and paper. Mostly in countries that don't have video games yet."
My friends introduced me to gaming with gamma world in 4th or 5th grade around '81 or '82... and bluebox becmi a year later. There didnt seem to be any stigma about it at the time in my part of the world (colorado).
My parents let me get the red and bluebox of becmi for a buck a piece at a goodwill. I finished off the sets at store prices, then got into 2e until spelljammer, then moved into palladiums heroes unlimited, ninjas and superspies and rifts.
My parents definitely brought me all of the 'hysteria concerns'... is it devil worship... i'm not going to try and kill myself if my character dies... I understand the difference between fantasy and reality.... I'm not 'on the drugs' am I... I'm never going to make a living in the real world with gaming so if my grades fall off they're taking it away. Make sure you're feet are on the ground... That kind of thing...
All my gaming sessions were on a nice covered back porch picnic table outside a giant bay window. I simply told them how lucky they were that they had a visual lock on me at all times though the window and that my hobby, relative to other kids in the neighborhood, required less 'soccer mom driving' and less expense overall. And we were 'outside' so my friends weren't being loud and tracking in mess all over her impeccable home and her 3000 dollar couches.
The fact that I was never 'dark and brooding', never did drugs, made logical rational points to them and got good grades probably helped a lot. While they certainly made the occasional 'if you dont do what we say we're taking your books'... We both knew that once the books were gone they'd have a harder time keeping tabs on me.
Probably the biggest disadvantage for me of that experience is how much they stressed the 'feet on the ground' messsage.... It sunk in to such a degree that I do really have a strong belief that you cant make money doing what you love. I have never enjoyed a job and have a huge built in mental hurdle at the notion that a job I'd like is 'real work' even if it might pay the bills. Even if I could find work in the gaming industry I probably couldnt talk myself into pursuing it because my mind is hardwired to think 'your job is what you do for a living that is productive meaningful contribution to society' and gaming is 'that BS you do in your spare time thats all fantasy in your head and doesn't do anyone any good.'
Yeah. It helped that gaming was, by comparison, a stark contrast to my sister and cousin... Both a year older than I was and getting in trouble for sneaking out at night.
My cousin had the 'trope' experience of having her mother find out she'd snuck out of the house by seeing her on television being taken to the hospital from a rock concert...
She went to... geez. I forget... Axl Rose? VanHalen? Some concert where too much drinking and crazy went on... On the tv concertgoers being loaded into ambulances and sure enough... One of them is my cousin.
None of that kinda drama in my gaming group. My dad basically admitted I was a much better son than he was... He'd always sneak out at night, steal his dad's car, toss cherry bombs into places you shouldnt... We might do tons worse in fantasyland but i'd never consider anything like that in real life or he'd have kicked my butt.
They knew my sister and cousin were up to no good far worse than I was.