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Petty moves from a petty man.

“Perhaps I should have considered other options.” (head-desk)

Innocent people do not delay justice.

“Facilitate” is an active verb, not a weasel word.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

I would try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

Disappointing to see gov. newsom with his finger to the wind.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

There are consequences to being an arrogant, sullen prick.

The arc of the moral universe does not bend itself. it is up to us to bend it.

Oh FFS you might as well trust a 6-year-old with a flamethrower.

You cannot love your country only when you win.

Since we are repeating ourselves, let me just say fuck that.

Everybody saw this coming.

Tide comes in. Tide goes out. You can’t explain that.

Following reporting rules is only for the little people, apparently.

This really is a full service blog.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

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Hey Washington Post, “Democracy Dies in Darkness” was supposed to be a warning, not a mission statement.

Dumb motherfuckers cannot understand a consequence that most 4 year olds have fully sorted out.

You are here: Home / Popular Culture / Gamer Dork / Late Night Open Thread: Dungeons & Dragons & Memory Holes

Late Night Open Thread: Dungeons & Dragons & Memory Holes

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Evidence that progress has been made, in some areas; there are still individuals who regard D&D as the Devil’s Doorway but nowadays the rest of us laugh at them. From the NYTimes article:

… The 1980s were prime years for accusations that the game fostered demon worship and a belief in witchcraft and magic. Some religious figures cast it as corrupting enough to steer impressionable young players toward suicide and murder. As Retro Report recalls, fears began to be stirred in 1979 with the disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III, a gifted 16-year-old student at Michigan State University and a devoted D&D player. The game warped his thinking and drove him to behave erratically — or so some insisted. In reality, the boy was already troubled. After a month’s absence, he was found. But in 1980 he ended up taking his own life.

A nationwide focus on his plight propelled interest in D&D. Sales soared, with the numbers of players leaping from the thousands into the millions. Condemnation rose as well, usually after bad things happened to D&D gamers….

Agitation over the game has subsided. So has general interest. D&D is classically low-tech, played with pens, paper, dice and figurines. Its influence, however, abides, notably among creative types who acknowledge that they qualified as full-blown nerds in their teens…

Figures that the Grey Lady somehow manages to overlook the real reason D&D has been “normalized”; the kids playing it today are the kids and grandkids of those original 1970s gamers.

As for the foundational horror story highlighted in the video… I was working on that campus when Dallas Egbert went missing and William Dear discovered his perfect marks in Egbert’s parents. Even the campus and city newspapers reported — obliquely, as was the custom in those days — that Egbert was a gay sixteen-year-old, bullied by his older dorm mates’ jock friends, seeking to explore his sexuality and consuming whatever intoxicants he could get his hands on. Given his extreme youth, all the men were older & he couldn’t legally consume so much as a beer. He also played D&D. Private Investigator Dear might not be able to track down a flatulent St. Bernard in an old-fashioned phone booth, but he could spot a gullible media personality like a hawk hunting mice. And since the campus bullies, the still-mostly-underground local gay community, and the people who sold Egbert drugs & booze weren’t exactly eager to speak for attribution, Dear made himself an easy profit blaming Those Witchcraft-Addled D&Ders who were Egbert’s only street-legal comrades.

It’d be nice to believe Dear was genuinely afraid that gamer voodoo had ensnared an innocent child, but his every action during those dark days belies that. Like every other outbreak of Satanic Panic in America, the Great D&D Terror was 60% gullible idiots, 30% victims / victimisers looking for something to blame, and 10% grifters honing in on the latest profitable outrage. Only the proportions change, and that not by much.

ETA:
Commentor Condorcet Runner Up linked to a great post by Annalee Newirtz at io9, “How We Won the War on Dungeons & Dragons” — the NYTimes reporters would have done well to read it, too. But then they’d have risked their readers (or their editors) seeing comments like…

It was never a fair fight between fundamentalist Christianity and D&D. One was a dangerous system full of dark mysticism and threats to warp a young mind beyond repair, and the other was a tabletop RPG.

