D&D in the 80s, Fads, and the Satanic Panic

Mannahnin

Scion of Murgen (He/Him)
Board games, I think, were still very much considered the province of kids and families at the time. It wasn't until -- what, the early 90s? -- that "Eurogames" got a real foothold?
Early to mid 2000s, I think. Settlers of Catan being the standard bearer.

After Settlers was first released in 1995, a small but passionate following emerged. It wasn't until a decade later that the game's popularity began to blossom. "The start of the tipping point was 2008," said Bob Carty, a spokesman for Settlers manufacturer Mayfair Games. "Settlers is three to five years away from being a household word." Last year alone, the game's sales grew 35 percent. Carty said that the game is mainly played by families, but it's also popular on college campuses and as a team-bonding activity at companies.

This article is from 2011. 2008 was also the first year that the Catan World Championships (started in Essen, in 2002) were held in the US, at Gen-Con Indy. Starting then, the event has been every two years, alternating between the US and Germany until the pandemic put it on hold.


 

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Jer

Legend
Supporter
I've never flipped through BECMI. What do you think it did beyond what B/X did to make it explicitly all ages? (What separated the changes out as being explicitly more open to the younger group as opposed to the no-experience group?) Thank you for any insight!
So specifically in the Basic set I think the introduction on how to play - the narrative choose-your-own-adventure beginning and the later more "fighting fantasy" numbered text sequence for how to play the game with dice and hit points - are the things that feel aimed at a younger audience than the B/X game. The B/X version of it was the "Example of Play" which just reads like any other example of play you might read. There are a few other little things - like how in the B/X version clerics are explicitly priests of gods/goddesses while in Mentzer Basic clerics explicitly gain their spells from a devotion to a "great and worthy cause" - usually their Alignment, and the discussion of having mythological gods in the game is off in the DM's book as an optional thing you could add if you really want to and everyone is okay with it. Basically the fact that it's a much more tutorial oriented rulebook combined with some nods to Satanic Panic.

I do think that trails off after the Basic set though - the Expert-Immortals sets are more "all ages" than specifically targetting a younger crowd (in fact if I remember correctly the Immortals set was 14+ - mostly I think because of the discussions of 5-th dimensional mathematics and physics that made up a large chunk of the book, tbh.)
 

Reynard

Legend
Early to mid 2000s, I think. Settlers of Catan being the standard bearer.



This article is from 2011. 2008 was also the first year that the Catan World Championships (started in Essen, in 2002) were held in the US, at Gen-Con Indy.

I must have been remembering Catan. I thought the follow on was quicker.
 

Cadence

Legend
Supporter
Board games, I think, were still very much considered the province of kids and families at the time. It wasn't until -- what, the early 90s? -- that "Eurogames" got a real foothold?

Were the Avalon Hill ones (and those of that style) aimed at older? Did the public at large have any consciousness of them?
 

Yes, although the "a lot of mainstream experts and shows giving credence to it" is another part of the myth.

It was reported in a lot of mainstream places, mostly local newspapers and tabloid talk shows, though 60 Minutes most famously. I don't think there was ever actually a significant number of medical or psychological experts who had a problem with it. Pat Pulling's accomplice, fraud and later felon Thomas Radecki, founder of the "National Coalition on Television Violence" was the most prominent and loud "expert", and he was later shown demonstrably to be a complete charlatan. As was Pulling.

I am just reporting what I remember from the time, and I am sure this varied a great deal, but I certainly recall seeing it on mainstream news programs, seeing experts on panels. I also remember a number of school counselors at my schools taking issue with Dungeons and Dragons (and routinely asking those of us who played questions about our hold on reality). I am sure there were a majority of experts who didn't go in for this stuff. But people were going to jail for crimes they didn't commit during the satanic panic. It wasn't a marginal movement by any stretch.
 

Mannahnin

Scion of Murgen (He/Him)
So specifically in the Basic set I think the introduction on how to play - the narrative choose-your-own-adventure beginning and the later more "fighting fantasy" numbered text sequence for how to play the game with dice and hit points - are the things that feel aimed at a younger audience than the B/X game. The B/X version of it was the "Example of Play" which just reads like any other example of play you might read. There are a few other little things - like how in the B/X version clerics are explicitly priests of gods/goddesses while in Mentzer Basic clerics explicitly gain their spells from a devotion to a "great and worthy cause" - usually their Alignment, and the discussion of having mythological gods in the game is off in the DM's book as an optional thing you could add if you really want to and everyone is okay with it. Basically the fact that it's a much more tutorial oriented rulebook combined with some nods to Satanic Panic.

