D&D General Oddball mentions of D&D in popular culture.

[Laurefindel]

there are a few references in Ready Player One.

then again, there are references to EVERYTHING in ready player one...

 

[RobJN]

Didn't they play D&D with one of the Terminators in the Sarah Connor Chronicles TV show...?

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

One thing that I think we are seeing, and will increasingly see in the future, is the throw-in use of "D&D" to refer to the late 70s and early 80s.

Kind of like how some media (TV, movies) will use that certain Haight-Ashbury "summer of love" look and references to refer to the 60s.

Everyone knows about Stranger Things, of course. But that's not the only one. When I got around to watching the third season of True Detective*, they included the fact that one of the kids played D&D as a shortcut way of placing it in the '80s.

....of course, they somehow managed to mess it up. IIRC, not only did it not make sense (it was implied he was playing it by himself, or with one other person who clearly wasn't playing D&D), but when they briefly showed the dice, they had a backgammon doubling cube.

Anyway, they had a fake module (Forest of Leng) and it also played into the whole Satanic Panic Angle. Even so, it seems that as the past recedes, the signifiers remain.



*Excellent. If you liked the first season, and didn't care for the second, try the third. Mahersala Ali is amazing.

 

[Sacrosanct]

Last night I was going off the top of my head, but wikipedia has many more references. I still say that Borderlands 2, Tiny Tina's Adventures, while being a FPS and using Borderlands mechanics, felt more like a D&D game than most actual licensed D&D games lol.

 

[ko6ux]

One thing that I think we are seeing, and will increasingly see in the future, is the throw-in use of "D&D" to refer to the late 70s and early 80s.

Kind of like how some media (TV, movies) will use that certain Haight-Ashbury "summer of love" look and references to refer to the 60s.

Everyone knows about Stranger Things, of course. But that's not the only one. When I got around to watching the third season of True Detective*, they included the fact that one of the kids played D&D as a shortcut way of placing it in the '80s.

....of course, they somehow managed to mess it up. IIRC, not only did it not make sense (it was implied he was playing it by himself, or with one other person who clearly wasn't playing D&D), but when they briefly showed the dice, they had a backgammon doubling cube.

Anyway, they had a fake module (Forest of Leng) and it also played into the whole Satanic Panic Angle. Even so, it seems that as the past recedes, the signifiers remain.



*Excellent. If you liked the first season, and didn't care for the second, try the third. Mahersala Ali is amazing.

In the 1980s I used a backgammon double cube for D&D when I was DMing. It was my "God Dice."

If one of my smart-ass, edgy teenager friends got really unruly, the doubling-cube decided how many hit dice the lightning bolt that the gods tossed at them was.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

One thing that I think we are seeing, and will increasingly see in the future, is the throw-in use of "D&D" to refer to the late 70s and early 80s.

Kind of like how some media (TV, movies) will use that certain Haight-Ashbury "summer of love" look and references to refer to the 60s.

Everyone knows about Stranger Things, of course. But that's not the only one. When I got around to watching the third season of True Detective*, they included the fact that one of the kids played D&D as a shortcut way of placing it in the '80s.

....of course, they somehow managed to mess it up. IIRC, not only did it not make sense (it was implied he was playing it by himself, or with one other person who clearly wasn't playing D&D), but when they briefly showed the dice, they had a backgammon doubling cube.

Anyway, they had a fake module (Forest of Leng) and it also played into the whole Satanic Panic Angle. Even so, it seems that as the past recedes, the signifiers remain.



*Excellent. If you liked the first season, and didn't care for the second, try the third. Mahersala Ali is amazing.

Could also be Palladium. I ran a Palladium campaign where I gave one of my players a magic weapon that used the Backgammon doubling dice for damage. He has notorious bad luck with dice and in that campaign he never rolled above 8 with it.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

@ko6ux
@ardoughter

I mean, anything is possible, but it certainly seemed like an odd choice to have a backgammon doubling cube in the set of dice that you saw. I found an image of the shot; it's big, so it's in spoilers-

Spoiler

See what I mean? And it was definitely D&D (and only D&D).

 

[Bupp]

When I was a kid and started playing D&D, I raided all the board games for their dice. If we would've had a backgammon set, you bet the die would've been in my collection.

 

[BookTenTiger]

Tennis star Naomi Osaka's Twitter bio is just the words "chaotic neutral."

 

[David Howery]

the weirdest place I ran across it was in a book in some 'weird detective' series, where the game is briefly mentioned as being 'not as interesting' as some other made up game... which led to the two brother detectives running afoul of some twisted genetic engineering cult that captures them and turns one into a sort of monkey and the other into a sort of reptile. But never fear, they get fixed in the end...