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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 42786" data-attributes="member: 2067">Quoted:--My little sister was watching Honey I shrunk the Kids the TV show, they had a group of D&D players hitting on some girl and kept saying "Charisma eighTEEN." --This? Kinda funny...just 'cause I know people like that. This seems fairly inoffensive, just kiddin' around sorta thing. It's not overtly insulting or narrow-minded. In fact, you'd have to know a bit about D&D anyway to get the joke. This is okay, even if it might make me roll my eyes. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Quoted:--From a friend of mine at school when I mentioned D&D "I would NEVER play D&D! You know, those columbine kids played D&D!" --This? Just wrong. This is the kinda thing that raises the ire. It's like saying: "You play D&D? You must be defective! You must have deep psychosis! You must be on the verge of murder!"...ergo, you are lesser, less human, than everyone else, and therefore are worthy of contempt and permitted to be assumed psychotic until proven otherwise.Not only that, but it covers up the real reason things like this happen based on a scapegoat. If people can blame something else, they don't need to look for a cause that may make them squirrelley, so to speak. They don't need to look at the true motivation when they have a person to blame it on. This is why Hollywood and Video Games get blamed. Fotrunately, they have a much larger audience that enjoys them, so they can remain (mostly) immune. The millions of people who watched Die Hard know it doesn't make you kill. They didn't.Unfortuneately, D&D-dork remains a minority, and therefore, is not faught against. John Q Public doesn't know D&D doesn't make you kill because all he knows of D&D is that it's some game that makes you satanic. Because D&D doesn't have a majority audience or a plurality of people who *obviously* know it doesn't do this (and because accusations are printed in big, bold letters, while retractions are hidden amongst the editorials), there isn't an initial public reaction of doubt against the accusation. If somebody said watching american football made you violent because it encourages tackling, winning, and beating up the other team, much like a war, no one in the US would buy that.The high schools of the US are not a safe place for anyone who does not fit in. They are accosted, often violently, and little, if any, punishment is given to those who do this. The ones in charge imply that it's okay by lack of action (of course, many of these people are powerless and/or unwilling to help anyway, but that's another rant), and the poor guy is left without a defense when those with the concept that being a dork makes you a lesser human being, okay to beat up and make fun of and deride. *THIS* is about as close as possible to finding out *Why* high school suicide, psychosis, and depression rates are so high. This is the dangerous mental cocktail that causes human beings (of no better or worse standing than yourself or any other human being) to do things like Columbine. Low self-esteem, needless ridicule, are the ingredients. NOT D&D. It just so happens that the D&D-dork stereotype is typically somebody who already doens't have the best self-esteem.I got lucky. The guy who got me into D&D was the lead linebacker for the high school football team, and was dating the cheerleader. Here in college, not only are social pressures less and hormonal cocktails safer, but people are seemingly more open to new experiences and willing to try out things. Heck, my D&D group has more women then men. I have been very supported in my "closet habit."Unfortuneately, the problem lies not with just D&D. It lies with the human nature (people different from you are bad! Whose fault is it?), the US school system (...no snappy comments. This thing is fudged up beyond realistic expectations), and the "clique" of D&D-dorks themselves.Again, maybe I'm reading a bit too deep. But this is unreal. It's the mindless, uneductated hatred against D&D that I see, on a much greater scale, against things like Al Queda and Muslim extremist groups. As exemplified in speeches by G.W.Bush...the passion and hatred for people called "evil" and "cowardly"....I gotta say something, and that's that you can't distance yourself from any human being on the planet. They all think a lot more alike than you could think, and they have reasons (probably dang good ones) for doing what they do.Not that this justifies this...it's just that before you can stop something, you need to understand where they're coming from first, and stop it at it's source...not just push back harder.My overanalyzation has reached it's end. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> I've lost the point. Anyhoo, we can at least seek solidarity in each other...y'know, stick together as the oppressed and such. Rednecks hate us, too, y'know. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f644.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":rolleyes:" title="Roll eyes    :rolleyes:"  data-smilie="11"data-shortname=":rolleyes:" /></blockquote>

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