In case anyone is wondering, I mean to rant here because this is one of those cultural things that annoys me and its one of the few said cultural things that I can actually talk about here. I am not intending however through this rant to insult anyone. I have rather the opposite intention of pulling anyone down.
palleomortis said:
I can understand the skeptisism. I have to agree that if a friend just showed up with a monstermanual, or some other books (Book of Vile Darkness), I would be skeptical too. But whenever the namd Dungeons and Dragons is mentioned, it seems less skeptism, and more Fear/Distain. If startles me that people can so blantantly accept or suppose that the game is so incredibly horrid and warping that even watching it played or talking about it will effect you. After all, the people that usually act in such a way are often people I veiw as logical, smart-ish, people.
Keep thinking like that. It will serve you well. But allow me to explain a bit more of what is going on.
The other side isn't 'balantly accepting' anything. The first step in understanding is to assume that the other side holds the positions that they do for reasonable and valid reasons. You don't have to agree with those reasons, you don't have to like them, and you can think that they are based on faulty information or understanding, but you have to understand that in that other person's shoes they seem (and may even be) perfectly reasonable.
In my experience, how this all came about is something like this:
Parent A hears about D&D and thinks this could be a really neat thing. So he buys his kid the D&D Basic set and expects to maybe play with his kid, and that the kid will play with the neighbors. He's reading through 'Keep on the Borderlands' when he comes across pasages in it about torture and frescos of nude women frollicing with demons or something of the sort. He thinks to himself, "Hmmm... you know this is a little heavier of material than I expected. I'm not comfortable with some of this.' But, generally being open minded, this doesn't deter the original intention, because after all, it's just snippets of text. Then he orders the 'D&D Coloring Book' for the kid for Christmas through the mail, and things get worse. Now those passages are illustrated, and there is all this dark material and when the kid colors it, it looks pretty freaky. So now he's getting worried about the games subject matter, so he talks to some other parents, and they've heard bad things about this game. Then he picks up the Monster Manual and flips through it and there are naked Succubi and entries for Beelzebub and alot of other stuff he sees having no bearing on 'swords and sorcery' as he understands it and he decides that maybe the people publishing this game really are a bunch of freaky Satanists, and maybe some of those wild rumors he's heard about the game are true after all. Parent A confiscates the kids books and tells the kid 'no more D&D'.
Parent B talks to Parent A. Parent C talks to Parent B. Parent C tells Parent A that kids X,Y, and Z who play the game are using drugs/bad influence, and so forth. Pretty soon it enters into the societies common wisdom that 'D&D is bad'. And if you don't believe it, you can always talk to Parent A, who is a trustyworthy figure, and they'll confirm it.
Maybe that isn't fair to the game, but it didn't come about by accident.
If you'll look back at your original post and the first responce to it, I think you'll see that you and maybe some other are making the same sort of snap judgments without information that annoy you so much.