Reader Interactions

75Comments

  2. 2.

    Villago Delenda Est

    The Grey Lady gets nearly everything wrong. From Robert Goddard to Adolf Hitler.

  3. 3.

    Walker

    D&D and RPGs are the foundation of almost every modern video game. This is a large part of its influence.

  4. 4.

    Chip Daniels

    The 80s were also the time of the Satanic Sex Cult Panic, which turned out to be the Salem Witch Trials of our age.

  5. 5.

    MobiusKlein

    Wait, what does this have to do with the great Bern/Clinton war? (ducks, leaves thread)

  6. 6.

    Just Some Fuckhead, Clinton Supporter

    I still have repressed memories from the McMartin preschool abuse trial that Satan figured so largely in.

    Never played D&D around a table tho. Pretending isn’t in my bailiwick.

  9. 9.

    redshirt

    My High School had a Satanism scare as a shack was found out in the woods and there was indeed a pentagram, and possibly some blood.

    I think it was just Dio fans though.

  11. 11.

    Chip Daniels

    @Just Some Fuckhead, Clinton Supporter:
    My barely repressed memory is how when I first read the accusations, my outrage and fury welled up to where I was ready to join a torch carrying mob.
    But then slowly, bit by bit as the hysteria subsided and the trial wore on, it became apparent that most of the accusations were coached by overzealous inquisitors, to where by the end of the trial I would have voted for acquittal.

    I’ve never trusted prosecutors since..

  12. 12.

    Linnaeus

    10% grifters honing in on the latest profitable outrage.

    Like Rona Jaffe. She read William Dear’s accounts and decided she’d crank out a novel about the dangers of fantasy RPG’s. She even got a TV movie out of it (with Tom Hanks!).

  16. 16.

    Anne Laurie

    @Linnaeus: Yeah, if William Dear deserves to spend his next 15 life cycles as a cockroach, Jaffe has earned at least half as many again. He had a pretext, however slender, for pretending to Egbert’s parents that he was acting in good faith. Jaffe just saw a quick profit and snapped at it like a dog digging through the cat’s litterbox.

  17. 17.

    Just Some Fuckhead, Clinton Supporter

    @eemom: Oh wow, I didn’t even think it might be too soon to bring up a trial from 30 years ago in which no one was convicted of wrongdoing. Sorry about that and have another drink.

  20. 20.

    Major Major Major Major

    Ah, shit, I need to level up my warlock for Thursday. Thanks for the reminder. I’m supposed to be sending Kerbals to their accidental fiery deaths right now, but now I have two dorky games on the brain.

    D:

  21. 21.

    Mike in DC

    I have played D&D, but superheroes have always been my forte. Champions for the point-based, ultra-complex win.

  22. 22.

    Frankensteinbeck

    Social context is important. This is 1980, when the fundie megapastors were at their zenith, and that is not a coincidence. It was when the religionists realized they were heading towards obsolescence. Not only were blacks getting seriously uppity, but ‘God told me to do it’ stopped being a sure fire way to get respect and applause. They signed up with Reagan and launched their defensive action to force their religion into every part of the culture they could reach. You can see how that has gotten increasingly desperate and unhinged.

    A big part of the early game was stopping their kids from leaving the faith. That meant a decade and a half of scare stories and ‘think of the children!’ It created an environment where total control of a child’s life is seen as virtuous and responsible, instead of abuse. They started with the Satanism card, moving one of their personal bugaboos into the public sphere.

  25. 25.

    Bluemouser

    I lived in LA during the McMartin Preschool Trial and in San Diego during the Dale Akiki trial. Looking back I was one of those inclined to reflexively support what the prosecution was saying. After both those trials, like Chip Daniels, my trust in prosecutors and the presumed guilt of those charged by the court system declined precipitously. I will never forget what they did to Mr Akiki. At least at the end he was acquitted and the district attorney voted out of office partly as a consequence of that trial

  26. 26.

