D&D is an Adult Game?

[BryonD]

I've always felt D&D was aimed at precocious kids/teens of all ages, much like the literature that informed and inspired it.

I've known a lot of game designers (and read comments by far far more) and they all seem to be adults who play games like the ones they develop.

I haven't known many authors of children's lit, but I've always presumed that they read adult literature for their own pleasure. Though I may be wrong.

 

[WizarDru]

D&D wasn't so much marketed to kids so much as it wasn't NOT marketed to kids. By the time of the Basic Set, D&D was clearly trying to get a younger and/or broader audience. But in the 1970s, it certainly wasn't being targeted to a younger audience. By 1980, word was getting around, however, and it certainly had elements that appealed to proto-gamers, regardless of marketing. Tolkien was cyclically coming back around, after the 1976 movie, the release of the Silmarillion in 1977 and the 1978 Hobbit TV Special among other things.

D&D tapped into the love of legends, adventure and monsters that gamers dug. The kids who liked stuff like D&D gravitated to it, just like no one told me about E. E. Doc Smith and the Lensman series...I just saw it there on the shelf and said, "Hmmm. What's that?"

 

[Haffrung Helleyes]

Adult game?

Didn't the 1E module 'Vault of the Drow' contain a drawing of a demoness with full frontal nudity? I remember my mother seeing me reading it as a kid, and exclaiming 'this is softcore porn!'.

She didn't take it away, though!

Ken

 

[Clavis]

Going through the First Edition MM I count:
8 fully exposed female breasts
6 somewhat obscured female breasts
2 depictions of female pubic hair
1 Centaur penis

It seems to me that TSR considered their audience to be primarily adults.

That book would never get published for D&D nowadays.

 

[pawsplay]

So, exactly when was D&D marketed to the 20+ crowd? When has D&D ever been an adult game?

The term "munchkin" was originally a reference to the fact that young D&D players were short and had squeaky voices.

 

[Hussar]

Going through the First Edition MM I count:
8 fully exposed female breasts
6 somewhat obscured female breasts
2 depictions of female pubic hair
1 Centaur penis

It seems to me that TSR considered their audience to be primarily adults.

That book would never get published for D&D nowadays.

Wow, showing a horse dong is now adult content?

Note, I said Teen, and YA, not children. That means PG 13 for those in Canada. Which means nudity is ok.

What is not ok are graphic depictions of violence, torture, rape, and all those naughty bits that are very much not Grandma friendly.

The fact that D&D has always glossed over these things leads me to think that the game was always PG-13 at the very outside.

But, I was specifically asking about marketing. So far, I've seen one image that might be considered directed at an adult audience. The rest has been very much teen (and chainmail bikini chick is hitting the teen boys thing pretty hard as well. )

To be fair, I always thought the art in the 1e Fiend Folio was a fair bit more mature. Arms being ripped off that sort of thing.

Look at the difference with something like Vampire to see what marketing to an adult audience looks like. D&D gets the D&D Saturday morning cartoon and a couple of execrable movies. Vampire gets a prime time night time TV drama and the Underworld series of movies (granted the Underworld movies weren't really by choice ).

What marketing, over the past thirty or so years, has been targetted to adults by TSR or WOTC? Where are the prime time TV ads? What adult magazines - ahem, I don't mean THOSE ones, I mean things like Nature, Popular Science, that sort of thing - show D&D ads?

Heck, it's only been in the past few years that D&D managed to get out of the toy/hobby shop ghetto and into mainstream bookstores.

So, again, at what point in time has the advertising for D&D been targeted at the 25-45 crowd? At the 45+ crowd?

 

[Theo R Cwithin]

8 fully exposed female breasts
6 somewhat obscured female breasts
2 depictions of female pubic hair
1 Centaur penis

That's the spell components list for Disjunction, right? Or was it Bigby's Grasping Hand?

 

[Jeff Wilder]

In my experience, D&D has always been played by adults or, in a (significant) minority, by teens that would probably be considered exceptionally mature (in a non-value-judgment sense) in intellect, creativity, and taste. (In other words, in those cases in my past in which teens (including me) -- or even more rarely, pre-teens -- played D&D, those teens also read books targeted at adults, saw movies targeted at adults, watched TV targeted at adults, and so on.)

IMO, D&D by its very nature has to be toned down (or significant elements completely ignored) to get a PG-13 rating.

Does this make it an "adult" game? I guess my inclination would be in the affirmative.

 

[Ariosto]

This reminds me of Batman. Sometimes he's a dark anti-hero and other times he's a campy action hero. He's flexible enough to do both and thus can appeal to multiple demographics.

Yeah; camp was on TV for the "grownups" -- kids (and the comics) recognized the dark nemesis.

 

[Ariosto]

What is "softcore porn" changes over time as well as from place to place. Gene Roddenberry in the 1970s produced a pilot for a TV show in which the humanoid aliens were distinguished by having two belly buttons. An apocryphal story was that, after seeing so much of Goldie Hawn's navel on "Laugh In", he was getting in a poke at the censors of "Star Trek".

Anyway, I think a brilliant part of selling D&D to kids was not labeling it as for "kids" -- but addressing it to "Adults, Ages 10 and up." Gygax's writing style was not necessarily a good fit regardless of the reader's age, but I think Mentzer may have gone slightly too far in "thinking young" for the second red box.

It seems a pretty common mistake to go from "writing for" children and other discerning readers to "writing down to" them, and I think they tend to notice.