I do think that trails off after the Basic set though - the Expert-Immortals sets are more "all ages" than specifically targetting a younger crowd (in fact if I remember correctly the Immortals set was 14+ - mostly I think because of the discussions of 5-th dimensional mathematics and physics that made up a large chunk of the book, tbh.)
Yeah, Mentzer Basic in 1983 was the dedicated effort to crack the formula to teach players how to play directly from the books. Folks DID teach themselves from B/X and from Holmes Basic, but it was definitely harder.

Those first couple of years in the 80s were when the sales numbers, as Snarf mentioned in the OP, shifted younger. Many more middle schoolers than before.
 
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Reynard

Legend
Were the Avalon Hill ones (and those of that style) aimed at older? Did the public at large have any consciousness of them?
Which ones? The war games weren't board games, they were war games. Later I know they tried to ape Dungeon, but I don't know what market they aimed at.
 


Mannahnin

Scion of Murgen (He/Him)
I am just reporting what I remember from the time, and I am sure this varied a great deal, but I certainly recall seeing it on mainstream news programs, seeing experts on panels. I also remember a number of school counselors at my schools taking issue with Dungeons and Dragons (and routinely asking those of us who played questions about our hold on reality). I am sure there were a majority of experts who didn't go in for this stuff. But people were going to jail for crimes they didn't commit during the satanic panic. It wasn't a marginal movement by any stretch.
Can you remember any specific shows with those panels, and which mainstream news programs might have hosted them other than the famous 60 Minutes episode?

But that is pretty mainstream. If it is prevalent enough that you have law enforcement taking advice and acting on it, that shows how mainstream the satanic panic was
Perhaps we're having a bit of a semantic issue here. There are (depending on how you count) around 15,000 - 18,000 state and local law enforcement agencies in the US. Whether fraudulent trainers on nonexistent "satanic crime waves" are mainstream kind of depends on how common they are, and perhaps whether their teachings were ever incorporated into larger national or regional training kinds or materials, no?

You can have a little cottage industry of these charlatans bilking money out of Bible belt departments run by misguided Evangelicals without it ever becoming a common thing for most departments or agencies.
 

Jer

Legend
Supporter
Were the Avalon Hill ones (and those of that style) aimed at older? Did the public at large have any consciousness of them?
The only Avalon Hill game that I remember anyone in the general public knowing about was Diplomacy. In the early 90s I knew folks who played Diplomacy who wouldn't have picked up another Avalon Hill game or played D&D.
 

Jer

Legend
Supporter
Those first couple of years in the 80s were when the sales numbers, as Snarf mentioned in the OP, shifted younger. Much more middle schoolers than before.
Makes you wonder maybe if some of the growth in sales was from moving the game to younger and younger buyers after each age group saturated.
 




Cadence

Legend
Supporter
Which ones? The war games weren't board games, they were war games. Later I know they tried to ape Dungeon, but I don't know what market they aimed at.

The only Avalon Hill game that I remember anyone in the general public knowing about was Diplomacy. In the early 90s I knew folks who played Diplomacy who wouldn't have picked up another Avalon Hill game or played D&D.

The only Avalon Hill one I ever played was Titan, but I remember seeing them at the hobby stores.

I'm not sure where the line between war game and board game is (from Risk to Titan to Star Fleet Battles).
 



Reynard

Legend
I've had something rolling around my head wondering how much the 1950s comic panic, 1980s satanic panic, and the modern things all fed off of the same personality traits and types of people.
Long before those things, and long after. Human nature is what it is and isn't likely to change any time soon.
 

Mannahnin

Scion of Murgen (He/Him)
Were the Avalon Hill ones (and those of that style) aimed at older? Did the public at large have any consciousness of them?
They absolutely were aimed at an older audience, but they were a pretty small, hobby market. There are solid annual figures in Game Wizards comparing TSR's revenue to Avalon Hill and SPI and the general wargaming market each year, but I don't have my copy handy with me.

Greg Costikyan's famous 1996 elegy for SPI gives some numbers as well. The first commercial wargame (ignoring early outliers like HG Wells' Little Wars, I guess) he lists as 1953's Tactics, which sold 2000 copies and was the basis for Avalon' Hill's formation. The most successful war game of all time he lists as Avalon Hill's Squad Leader, with 200,000 copies sold.


In the mid-70s, SPI was grossing $2 million annually, and employing as many as forty people. It was publishing forty or more games every year. As it appeared at the time, SPI, and wargaming as a whole, was on an upward trend.