    MobiusKlein

    @Mike in DC: ah champs. I remember doing terrible things with those rules, only to have other folks do 5x worse. Desolid, usable vs others. Only for oif armor.

  30. 30.

    NobodySpecial

    D&D was instrumental both to my final break with organized religion and a lifelong love of reading. My tastes in RPG’s has shifted and expanded over the years, with my current focus going to Delta Green and Eclipse Phase, but D&D will always have a special place in my heart.

  32. 32.

    eldorado

    there was indeed a kerfuffle in my little town about the d&d situation, back in 1980-81. they didn’t manage to weaponize it though, so i didn’t suffer any repercussions beyond being a nerd who was into those kind of things.

  33. 33.

    Davebo

    D&D was always just a scam dreamed up by a dice manufacturer trying to offload some ill advised investment in 30 sided dice.

    Real gamers played Star Fleet Battles and Axis and Allies! OK, I piddled with D&D for a while in the 80’s but I was in the Navy and had a lot of time on my hands….

  34. 34.

    Just Some Fuckhead, Clinton Supporter

    @eldorado: I always thought there must be something to the Satan thing the way Tom Hanks disappeared into a D&D game and then inexplicably became a mega superstar.

  35. 35.

    eemom

    @Just Some Fuckhead, Clinton Supporter:

    Oh wow, I didn’t even think it might be too soon to bring up a trial from 30 years ago in which no one was convicted of wrongdoing.

    And innocent people’s lives wrecked, there and in similar cases all over the country. But you’re right, I’m sure they’ve forgotten all about it by now.

  36. 36.

    Just Some Fuckhead, Clinton Supporter

    @eemom: Please stop digging. I like the you that made the funny comment to Botsplainer earlier. Let’s hold on to what we’ve got.

  37. 37.

    TheMightyTrowel

    I tried to play D&D lots – i’m a lover of fantasy/sci fi, I have a rich interior life with lots of whimsy, I have a shit ton of nerdy friends… I also totally lack a grown-up attention span. SQUIRREL. Even games I do play (scrabble, exploding kittens, Cards against humanity) have to end in 30-35 minutes or I just wander off or go all chaotic-evil bomb-thrower and try to flip the table to disrupt game play.

    That said, all my earliest fun sexy times were had while distracting various high school friends from games I grew bored of playing, D&D included. So there’s that.

  38. 38.

    condorcet runner up

    There’s some great background here on the truly misplaced panic that the NYT probably should’ve researched first.

  44. 44.

    Anne Laurie

    @TheMightyTrowel: Sister from another mother!

    I actually ended up marrying my housemate the Dungeonmaster — to the combined confusion & dismay of his loyalest acolytes. (Two of them served as groomsmen, at the end of that chapter. Would’ve been three, but the last one bailed without warning on the day & hasn’t spoken to either of us since.) So I, too, will always have a place in my heart for a game I just could not get into.

  45. 45.

    sinnedbackwards

    Ouch. “hone in on” please tell me it was a typo.

    Back at the dawn of modern time (the early 70s) I remember playtesting what became D&D on visits to MippleStipple via the bozo-bus building denizens. Never found it that engrossing myself, either.

  46. 46.

    Frivolous

    I am 43 and still play D&D. Also Pathfinder.

    I live in the Philippines, so I never got the Satanic scare thing.

    Congratulations on marrying a fellow gamer, Anne Laurie. Really happy for you.

  47. 47.

    Miss Bianca

    @Anne Laurie: Tried playing it once. Our dungeon master was the younger brother of one of my best high school buddies. He was not very experienced. He kept running us into bands of orcs, which got old after a while. Could not take it seriously. I remember one of our elves was called “Constitutional Amendment” – this was when the ERA was still a thing, if only barely.

    I think that was my one and only time with D & D. It was a big thing with the boys at East Quad when I got to UM, which was actually probably around the time that the “panic” was starting. I seem to remember that even Joyce Carol Oates or someone got into the act with a book called “Mazes and Monsters”. Ah…good (?) times.

