D&D 5E Raise your hand if your mom...

[Wednesday Boy]

My folks never took issue with my brother and I playing D&D but I suppose since we started in 1992 we missed most of the D&D hysteria. However a bit later we started playing Magic and my aunt came to use with the same misinformed concerns. After explaining to her that it was really a game about comparing numbers on cards, she was assuaged and ended up buying us booster packs for Christmas.

 

[exile]

My mom bought a lot of my early D&D stuff for me, but when she felt that I was spending too much time with it she encouraged me to put it away for a long time. This was during the AD&D era. During this time away from D&D, I discovered Palladium ' TENT RPG. Once 2e hit, I got back into D&D in a big way.

 

[Melvis Pestly]

My parents were always cool with it. I got the Moldvay set for my 10th birthday in '83 and never looked back. My mom even got me the Monster Manual (with the Easley cover that still makes me drool thinking about it) for Christmas that year without me even asking for it. I folks probably felt that were 2 kinds of kids in the world: 1) the ones that smoke, drank, and got their prom dates pregnant and 2) the ones who played RPG's. Which one do you think they'd rather have?

 

[TheBlueKnight]

My parents were a little worried when I started playing with my friends. I explained to them that it was very similar to the games I was playing on the computer at the time (Ultima III, for example) except with real people etc. and that assuaged their fears. When I bought the 2E Player's Handbook I do recall not telling them about it for a while.

Twenty years later - just last year - my mom asked me if we all dressed up in costumes and acted stuff out. I explained to her that, no, we don't do that but there are groups that do.

I think my parents are still a bit mystified by it. Maybe I'll run a game for them or play the board games when they visit next, hehe. Not really their thing though.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I was raised in a strict Cthulic household and my squamous forebearers piped unsettlingly when I first brought home something filled with legible text that did not warp the mind unlike our Good Books, but a consultation with the naked January night sky on a half-frozen beach in the Northeast US when the aurora borealis was particularly intense convinced them there was nothing wrong with it.

Unfortunately for them, I met some Heaven's Gate folks through our local gaming store, and fell in with some bad kool-aid. I'm not sure they ever totally got over their suspicion with these tomes of non-maddening sanity, and I know they were disappointed when I brought home a satan-worshiping anarchist from my afterschool pottery class and told them we were in love. Can't say I blame them, they taught me to save myself for the infinite cosmos and its crushing isolation, but I couldn't help it, Jess was cute and I was 17 and wanted something more than the madness of an utterly nihilistic universe. She had a fire in her eyes. Also, she had no more than two, and they were mostly symmetrical.

'Course then she got Born Again when I left to go to college and I started dabbling in African disapora mystical religions, so we fell apart. She got really into exegesis, I got really into sacrificing chickens to call upon Baron Saturday, we just became different people.

I hear she lives in Spokane these days. We're not really friends on Facebook. It...didn't end peacefully.

Anyway, Christmas is still weird. Most of my old gaming group jumped aboard the Hale-Bopp train to somewhere better, so I don't really reconnect with the old mates these days. My new group is in NYC where I live so, you know, mostly folks who worship the Flayed God Xipe Totec, but they're more culturally Totecish than religiously Totecish. Y'know, they make good tortillas at Tlacaxipehualiztli. But they don't celebrate the same Festival Of Colourless Light that my family does, so they're not the type you invite home. I mean, maybe someday Brenda will come back with me, but we haven't been dating for even one tonalpohualli yet, so definitely not this year.

But hell, at least I'm not the black sheep of the family.

I mean...my brother is a Detroit Lions fan.

 

[Mishihari Lord]

When I was 10, I started playing in my first game with my mom as DM in 1980. My dad played in our first game too, but he didn't care for it, so after that it was me, my sister (9) and my brother (8) as players. We're devout Christians, but the backlash to D&D was something that I only ever heard about second or third hand. My parents read the books and saw nothing wrong with it.

 

[Vic Ferrari]

I folks probably felt that were 2 kinds of kids in the world: 1) the ones that smoke, drank, and got their prom dates pregnant and 2) the ones who played RPG's. Which one do you think they'd rather have?

I did all (well, not so much the prom-night-dumpster-baby).

 

[aramis erak]

Looking back at 35 years gaming... I've honestly had FAR more problems with co-workers than with my parents.

 

[Uder]

We were already playing a bit by the time my mom overheard us playing and the DM told me I wasn't allowed to look in one of the books. So she bought me the Holmes set. Damned if she was going to let someone tell me what I could and couldn't read.


I did know two people at my JR. High and High School who had all of their books burnt, and heard of more second-hand. Reinforced my belief that their parents and the orgs they belonged to were really just a bunch of insecure wannabe facists trying to appease the thunder gods.

 

[boerngrim]

Parents: no prob. Other kids parents: prob.

My parents just thought it was a silly kids game and were not bothered byy it.
However, when my friends and I played the Red Box in recess during 5th grade, one of my classmates tolde her mother we were playing "The Devil Game" the pastor had warned them about and we were told we could not play at school any more. I remember, when our teacher came and told us, he was emabrassed and not happy that he had to do it. We were just confused that anyone could think that a game where you pretend to be heroes and fight monsters was promoting Satanism.