Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="wingsandsword" data-source="post: 2485770" data-attributes="member: 14159">The media rarely depicts D&D in a favorable light, unless it's D&D players who are writing the media (like D&D references on shows like Simpsons, Futurama and X-Files).When the Columbine Shootings happened, our local paper printed an editorial that day blaming it on D&D, saying it was clearly the latest "occult murders" due to a game "that hadn't been banned yet" where "kids sit around gambling on rolling dice, around a table strewn with satanic idols while casting black magic at each other".  It couldn't be more anti-D&D if Jack Chick himself wrote it.The president of our gaming club (and GM of a very popular game) called them, and got a reporter who seemed interested in doing a counterpoint article about how D&D wasn't harmful and was a benign hobby, especially after it very quickly became obvious that Columbine had absolutely nothing to do with D&D.  We invited the reporter to a session of a popular, longrunning campaign for him to witness a typical D&D game in action.  He saw a group playing and having fun, no black magic rituals, no satanic idols (we didn't even use minis in that campaign, from what I can tell, minis somehow get mistaken for idols sometimes), no gambling, and it went fairly well, or so we thought.  The counterpoint article never ran in the paper.  Calling back some time later, we found out that the editor had killed the article.The campus paper at our University did an article on our gaming club and D&D back in '98.  The reporter was a freshman journalism student who was utterly clueless about all forms of gaming other than board games she played as a kid.  We politely and calmly explained our hobby, talked with her about the club, our games, what they are and how they are played.  She barely asked any questions (her interviewing skills were negligible, she still had a long way to go learning to be a journalist), and she was utterly amazed at the idea that dice came in more than 6 sides.  Then came the article: a disaster.  Quotes from each of us were attributed to each other, names were misspelled terribly (including replacing most last names with words via a spellchecker), and it was so disjointed and poorly written that if you didn't know anything about the club or gaming beforehand, you wouldn't when it was done.  Of course, this is a student paper at a University, and that article definitely looked like a student effort.My ex-fiancee was actually banned from playing D&D with my group after her mother saw a rerun of Mazes and Monsters on Lifetime (she still lived at home with her mother, and was very much controlled by her <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f641.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":(" title="Frown    :("  data-smilie="3"data-shortname=":(" /> ).  It took months to convince her that the movie wasn't "based on a true story" and that if you play D&D you'll end up just like that movie, and she only begrudgingly acknowledged that it might not be "entirely truthful", but she still didn't trust gaming, or me because I was a gamer.</blockquote>

Verification