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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dannyalcatraz" data-source="post: 5012827" data-attributes="member: 19675">My apologies- the "killer" I was thinking of mainly was actually in this decade- a multiple murderer in New Jersey in 2005 named John Eichinger- and the assertion was made by the DA (and a few others) that the killings were linked to D&D.In the late 1980s/early 1990s, it was parents blaming D&D (and Metal) for suicides.WoD games greatly de-emphasized the math and mechanics typical of earlier games.  Amber (1991) even brought us diceless gaming.These games were less about the combat and more about "storytelling"...or so it was claimed by their players.Thus, the advent of these stripped-down games also started or greatly inflamed the whole "roll-play"/"role-play" discussion.In addition, WoD and a few other games turned the tables on what could be played as a "heroic" archetype in an RPG- Vampires as PCs was virtually unheard of before V:tM, ditto Werewolves.I base this on having owned, played or playtested over 100 different RPGs in the past 30+ years.  Not scientific, of course, but its not exactly a shallow basis for my assertion.The baseline assumption of most (but not all) games released before 1990 was that the PCs were non-evil, and their foes were at least in some meaningful way non-good.Even games that didn't have an alignment system tended to handicap "evil" PCs with fewer options, more "legal" barriers in the campaign worlds.In the late 1980s, the anti-heroic character became more popular and acceptable in various forms of literature than ever before, and that popularity got translated into RPGs in the 1990s.All of that doesn't mean that it wasn't possible to play evil PCs and anti-heroes before 1/1/91, but merely that the games themselves did not favor playing such PCs.</blockquote>

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