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Message: <blockquote data-quote="adembroski" data-source="post: 3959974" data-attributes="member: 18869">I forgot to mention the Chick factor... and I'm not talking about women. I don't remember his first name off hand, but a man named Chick... a religious leader, apparently, though I don't know anybody (being a Christian myself) that really knows who he is.He's the main proponent of the Dungeons-and-Dragons-is-evil lobby. A sad hanger on to the legacy of a 1980s 60-Minutes D&D version of the fake military transcripts... like almost all mainstream media reporting, it was a study in half-truths and motivated false assumptions. Admittedly, his arguments make a tad more sense than those of Ed Bradley, and he appears to have done some research to get to his conclusions, but like all of the D&D-is-of-the-devil crowd, he mistakes the medium for the message.While the Word-of-the-Church does not hold the sway it once did (for good or ill, I'll leave that to the read to decide), certainly, the fact that Christian opposition to Dungeons and Dragons was never really covered in mainstream media (only the "fact" that D&D was "occult"), that opposition has become a meem of sorts, infecting a large portion of the population without them really noticing. So D&D is not only geeky, but also downright weird. You have to be messed up to play this game. And admittedly, many of our nations odder subcultures play the game. I have many friends of the Wiccan faith, virtually all of which play. I'd be willing to bet that upwards of 90% of Anton LeVay followers are gamers. There are RPGs out there (various Steam Punk games, the White Wolf line) that are based on decidedly unchristian values. But to people who use those as examples, I say that the game tends to attract the eccentric... it doesn't create them.You know, this just now came to mind: The game will never, ever die. I say this because I think it fills an important niche in our society. "In the beginning", there were storytellers. Tribal and clannish wisemen who passed history down from generation to generation. Next came the bard, who would travel from village to village, passing on tales, entertaining and educating. The Greeks had their tragedies, and the play was the thing. Eventually we had print, and the pen indeed became mightier than the sword. Eventually radio, then radio with pictures, and today we have 65" flat panel High Def plasma television with 6.1 surround sound and ambient lighting... but we all still yearn for the storyteller. That social exercise when the village came together to hear tales of the great heroes of generations past... and so today we have the Dungeon Master... for those of us who still have an attention span, anyways.</blockquote>

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