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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5780370" data-attributes="member: 4937">Good.I'm hard to insult, and the way to do it that really gets under my skin is not anything you are engaging in nor is it something that immediately occurs to most people when they are trying to be insulting.Let me come clean on this.  I'm not sure that I could make my argument stick, but not because I don't think my argument has some merit.  Rather, I don't think that I can get my argument to stick because its a counter-factual argument.  If you are not familiar with the term, it doesn't mean that I'm arguing against fact, but rather that the basis of my argument is a "what if?" scenario.  All arguments built around what might have happened if something else didn't happen are essentially without substance.  It's really impossible to know what would have happened in the absense of the Occult scare in the '80's. What I do feel that I can prove definitively is that the occult scare trailed the growth of D&D rather than proceeding it.  That's factual.  But either the counter factual argument that without the occult scare it would have grown less, or the counter factual argument that without the occult scare it would have grown more is just so much hot air amongst nerds.   What is true is that D&D experienced phenomenal growth, then there was an occult scare, then D&D's audience shrank and its mainstream 'for kids' properties like toys, coloring books, and Saturday morning cartoons vanished at about the same time.  It's impossible to prove the exact reasons why that happened, but if you want to claim corellation between the occult scare and D&D's growth, then I think I can show even strong correllation between the reverse and further that it hurt sales in the period immediately following the height of the scare in the public conscious (roughly 1985).I think for example there is pretty good evidence that the CBS executives were always uncomfortable with the darkness of the material in the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon, and that the show was torpedoed rather suddenly in 1985 despite having won its time slot for two years running (despite relative low promotion compared to other shows in the lineup).  Similar things happened to the nascent D&D toy line for which the cartoon was one of the strongest marketing vehicles.More or less, that's what happened.  And while Hollywood makes predictably crappy movies, the D&D movie's production values were obviously and severely hurt by the extremely limited budget.  And the extremely limited budget was due to the fact the studios didn't percieve the D&D brand as a money winner, which it wasn't in no small part due to the fact that in 1985 the occult/suicide contriversy crushed all of D&D's licensed derivatives in a domino effect leaving D&D only as an esoteric game in the hands of nerds with heightened reputation for misanthropy.Comic books are a niche product with relatively low sales that are a nerdy past-time, but that doesn't stop movies based on the comics from being mainstream entertainment or licensed Marvel toys from filling an aisle at Target or Wal-Mart.  But consider how long it took comic books to recover from the much more well deserved comic book scare of the 1950's.My point is essentially, if you are arguing for the positive influence of negative publicity on the basis, "Look how successful D&D was.", then you are neglecting to consider not only the timeline (D&D's success leads and triggers the scare), but just how successful it could have been.</blockquote>

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