Who ruined D&D's Rep?

[Desdichado]

My 11-year old daughter is Team Jacob, while my 15-year old daughter is Team Edward... loads of fun, in the house. Me, I'm a True Blood kinda guy... Team Sookie

Is Team Blade an option? 'coz that's one awesome vampire-ish kinda guy.

Not that I'm sexually attracted to Wesley Snipes. Wasn't Jessica Biel in one of them Blade movies?

 

[The Shaman]

Oh sure. And what am I supposed to do with a broody pubescent vampire and an ugly one horned mule? No thanks.

Hmmmm.

You do have a point there.

 

[ProfessorCirno]

Honestly, I don't think D&D is as outspokenly uncool as a lot of us tend to think it is. Keep in mind, we're people who talk about D&D on the internet - it's not the game that never had a chance, it's us ;p

But even that, I think, is untrue. I'm sure quite a few of us are rather well liked by our peers. In all honesty, I think Bullgrit had it right - it's less that D&D is super uncool, more that a good number of gamers think it should be. Go to a convention and you'll start to see a sort of bizarre reverse gamer discrimination, with things like "He's way too cool looking to be here, he's probably just here to mess around with us" or "He's not a real gamer, he's just looking at it." Or even "that girl just got dragged here by her boyfriend."

I have heard every one of those sentences stated in real life, multiple times.

Sure, every so often one of those can happen. But far more often I see dudes talk to the people like they're idiots, "Ok so these are Polly-heedraaal dice, we use them for interactive gaming and-" only for the girl to cut the dude off with "Yeah, uhh... I just need more d10's for a Shadowrun campaign I'm running."

 

[Theo R Cwithin]

But seriously: Lexa Doig. Rrow!

Mmm, seconded!

Honestly, I don't think D&D is as outspokenly uncool as a lot of us tend to think it is. Keep in mind, we're people who talk about D&D on the internet - it's not the game that never had a chance, it's us ;p

Hehehe, so D&D is uncool because of its association with D&D players, not the other way around. Astute! IME, this is actually pretty close to it. I really don't think D&D itself is considered uncool; rather most people are just kind of neutral about it. It's not exactly mainstream, sure, but what hobbies truly are?

I think D&D's rep been tempered these last couple decades, by the "rise of the geek", the insane popularity of mmorpgs, and the simple fact that a lot of influential people today have done or do it. And I don't just mean filmstars, but also a lot of the people here: managers, researchers, educators, parents, lawyers, businessmen, and so on.

I really don't believe it has a "bad" rep at all; if there is stigma, it's more to do with unfamiliarity, and maybe a recollection of the bizarre controversies from the 80's.

 

[TheAuldGrump]

Maybe we're using a different scale. To me: "not uncool" does not mean "cool"; there is a neutral zone between "uncool" and "cool."

For instance:

Being a rock guitarist = cool

Playing air guitar in public = uncool

Knowing how to play the guitar = neutral

Bad press doesn't make for uncool. In fact, it can make for very cool.

And deaths attributed to something doesn't make it uncool, it makes it "dangerous." And to some teenagers, dangerous = cool.

I remember hearing some of the bad press about D&D, but it didn't result in "Ew, D&D is for dorks." It did ocassionally result in "Oh my god, D&D is evil."

Bullgrit

Dude, in the '80s and '90s I was singing in a folk group, and doing storytelling at the library, old age homes, and a few schools - trust me, D&D did nothing to make me less cool!
....
....
....
(I am not sure if anything could.... )

The Auld Grump, who no longer performs, but still listens to folk music and storytelling....

*EDIT* Incidentally - looking back at 13-14 year old Young Grump... aside from my taste in food, I really am not ashamed of anything - I run games for young adults, supposedly every other week (but more like three out of four in reality). Yeah, my very first year DMing is embarrassing, but I was learning how, so no real shame. (And I have twice bumped into players from that game, who still tell me that it was a good game, so....)

My taste in music, movies, hobbies, books, comedy, and politics has changed little. I was a geek then, and I am a geek now. All that I have done is accumulate more geekiness.

 

[TarionzCousin]

[edit: On second thought, I'm not sure where Morrus's grandmother would stand on that one!]

Who? It's Eric Noah's grandmother we've got to watch out for!

You kids! Get off of my lawn!!!

Ahem. Now. Where were we?

Has D&D ever been "cool"?

Also, there are many more females involved in LARPing than in tabletop gaming. No, I'm not going to cite any study. There is much more socializing and interacting with the opposite sex in a LARP than in your average Friday night D&D game.

 

[Xyxox]

My memory has it that the activity was already uncool in the 80s.

It was uncool in the 70s, too.

That's okay, though, because wargaming was uncool in the 70s, too. I did both and was an uncool total geek.

 

[Theo R Cwithin]

[edit: On second thought, I'm not sure where Morrus's grandmother would stand on that one!]

Who? It's Eric Noah's grandmother we've got to watch out for!

You kids! Get off of my lawn!!!

d'oh! all those grandmothers look the same to me.

 

[S'mon]

As I recall age ca 12, it was definitely the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon that attracted the opprobrium of the non-gamers - and of many gamers.

 

[Wik]

I just think it's funny that a guy who says he's from "Faerun" was wondering even for a second why RPGers are at all "uncool".

For what it's worth, in sixth grade I used to run lunch hour games. This was around, um, 1995? And I brought in a lot of guys that you could consider "Cool". (and some that definitely weren't - any 8th grader that played with us was definitely not cool - and we all knew it!) I had an ongoing D&D campaign that, at the high point, had 20 players. Yeah, twenty. And a lot of them were on the basketball team, or whatever else.

And when I moderated Battletech games? Holy crap. I dimly remember a hugely varied crowd.

I also (and this is a favourite story) had two friends of mine, who happened to be girls, who thought that "D&D is really nerdy" and wouldn't even listen to me when I tried to explain it to them. Even though I knew they'd like it - being all into anime, back when it was still called "japanimation". I wound up copying most of the tables for BECMI, and making a whole bunch of notes, and "introducing" them to this "new game I made up". Which, by the way, they loved. Which goes to show that for some, it was just the NAME of the game that made people assume it was uncool - the actual game itself wasn't much of a problem.

(The same, by the way, happened a few years ago, when my girlfriend at the time's father found out I was into 'Dungeons and Dragons' and made fun of me - in a polite way, but basically kept calling me a geek. Finally, I shot back with 'your daughter's been playing RIFTS for years!' And he was like 'yeah, so? how is that the same?')

As for me... yeah, I was a geek. Everyone knew it. But I was a "borderline" geek, in that I had friends with most of the major groups. I was at all the big parties for my school. So, I was a geek, but not enough of a geek that anyone ever gave me a problem for it.