D&D General The First Demise of TSR: Gygax's Folly

[MGibster]

I never felt like RPGs were in danger from the satanic panic.
I thought it was basically free advertising that tripled sales.
If anything it was more dumb luck.

We've got the benefit of hindsight, but we've heard people who lived through it talk about how it made playing games difficult for them. And when your company is the one being sued for wrongful death you never know how much damage that might actually do. Juries aren't always entirely predictable. Gygax did a great job defending TSR on the national stage and he deserves credit for doing so.

 

[Mannahnin]

I never felt like RPGs were in danger from the satanic panic.
I thought it was basically free advertising that tripled sales.
If anything it was more dumb luck.

In danger of being banned nationally? Probably not. In danger of being condemned and in effect banned locally? Happened all over the place.

James Dallas Egbert III's disappearance in 1979 and the sensational theory invented by P.I. William Dear about Egbert playing in real life and disappearing in steam tunnels was responsible for national news coverage, kicking off the big fad sales period for D&D, late '79 through '83.

The satanic panic developed a little later, with Pat Pulling founding BADD in 1983. The ongoing slander and libel campaign, dishonest attacks on it in religious and secular media, and fraudulent misinformation peddled to police and school orgs across the country by fake "occult crime experts", resulted in real damage to TSR's sales. Big retailers and department stores like JC Penney and Sears stopped carrying their products, credulous school boards and PTAs shut down/stopped allowing after-school D&D clubs and D&D summer camps, and misguided parents bought into the lie that D&D was harmful and burned books/stopped their kids playing.

There's definitely a degree to which controversy IS free advertising, but by '85 D&D sales were tanking by comparison with those boom years, and while some of it was no doubt market saturation and the challenge of people learning to play, the satanic panic does seem to have done real damage too. I think Gygax did pretty well in his famous appearance on 60 Minutes in '85, but Ed Bradley and company elevated Pat Pulling's nonsense and Thomas Radecki's fraud to equal status with reality, on one of the most watched shows in the country, and gave those lies an unwelcome appearance of credibility.

 

[PHATsakk43]

I never felt like RPGs were in danger from the satanic panic.
I thought it was basically free advertising that tripled sales.
If anything it was more dumb luck.

I can attest that D&D was absolutely equated with Satanism when I was getting into the game in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I hid my copy of B/X Basic books with their covers torn off in folders with my Playboy stash, and was actually far more afraid of my guardians finding D&D stuff than porn. I knew kids who were beaten severely by their parents for being involved in “devil worship” for playing games.

As a then Christian, it caused me personally a lot of guilt and anxiety for playing simply because I did assume that there really was something to the assertions. Among my friends, we were actually afraid to play with any AD&D stuff, as we assumed the “Advanced” part was where you made your pact with Satan. We didn’t get over that fear until around 1993 or so when one of us got DMGR3 Arms & Equipment guide, which after looking through sort of convinced us that, no, “Advanced” just meant more options instead of selling one’s soul.

You really have to remember that there wasn’t any way to discuss the realities of things except word-of-mouth back then. Or maybe if you happened to see something on TV or in a newspaper or magazine. Information was much harder to find, especially on niche topics.

 

[billd91]

There's definitely a degree to which controversy IS free advertising, but by '84 D&D sales were tanking by comparison with those boom years, and while some of it was no doubt market saturation and the challenge of people learning to play, the satanic panic does seem to have done real damage too. I think Gygax did pretty well in his famous appearance on 60 Minutes in '85, but Ed Bradley and company elevated Pat Pulling's nonsense and Thomas Radecki's fraud to equal status with reality, on one of the most watched shows in the country, and gave those lies an unwelcome appearance of credibility.

It's worth noting that some of the big store chains that had started stocking D&D stopped, almost certainly as a result of the Satanic Panic controversy. That narrowed D&D's reach into broader markets.

 

[Mannahnin]

It's worth noting that some of the big store chains that had started stocking D&D stopped, almost certainly as a result of the Satanic Panic controversy. That narrowed D&D's reach into broader markets.

You mean like I noted in the paragraph above the one you quoted?

Edit: I did some digging into archived online department store catalogs a few years ago during a related discussion, and confirmed the Sears annual Christmas Wishbook kept TSR stuff until 1984, but it looks like Penneys and Montgomery Ward dropped them earlier.

 

[TiQuinn]

It's worth noting that some of the big store chains that had started stocking D&D stopped, almost certainly as a result of the Satanic Panic controversy. That narrowed D&D's reach into broader markets.

I remember interviews with Jim Ward about why they made the switch from demons and devils to tanar'ri and baatezu, and it was largely due to seeing the bottom line impacts of losing some of the big box stores. It's tough to say that one has to just wait it out -- yes, the pendulum swung back to people not really caring about demons and devils, but that was also 10 years later. Can a company wait that out? I know Gygax thought it was all a bunch of nonsense, but regardless what anyone, even the head honcho personally thought, they needed ammo to help defend the viability of the company at that point.

(I always thought Tanar'ri sounded pretty awesome as a name. Baatezu a little less so.)

 

[Cordwainer Fish]

I always thought Tanar'ri sounded pretty awesome as a name.

Well, you can produce a glottal stop in that position, but a) only because of the nature of English's weird-ass /r/; it wouldn't work in most languages and b) I'd expect it to get sandhied [1] out after a millennium or so.

[1] Is sandhi a verb? Is now, I guess.

 

[billd91]

You mean like I noted in the paragraph above the one you quoted?

Well, OK then, heavily emphasizing more than noting. I'm not sure there's a bigger or more shocking blow than having made a major distribution deal that will enable getting into the big stores... and then having those stores drop the product a couple years later due to social backlash.

 

[Clint_L]

Yes, it is very different. However, in this particular case, I was referring to Gygax's and even the Blume's practice of hiring friends and family who essentially had no real function at TSR and were quite a drain on resources. Distributing such largesse to friends and family to the point of harming their own bottom line is a fairly common practice among people of modest means who have no experience handling large sums of money who suddenly find themselves swimming in it. i.e. It's something Gygax had in common with MC Hammer and even a lot of lottery winners.

And here I thought you were referring to Gygax's brief parachute pants era.

 

[MGibster]

And here I thought you were referring to Gygax's brief parachute pants era.

Dangerous Journeys was crazy!