I had no idea that it went that far back. The Exorcist of course is what brought the scare back.

My parents were pretty open minded, but the three things my mom completely banned from our house were ouija boards, D&D, and Marilyn Manson. Total Recall? totally fine. D&D? gateway to hell.

Only thing my parents banned was Gwar, after my mom got hold of the lyric sheet for America Must Be Destroyed.

See also, Comic Books in the 1950s and of course our favorite, video games in the 00s

Yeah I was a bit too young for D&D (this report came out when I was two) and it sounded neat but I never got into it, save for Baldur's Gate on PC. So for me all the news stories were about how video games were either destroying kids' minds (AKA we'll all stop reading) or kids' moral barometers (violent video games). But yeah I'd just watch those to see a new Genesis game in action or something.

But it seems like by the time I was old enough to play games sometime in the early 90s, my parents would've been thrilled to know that I was reading out loud and learning some pretty complex vocabulary in my free time instead of feeling like those things were a chore for school. In fact, the only way we finally convinced my parents to get a NES was by showing them games like Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy, where there is a lot of reading involved. We never got those games and just stuck with mind destroying games anyway, of course..

The devil's work is to design a bunch of NPCs and figure out what voice to give them. Satan's also a total min/maxer.

My D&D didn't need to indoctrinate me, because my parents already had. My father was a Unitarian atheist who liked to lie and tell his students he was an Odinist, while my mother was a practicing pagan sorceress who believed she could communicate with spirits and magically transform into animals.

Frankly, D&D was, if anything, a little too Mormon for my liking (anyone remember the Dragon Magazine bullshit over the Book of Vile Darkness? Ah, 2e, I do not miss you). VtM and World of Darkness were much more suitable towards my childhood development so far as my parents were concerned; less of those dangerous, subversive Christian undertones.

dry county maybe?

EH, I remember your big long explanation about how NOT playing D&D was due to your father and your horrible upbringing and that you wanted to play it but was afraid to because you'd go all Into the Mouth of Madness and tentacle brain all over the place.

That was probably a parallel universe. You should still give it a shot though. Unless you're the absolutely worst person not leading a militia possible, you lie your ass of here and pretend to be people constantly, you may be really good at D&D and find it uplifting.

Assuming you're not already playing and just hypographitating, or you're Zawahiri's widow and... well, I have no idea why she'd pretend to be you. Experience points?

I grew up in a Catholic family, and I was told not to play D&D. I think in Atlanta the Catholics and Protestants mingled a bit more than other parts of the country. When I finally first tried the game around 2001, I was a bit nervous, but when the game finally started I was like, "This is it?" It's amazing how all these "experts"on the subject never even looked at a guidebook. They just pulled shit out their asses.

No, meme, that was later (many years after I had their blessing to start LARPing and playing D&D), and it was Magic: the Gathering (mainly) which I couldn't play. My father eventually cracked down on my nerd hobbies, but not out of any religious conviction - rather, out of a lack of religious conviction, and out of the belief that children with an intense interest in certain subjects were, by necessity, autistic weirdos (like my mother, whom he had since divorced).

I said you should play Magic the Gathering?

Fuck, I hope that WAS a parallel universe!

Basically, it was a question of age and priorities. Think 1 Corinthians 13:11, only with more "Football Dad".

When I was a little kid, my dad was actually pretty chill. I'm not sure whether this was because Dad was a progressive parent, or whether it was because he was simply flat-out negligent, due to being so busy teaching and chasing after women half his age (probably a bit of both). Most of my quirks, he didn't mind at all; he'd take me to visit castles, he'd let me wear my Billy Bishop aviators cap every goddamn place I went, hell, he even bought me my first M:tG deck! The only thing he wouldn't stand for was my interest in video games - mostly on account of the fact that my mom played video games, and the fact that I spent way too much time drawing video game stuff, which was a sure sign of mental illness (fifteen years later, he got the same way about my baby brother and dinosaurs). But D&D was fine; it was a social game, there was a lot of maths involved, and it kept me hanging out with the fac-brats rather than all those Beavis&Butthead-watching townie plebs. No problem at all, roleplaying, just so long as you stayed well-rounded and kept working on your "hooks" - playing squash, inventing industrial log-splitters, or (in my case) summer theatre camp.

