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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wofano Wotanto" data-source="post: 9441183" data-attributes="member: 7044704">What, the Ordeal story?  They were dressing up for a Halloween party, not LARPing, and outside of Crystal's acting as part of the...prank?  intervention?  whatever you want to call it...no one's playing in character.  There was some LARPing going on, but it was on a smaller scale and often overlapped with historical recreation and the SCA more than roleplaying games.I was 17 in 1983 and to 2024 me the story manages to be both old-fashioned and accidentally futurist at the same time.  Cruel stupidity like nicknaming someone Wart based on their vocabulary was certainly a thing back then, and every D&D player in a small town knowing each other well enough to get together for a party rings pretty true from my own rural youth - although 1980s Voorheesville couldn't have scraped up four tables of players if the world depended on it.Trying to "fix" player behavior (if that's even what they were really trying to accomplish) in such an absurd, indirect fashion is also something that feels like the past, but I question whether anything like this was ever done IRL.  Never ran into or even heard about anything like it back then.  Problem players usually just got tolerated until you could find a replacement, then told to go find another group.  OTOH, the POV character's group (especially going by the illustration) is far more diverse than the all-white-male gaming community that was dominant in many areas during Reagan's era, and there's no indication any of them get hassled just for being gamers.  Weirdly, that gives them less reason to put up with "Wart" simply because he's one of them, annoying habits or no.  BADD was still a couple of years off in 1983, but the more general Satanic Panic was already in full bloom in the US and depending on where you were roleplaying was definitely seen as suspect by the uptight and clueless majority.On a more general note, Dawn (the POV character - easily missed since the author only uses it once) has a level of emotional maturity that would surprise me in any era.  They're never properly described but the implication seems to be that they just started college recently, and they're still a better analyst of other folks' behavior than 99% of the 18-20 year olds I've ever known.And if this was 1983, all those gender-neutral pronouns in that last paragraph would have been feminine based their name - and, I suppose, the fact that "Wart" kissed them.  Default assumptions about gender identity and sexual preferences were very much the norm 40-odd years ago.  So that's another change.  The past is an alien place if you didn't live through it.</blockquote>

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