  48. 48.

    TheMightyTrowel

    @Anne Laurie: My best friend’s husband runs a Gaming Convention (not the kind with booth babes, the kind where a bunch of gamers rent rooms in a hotel and play different RPGs in different rooms and my best australian friend is a seasoned dungeon master. She helped me write a character that is allowed to intervene at any point, take a turn, fuck shit up then leave. This is why we’re buds.

  49. 49.

    Anne Laurie

    @Miss Bianca: My not-yet Spousal Unit is actually an excellent Dungeonmaster, who researched his quests well & was careful to scale the challenges to each batch of players. Eavesdropping on those post-college games led me to try playing… once. He killed my character — who totally earned it — I flipped over the card table, and it was henceforth agreed that D&D was a fun hobby to which I was not temperamentally suited.

    It runs both ways. For example, he’s proud that I post here, but he doesn’t read the blog very often because we’re too nasty for him.

  50. 50.

    Linnaeus

    @Miss Bianca:

    I seem to remember that even Joyce Carol Oates or someone got into the act with a book called “Mazes and Monsters”.

    Rona Jaffe. Very different authors. :)

  51. 51.

    LesBonnesFemmes

    Good Lord, I had a terrible day at work, but HRC’s trouncing #feelthebernfatigue has made everything alright. *sigh*

  52. 52.

    FoxinSocks

    My mother forbade me from playing D&D, insisting it was Satanic. So I got interested in Paganism instead.

  53. 53.

    Seanly

    I played AD&D (also called 1st edition) from 1980 until about ’88. We lived in Little Rock & my liberal mom thought any game that stressed imagination, required cooperation, and was a craw in the side of all the uptight Baptists in the area was alright.
    Fast forward 25 years – my brother & I are bored of all the video games that take care of the math & dice but end up lacking imagination and having no soul. We picked up 1st ed books on ebay for cheap, found PDFs of the old modules & played via Skype. I started playing Pathfinder with a guy we met at the dog park. I have a local group that I play twice a week (when we have time) using the new 5th edition which is a lot of fun. I even got my self-described unimaginative wife to play.

  58. 58.

    opiejeanne

    My son started playing when he was in jr high, about 13 yo. Someone gave him a book and he and the kid next door spent hours with that game. His love of the game caused him to research things like the history of blacksmithing, about which he banged out a good report for English in a half hour one day. Got an A on it, and the computer helped him with spelling errors. I was told by an acquaintance from church that the computer was Satanic.
    This would have been 1983.

  59. 59.

    amk

    guess the nyt’s just wait till you hear from bs counties prophecy didn’t pan out after all. no wonder their numbers are tanking.

  60. 60.

    Anne Laurie

    @opiejeanne: He’s a much gentler soul than I am. Jokes that his Norwegian ancestors were the homebodies… my (illicit) ones were the berserkers who couldn’t stop looking for new people to fight with.

  61. 61.

    hamletta

    You know who has written reams on this issue? Fred Clark, our beloved Slacktivist.

    He grew up in and worked in the evangelical ecosystem. You should buy his book, because he is brilliant, but works at Home Depot.

  62. 62.

    Luthe

    No D20s for me. WhiteWolf sucked me in and so I have many D10s and a deep need to play a game where the source books are only available through illegal download (Werewolf: Apocalypse, for those who care).

  63. 63.

    Shantanu Saha

    I started playing AD&D in high school, then joined my college gaming group. They ran a D&D convention every year, based on their own variant of the original game. Now, 31 years later, we’re still running it, though we are now having a debate over whether to continue using our boutique system (now based on an open source D&D 3.5 variant) or go to 5th edition.

    I learned more about strategy and tactics playing D&D and other RPGs (Champions is my favorite system) than in all my years playing chess.

  64. 64.

    Cermet

    Played it in college from 79 -80. Had a lot of fun. Ran a few games myself. Certainly required using both one’s mind and a lot of imagination. Glad the NYT at least has acknowledge that D&D might just help kids today actually use their minds rather then numbly watch a screen and push buttons/joy sticks.

