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Message: <blockquote data-quote="SimonMoon5" data-source="post: 1108767" data-attributes="member: 5821">Here's my story:I was introduced to D&D (the blue box) by my "Big Brother" (from the Big Brothers/Big Sisters organization). Both my sister and I saw that this was a fun game, so we asked our mom if she would buy it for us. She made some comment about "Oh, I hoped you'd never ask to play D&D..." since she was the sort of person to believe *anything* especially if it was on TV. But nonetheless, she did buy me/us (my sister quickly lost interest) basic D&D, and then each of the hardback 1st edition books. In fact, for one birthday party, I even got her to decorate the top of the cake with a beholder, with gumdrops at the ends of each eyestalk. (She gave the beholder thirteen eyestalks  <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:" /> but it was otherwise pretty cool.)And then, she fell in with those religious nuts. She was a generally depressed person, and as so many desparate people do, she tossed away logic and went for its more comforting opposite.She became close friends with a new priest at the church. This particular priest had 3 children who also had some interest in D&D; they were a bit younger than I was, so they weren't exactly gaming buddies, but we at least had something in common. Imagine my surprise when I went over to their house and looked at theird D&D books, only to find them censored! One of the parents had taken a marker and marked out everything that related to clerics worshipping gods and everything related to demons, devils, etc (The "D" section of the Monster Manual was quite a sight to see.). The kids could play D&D as long as they didn't use any of the "bad" parts.And then they effectively had an intervention for me. They started telling me all the reasons why these elements of D&D were bad. I countered their arguments, but they were only in a mood for a lecture, not a discussion. In the end, I was banned from playing D&D. I sarcastically asked if we should organize a book burning for my books; they laughed at how people would react, but seemed to like the idea (just not the publicity it would draw).So I got to keep my books. And since my mom was never around when I played D&D anyway, I just kept playing.  When we moved to Connecticut for a year so that she could be closer to a large community of those religious nutsos (one family of them featured a gay man who had been "cured" and now had children), the friends I played with tended to play somewhat informally, since we only met during school, so we'd play an "oral" rules-loose mostly-diceless version of D&D. And then we'd play over the phone, and I don't think my mom ever knew just why I liked to talk to my friends for such long periods of time over the phone.Later on, when I was at college, there were so many other games to play (Paranoia, Call of Cthulhu, Marvel Superheroes RPG, DC Heroes RPG, Palladium, etc), that I didn't play much D&D... but we did play *some* D&D, so I would lie about it (or at least selectively not mention it).And then she died, and everything was fine again.</blockquote>

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