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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Flying Toaster" data-source="post: 9749867" data-attributes="member: 7052563">Yes, we lived in a very small town and went to a fairly small school, so our groups were schoolmates and friends.  D&D was our main hobby and often the main basis for the friendships.  We did not always get along and we sometimes played with people we liked less than others, but both players and DMs seemed to instinctively curb their worst behavioral tendencies.  Nobody wanted to be ostracized from the group because that probably meant finding new friends and a new hobby, which was not particularly feasible under the circumstances.  I am not sure how much it affected game play, but we were all well aware that D&D was a “nerd” hobby and in the late 80’s nerd stuff was not popular, mainstream, or accepted by parents and other adults the way it is today.  Some in our groups were fairly popular or even cool, but others (including yours truly) were nerds or geeks who did not accept the label and avoided talking about RPG stuff at school, although in retrospect that was probably a bit paranoid.  That started to change somewhat in 1989 with the Tim Burton Batman movie.  All of a sudden junior high school “cool kids” who had not thought about comics in years suddenly sported Batman movie T-shirts.  That may have been the thin end of the wedge that eventually led us to the mass popularity of other comic book movies, Trek and Wars, Critical Role, etc. We were aware of the Satanic Panic but it did not really affect us.  My parents bought me all of my D&D books.  They were happy to let me host games of D&D or the Starfleet Battles war game at the house, provided we kept the noise down to a reasonable level as we went late into the night.  Why?  Because that meant they knew exactly where I was and what I was doing <img class="smilie smilie--emoji" alt="😉" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" title="Winking face    :wink:" data-shortname=":wink:" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" />.</blockquote>

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