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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jared Rascher" data-source="post: 5569350" data-attributes="member: 28825">This issue always trips about a thousand different thoughts in my head.  Back in the 80s, in my Sunday school class, we went through the "D&D is Satanic" lesson plan, and when it came up, some of us brought in our game books for the teachers to look at, and I even ran a session for people in front of the class.  The teachers thought that while there might be some things in the game they weren't comfortable with, and that could be problematic for some players, the game itself was not intrinsically any more of a problem than anything else in modern pop culture.  So instead of damning the whole game, we shifted to discuss what we should thing about various topics addressed by the game.One thing, up front, that tends to bother me is that the mother in this particular instance is dismissed out of hand because of how she reacts to her son's hobby.  We don't know the context of the relationship.  We don't know if she's an exemplar of a mother otherwise.  In fact, because we like the hobby she is intolerant of, the hobby becomes of paramount importance, and we dismiss the fact that she could possibly be concerned about her son.  It actually reminds me of the Gygax charity hubub of a few years ago.  Because a charity was not sure if they should be affiliated publicly with D&D and roleplaying, I actually heard many people talking about hoping the charity went under.  But they don't know about the hobby.  They do have to be careful about their reputation, and is what they are doing  (feeding children in poverty stricken nations) really less important than proving how awesome our hobby is?  In fact, it probably would have  been a great time to show how "not evil" the people in the hobby are, but, in fact, we had a ton of people talking about how intolerant those people are, in a bit of irony.Interestingly, when I first started playing D&D, yes, there were tons of people that were taking aim on D&D for religious reasons, but I don't think the furor would have been half of what it was if it wasn't for the pop-psyche purveyors that showed up on all of the talk shows, discussing how D&D causes psychotic breaks with reality.  And of course we had the wonderful Tom Hanks movie to help with that.  Which had no religious element to it, either, interestingly enough.My only point is that the anti-D&D fervor was essentially a perfect storm of the advent of cable television, and the resultant ubiquity of talk shows, pop-psyche guests that wanted to get on television, and televangelists wanting a target to rail against.  Because cable television was a new novelty in a lot of the country, it appeared that "religions and psychological experts" agreed on the dangers of D&D.This wasn't the case, but I think you have to look at it in context of what was happening, culturally, at the time.  Was it wrong and unfair?  Sure it was.  Were people that got the wrong impression stupid or evil?  Not by a long shot.  The only real evil involved had to do with those people that knew they were lying about various things just to get on television  (remember the supposed TSR employee on the 700 club that talked about all of the company satanic rituals that no one could ever find a record of having worked at TSR?)It was only about two years ago that a friend of my wife's was surprised that I played "that weird game" because she had never had her view of the game challenged since the early 80s.  Thankfully, she knows me well enough to know I'm screwed up from all sorts of things that have nothing to do with playing RPGs.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />I guess all I'm saying is that intolerance can be a two way street, and its probably better to engage then to marginalize.</blockquote>

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