The mid and late 70s were the heyday of the field. New companies sprang up every year: Rand Games Associates, Simulation Design Corps, Panzerfaust, Conflict Games, Operational Studies Group, Yaquinto, Worldwide Wargames (3W), Simulations Canada.... The most successful and enduring was Game Designers Workshop, founded by a group of game enthusiasts who met at the University of Illinois's Champaign campus. From the very first, GDW's games were innovative, well-designed and of the highest quality. They tended, however, to deal with more obscure topics than SPI's, and often had fairly opaque rules; in general, GDW appealed more to the hardcore hobbyist.

At the time, sales were increasing everywhere; Avalon Hill sold more than 200,000 copies of John Hill's SQUAD LEADER, the best-selling wargame of all time. And game designers, beginning to believe that their vocation could become a permanent occupation, a developing art form, an industry capable of supporting its artists in at least modest comfort, banded together to form the Game Designers' Guild. Wargaming, everyone seemed to believe, had achieved a permanent presence in American life, if a tiny one by comparison to fields like film or publishing.

That, alas, was the high water mark.

From 1977 onward, SPI's sales declined, mainly because of mismanagement. The dollar volume remained nearly constant; even in 1981, SPI (not publicly traded) was claiming an annual $2 million in sales, the same figure it had reported as early as 1975. But these were, of course, the years of double-digit inflation, so that SPI's income, in real terms, was declining year by year. In 1980, an internal struggle began at SPI, as many staff members strove to replace Jim Dunnigan as the company's manager. The name of Dunnigan had been virtually synonymous with SPI since its foundation; his personality, vigor, and intelligence had made it a success. Yet, like many entrepreneurs, he proved incapable of managing it as an ongoing business.

Which ones? The war games weren't board games, they were war games. Later I know they tried to ape Dungeon, but I don't know what market they aimed at.
I think you've got wires crossed a bit. Most war games back in the day, like Avalon Hill and SPI's bread and butter publications, were board wargames. "Hex and chit", commonly. Using printed game boards with counters for units that you moved around the board.

Wargames using miniatures were a sub-set of the larger wargaming hobby, but more expensive and space intensive. A game of Squad Leader might take hours but could be tucked away in a neat box and put back in a convenient spot on a regular book case afterward. Avalon Hill had a whole line of boxed games for years they specifically titled "Bookcase games" (Outdoor Survival is one of them, as is my copy of their Starship Troopers game), which had a standard box size meant to have a similar footprint as a large encyclopedia or dictionary volume. Very different from the common long rectangle I always remember mass-market boardgames for kids coming in when I was growing up, and is still widely used (for Monopoly, e.g.) by the big boardgame companies like Parker Brothers and Milton Bradley.

AH BC.PNG


Side note- Dungeon! was originally sold in a smaller box, with a folding vinyl map. My first copy, OTOH, "The New Dungeon!" was the 1989 edition, which made the board bigger and fit it into the familiar larger rectangle shape/footprint of a mass-market boardgame for kids.

There's a significant incident talked about in Game Wizards about Fantasy Forest, TSR's 1980 attempt at a mass market boardgame for kids, and the hundreds of thousands of dollars they lost due to the singular incompetence of a Blume in-law who was then head of Purchasing, who managed to buy boxes and boards for the game which were completely incompatible in size!

A miniatures collection, on the other hand, at least takes boxes, and many of us collectors have extensive display shelves, and boxes and boxes of our unpainted stuff. :ROFLMAO: Chainmail was a miniatures game, and the major wargame publishers initially saw this "fantasy gaming" fad as part of that sub-set.
 
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Reynard

Legend
I think you've got wires crossed a bit. Most war games back in the day, like Avalon Hill and SPI's bread and butter publications, were board wargames. "Hex and chit", commonly. Using printed game boards with counters for units that you moved around the board.

Wargames using miniatures were a sub-set of the larger wargaming hobby, but more expensive and space intensive. A game of Squad Leader might take hours but could be tucked away in a neat box and put back in a convenient spot on a regular book case afterward. Avalon Hill had a whole line of boxed games for years they specifically titled "Bookcase games" (Outdoor Survival is one of them, as is my copy of their Starship Troopers game), which had a standard box size meant to have a similar footprint as a large encyclopedia or dictionary volume. Very different from the common long rectangle I always remember mass-market boardgames for kids coming in when I was growing up, and is still widely used (for Monopoly, e.g.) by the big mass market boardgame companies.
View attachment 253258

A miniatures collection, on the other hand, at least takes boxes, and many of us collectors have extensive display shelves, and boxes and boxes of our unpainted stuff. :ROFLMAO: Chainmail was a miniatures game, and the major wargame publishers initially saw this "fantasy gaming" fad as part of that sub-set.
Oh, I know, but being a "board wargame" was not being a "board game" and I imagine you would get some angry stares walking into a board game event and asking them how they liked their board games. ;)
 

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