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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mannahnin" data-source="post: 9671067" data-attributes="member: 7026594">In danger of being banned nationally?  Probably not.  In danger of being condemned and in effect banned locally? Happened all over the place.James Dallas Egbert III's disappearance in 1979 and the sensational theory invented by P.I. William Dear about Egbert playing in real life and disappearing in steam tunnels was responsible for national news coverage, kicking off the big fad sales period for D&D, late '79 through '83.The satanic panic developed a little later, with Pat Pulling founding <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patricia_Pulling#B.A.D.D." target="_blank">BADD </a>in 1983.  The ongoing <a href="https://www.rpgstudies.net/stackpole/pulling_report.html" target="_blank">slander and libel</a> campaign, dishonest attacks on it in religious and secular media, and fraudulent misinformation peddled to police and school orgs across the country by fake "occult crime experts", resulted in real damage to TSR's sales.  Big retailers and department stores like JC Penney and Sears stopped carrying their products, credulous school boards and PTAs shut down/stopped allowing after-school D&D clubs and D&D summer camps, and misguided parents bought into the lie that D&D was harmful and burned books/stopped their kids playing.There's definitely a degree to which controversy IS free advertising, but by '85 D&D sales were tanking by comparison with those boom years, and while some of it was no doubt market saturation and the challenge of people learning to play, the satanic panic does seem to have done real damage too.  I think Gygax did pretty well in his famous <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/v14p28/60_minutes_covering_the_dangers_of_playing/" target="_blank">appearance on 60 Minutes in '85</a>, but Ed Bradley and company elevated Pat Pulling's nonsense and Thomas Radecki's fraud to equal status with reality, on one of the most watched shows in the country, and gave those lies an unwelcome appearance of credibility.</blockquote>

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