  65. 65.

    Marc

    I played in high school and while in the military, and I can say AD&D is the gateway game to others. I played Champions, Palladium, and Shadowrun (just roll all the d6’s we have on the table…), and many others I can’t name off the top of my head. I’ve played the computer versions of AD&D and Shadowrun (plus many inspired by those two properties) when I haven’t had a group to game with.

    As for the public bashing of and the scaremongering about AD&D, I thought is was just a bunch of stupid people being lead by a pied piper slinging fear at an unknown other. But I was a teen during that mess, so of course I knew more than the adults, including how to figure out THACO. :)

  66. 66.

    Josh R

    Just finished listening to a podcast on this very topic. Well worth listening to. Interview with Joseph Laycock who wrote a book called Dangerous Games about the moral panic surrounding D&D. Personally I played D&D, and a few other RPGs, casually through grade school, then stopped. My wife, however, was a big D&D nerd for a long time.

    Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy Podcast

  67. 67.

    rumpole

    What “war” they won? the D and D system became the engine for basically every role playing game–some expressly (eg, Baldur’s gate) and some in a more derivative fashion (world of warcraft, diablo, elder scroll, neverwinter nights, etc, etc, ad nausea et infinitum).

    In fact, it’s still relevant to our politics. The Republican choice is between Asmodeus (lawful evil) and the Demogorgon (chaotic evil). You pick.

  69. 69.

    Paul in KY

    I work with a guy who used to know Mr. Gygax. I played D & D back in college & also played one called Traveler & another one about samurai/ninjas, that I’ve forgotten the name to.

    Having a good dungeonmaster was the key in those games.

  71. 71.

    NotMax

    No love for Tunnels & Trolls? Boot Hill? Teenagers From Outer Space?

    Ral Partha miniatures made with honest to gosh real lead?

    @Paul in KY

    At one time, in NYC at least, there was a store which sold only books and materials for Traveler, the sheer number of which were legion.

  72. 72.

    GMVictory

    @Luthe:

    For you: http://www.rpgnow.com/browse/pub/1/White-Wolf

    All editions available and the new 20th Anniversary Edition too

    I just did maths and realized I’ve been playing (mostly DM/GM) D&D and other RPGs for 35 years with a massive game library to go with it. It has and continues to be one of the best things I do for myself and for others. I’ve run dungeon crawls, political intrigue, superheroes, sci-fi, westerns, samurai, anime, tv crime series, movie-based series, good guys, bad guys, and a little bit of both. And some stuff that doesn’t come to mind right away.

    Matching wits with 2-7 people and trying to give them an experience where they jump up, shout, and high-five/fist bump each other like they won the big game is the best as well as laughing our asses off when someone spectacularly crashes and burns.

  73. 73.

    Paul in KY

    @NotMax: I enjoyed that one more than D & D. Also, maybe, because I managed to roll a Scout Ship right from the getgo.

    Would have liked to visit that shop.

  75. 75.

    Marc

    Now I could have seen some folks panic if Macho Women With Guns had been out at that time. Then there were the two expansion packs – Bat Winged Bimbos From Hell and Nuns With Guns. That trio would have sent the fundies knickers into high orbit with all the twisting had it been as popular as AD&D…

    From the wiki:

    “Macho Women with Guns is set in a near-future America where society has collapsed due to the misdeeds of the Reagan administration. Taking advantage of the earthly chaos, Satan has dispatched his female minions, the Batwinged Bimbos From Hell, to rebuild society in a form he approves of. The Vatican has responded to Satan’s plans by dispatching its elite group of warrior nuns, The Sisters of Our Lady of Harley-Davidson to combat the bimbos. The two groups of women compete (sometimes violently) to rebuild civilization by vanquishing post-apocalyptic menaces and male chauvinism.”

    The metal figures were what you’d expect – chainmail bikini babes of various winged and non-winged design, sporting heavy weaponry.

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