Normal, is sports, fast gas guzzling cars for nobody can take you seriously if you don't have status and huge expensive cars is a great phallic symbol, cop shows, hospital shows, detective shows, sports sport sports sports, talk shows, beer guzzling jocks who were high school heroes and can describe their winning playbook fourty years later, accountants,
D&D is for people who don't fit in society, and only normal people make up society. And Protestant Christians too (not to turn this into a religious rant but you asked) Not nerds and geeks. Nerds and geeks should just stay trapped in the closet and should only come out when a normal person can't understand a computer glitch of some sort.
It sounds to me like you've had some bad experiences. I'm sorry to hear that. But I think you paint with an extremely broad and bitter brush. I understand what you're getting at, but I think you both misread 'normal' people and mis-characterize them and yourself. Nerds and geeks not a part of society? Not fitting into society? On the contrary, nerds and geeks are a part of society.
D&D is a game for people who enjoy using their imaginations and interacting socially with other people while doing so. It's not something to be ashamed of or embarrassed by. You know what 'normal' people do? They engage in any number of equally obscure or bizarre hobbies equal to D&D...and that's perfectly OK.
My father-in-law is a fairly conservative Vietnam veteran and former prison guard. He likes sports, goes hunting and enjoys country music. He also likes to dress up like a cowboy, call himself 'Cookie' and goes to '
Cowboy Shoots'. Oh, and we live in
Pennsyvlania and always have. He also goes to Black Powder Shoots and has a period costume for that. Is that 'normal'? Is that any different from a group of D&D players? Are the people who spend 11 months building an air cannon for the annual 'Punkin Chunkin' any less normal than D&D players?
Of the five members of my normal gaming group from the last 1o years, two are big sports fans. We all like detective shows and most of us like 'Top Gear'. Two of us love Craft Beers. One of us works as a project leader for a power company, my wife used to graphic design, one of us is a DBA and the others work in technical fields. We work for financial companies, medical companies and other 'normal' places.
Now you might think we 'run under the radar' or otherwise hide our nerdy tendencies. We do not. One player ended up getting recruited for a game at work when talking about his game. I've explained the basic idea of the game and culture around my office multiple times. No one would mistake me or my friends for anything other than a geek. And that's great.
Creating an 'us versus them' mentality is, to me, counter-productive. In the 1980s, lots of so-called 'normal' people played D&D. You can see it in E.T., for example...Speilberg put it in there because like watching someone play a Wii in a movie now, it was in the zeitgeist. It's no accident that so many fantasy movies came out in the early 1908s. As often as not, 'normal' people get D&D just fine, if you take the time to explain it to them. And if they think it's nerdy or immature, that's their right. If that bothers you, you can try to explain it to them or just ignore them. That's your right.
Are there folks out there who will never cotton to it, particularly if they perceive some religious problems with the material? Certainly. But you can't let those kinds of people dictate your life, your behavior or your happiness. There are plenty of religious people who play D&D, enjoy Harry Potter and who have no problem with the two coexisting. As pointed out, D&D's creators certainly saw no conflict, nor do folks like designer
James Wyatt or boardgame reviewer
Tom Vasel. There are D&D players of every creed and color, limited more by access to materials and language than religious belief.
What I'm trying to say is that I hope you don't underestimate 'normal' people. Many of them may not enjoy D&D and similar games, but that doesn't mean they don't understand them and can't understand why people would like or enjoy them. Heck, with the success of stuff like Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, we have an easier reference than ever before. It's often said that people fear what they don't understand. Keeping D&D as some sort of fringe culture doesn't do a service to gamers or non-gamers. When I was 21, it felt cool to break the world up into 'us' and 'mundanes'. But I don't have that view now and a large reason for that is that I've met too many people who weren't geeks but who were awfully fine people (and who in turn passed no judgment ON geeks). I keep remembering Peter Gabriels song, 'Not One of Us', where he says: "
there's strength in numbers....when we learn to divide. How can we be IN, when there Is. No. OUTSIDE."
mad
