My wife rolled with it. Now our children play games with Dad along with friends of decades.
My sleep deprived brain envisioned this literally. As in Hades throwing undead critters at Pluto.
Nobody thinks the CKs actually read the stuff they were condemning, do they?
Realistically, I don't think many folks who have knee-jerk fear reactions to a thing, regardless of political or religious bend, fully explore why they have that reaction.
We started DnD back in '82-83 (Catholic gradeschool), I was the president of our DnD club in high school (private Catholic high school, enshrined in the year book
), and there was not a peep about the Satanic Panic from any adult, except my one friend's (our DM's) uncle, who was deep into the panic, but everyone ignored him. Our folks were all happy they knew where their teen kids were - playing games with their friends at someone's house all weekend, including staying up all night - and that we weren't getting in trouble. Our same group of 5-6 players still plays over 40 years later. Sounds like they cribbed it directly from the Comics Code.
Yeah, that was my immediate thought.
You played D&D with a monk? What level was he?
It's not too dissimilar to the Hays Code which was a guideline for American movies from the 1930s until the late 1960s. Because D&D proved so popular with kids, I imagine TSR was pretty adamant about keeping things somewhat family friendly for public relations purposes.
True, but at the time the Comics Code was still current, albeit slightly liberalized in the 70s, whereas the Hays Code had been abolished for about 20 years. Plus, for all that movies were far bigger overall, comics were near and dear to the nerd culture D&D grew out of (and came to partially define); I believe Gygax himself mentioned the old EC horror titles in the original Appendix N (notably at the center of the controversy that spawned the Code), and elsewhere expressed admiration for early Doctor Strange, so almost certainly he was familiar with it.