Not so coincidentally, that all changed about a year before I was scheduled to start applying for prep school. At that point, nerd-games were a liability. What I HAD to do was concentrate on being a scholar-athlete, on cultivating social skills and going to that goddamn Johns Hopkins program. "Talk to the Duke of Bulgaria, William. Make friends with Ivanka, William. Network with all these powerful children of powerful people, so that in ten years time they can pull some strings and get you a suitably powerful job. Don't be a loser like your mother - or me, for that matter! Be more like your Uncle David, go be an investment banker, William, make thirty million dollars, retire when you're forty, spend the rest of your life having old-man sex with the hired help" etc etc etc He even told me that I had to cut my goddamn hair like a Kennedy because it was only when I got my doctorate and had a bunch of published papers to my name that I could afford to look "eccentric"! It was time to batten down the hatches and beat the shit out of all his co-workers' kids (metaphorically speaking), so Dungeons & Magic had to go (literally speaking). And that's probably where I started off last time.

Anyway, the point of the Magic LJ was simply to illustrate the dramatic irony behind my father's plan; which, for those of you who don't recall, involved him chopping up at least a few thousand dollars of vintage M:tG cards, in hopes that this would force me to be more social and less of a loser. Then, when I joined the Army many years later, it turned out that almost everyone in my goddamn unit played M:tG - and I'm talking, like, "crazy addict, spend-half-your-base-pay-on-cards" played M:tG. All weekend they'd be sitting around having Magic tournaments, but me, I was still too traumatized from all the beatings to even look at that fucking game. So in a sick twist of fate, it was my NOT being a Magic-playing, Naruto-watching dweeb that made me the lone weirdo at my place of work.



D&D I might be able to play, only manifesting some of the lesser eldritch horrors in the act of so-doing. In fact, I actually seriously considered joining my juggalo friend down the street for her Pathfinder campaign last year, but ultimately didn't follow through with it, because that would have involved talking to her regularly on Facebook and - phhhbbrrrttt, don't even get me fucking started on my father's opinions about me keeping in touch with my friends via the internet.

(you may have been egging me on to play Pathfinder, Mr Dumpster; if so, I am sorry to say that it never happened. I am, however, willing to at least consider D&Ding again)

Yeah like I said above, I'm surprised D&D wasn't praised more for, if nothing else, getting kids to read, master pretty tough vocabulary, etc. in a world (by the 90s) infested by Nintendo. Because that's the way I remember the Harry Potter books: some groups called it out on the sorcery and the whatnot (I haven't read any of them and seen the movie so I don't know how "anti-Christian" it gets) but the fact that kids were actually READING FOR FUN again definitely took center stage.

But my upbringing was different than most; I was raised Episcopalian and our priest was openly gay for as long as I can remember- my parents would've been fine with me reading Lovecraft or Huxley, but the main reason they didn't want to get us a Nintendo was because of the gun that came with it. In a lot of the Bible Belt, sure, a gun's just fine and perfectly Christian, just don't read about Demons and Orcs and Wizards.

among other things the glossary in the Dungeon Masters Guide taught me what abbreviations like cf., e.g., et al., i.e., and N.B. meant

Haha I've been out of college for nearly a decade but I had to look up what cf. was again!

I developed an interest in D&D and roleplaying relatively early, toward the end of elementary school, due largely to a friend of my mother's (older than me) kids playing it, and reading a lot of their books while we were over visiting. So, like, early 90s.

I also happened to have a Jehovah's Witness as my best friend from the years of 7th through 9th grades.

When he saw me reading one, one day, while we were hanging out together, he cracked a joke that I was secretly skinning cats to perform my satanic rituals while using those books as manuals for such things, eventually turning it, over the years to come, into a running joke where he'd just say 'cat skinnnnnnnnnnnnnnnner' in a drawn-out menacing hiss every so often.

Fortunately, he was a very chill Jehovah's Witness, and I don't know if he's even stuck with the faith now that he's an adult (as his father didn't, which is why he got the divorce with his JW mother, I'm fairly sure).

Good times, good times.

wow

Crying?

Youknow-









*snikth-kPuh*


Things are gonna get so bad, soon.

Snikth-kPuh sounds like some Lovecraft monster reject.

That's a god line.

Well, there IS a lot of accounting.

..after rolling a 1 on a D20.

I used to have a best friend named Bunky. He's the only person I knew with that name. Owns a whole bunch of casinos in Las Vegas now.

Bunky Prewster?

Damnit! If we were 5 years older I would've called him that all the time! Then again he had a short temper and has apparently been to jail several times, so it's probably best that I didn't.

nah, it was caused by the burning dice fumes

It's a good thing she didn't accuse D&D of being sexist, or you'd still be defending her to this day.

Damn cami, chill. I don't even like the SHE-BEAST that shall not be named, but the mobs of NeckbeardHitlers that go after her disgust me more. *shrug*

I lost a cleric during a campaign to retrieve the Bowl of Knowledge.

I've got no problem with D&D but Teen Jeopardy? That's some dark business right there, have you considered talking to a priest?