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Comment by sillyquiet | Hacker News Reader

Dungeon magazine (and Dragon Magazine) were nerd nirvana in the age of the satanic panic.

Geek stuff was NOT mainstream, it wasn't cool, and it wasn't a big component of everyday life.

Lord of the Rings, Star Trek (and Star Wars, but less so), D&D... these were practically underground interests, especially in more conservative areas of America.

So the first time I went to a Waldenbooks in the shopping mall and saw a magazine with a freaking' dragon on the cover, well, it blew my mind. I had stacks and stacks of them. Still have many. The short stories, the comic strips, the short adventures, even the advertisement for miniatures and dice - it was amazing to me SO MANY people shared my interest.

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The short stories were fantastic. And they really were underground: mainstream youth culture had no idea and no interest and in some cases were even hostile toward the small group of believers. Like you I still have a stack of these magazines somewhere in my basement. My kids are not into RPG’s, so I may have to get rid of them or connect with a buyer if people really like to collect these things.

Yep, playing D&D was not something to admit to in a general audience.

to this day I have difficulty talking about D&D with people in public.

WoW and D&D 4e pretty much changed public perception, at least for people under a certain age (now 40ish), with regard to RPGs in general. That was when the frat guys at universities started playing D&D. That would be the equivalent of the high school jocks slinging dice between drills. Paired with the explosion in tabletop board gaming in the US (thanks Settlers of Catan) that's happened this century, it's become cool/normal to be into these kinds of things.

It think the shift into acceptance of D&D is part of a general mainstreaming of geek stuff (the so-called geek wave) rather than just tabletop games and the like. Other 'geek' interests fell into the same category - Star Trek, etc.

Those also have reached 'ok, I can talk about it in wider social circles without getting squinted at or handed a copy of The Watchtower' levels in the new millennium where they were not previously.

This is definitely a better state of affairs and it really really please me to see new audiences play D&D or discover TNG, but sadly, as such (again, maybe just my nostalgic bias) such things have been so marketable-sized by the corps taking advantage of the geek wave as to be bland and soulless.

I guess it's just the natural course for anything popular and marketable, really -- although thankfully, Wizards of the Coast has continued to publish some really excellent (at least in my opinion) D&D content. Plus, if you're willing to sift through a lot of so-so stuff, there's a lot of really great free or low-cost amateur homebrew stuff out there. That kind of thing is definitely a result D&D's popularity explosion.

The game which dare not speak its name.

Jumanji?

I played a lot of D&D when I was a teenager but it pales in comparison to the amount my teenage daughter plays today. Discord has made it so easy for her to get a group going that she has 3 different groups each week. However, they are much less about min/maxing as they are about the drama and story.

I think minmaxers were always just a specialized subgenre of fantasy gamers. The core to role playing games is playing a role -- the strict definition of drama and story. There was always a schism between those who saw the rules as an enabling technology to explore alternative takes on the human condition, and those who saw story and character as a matrix onto which the rules could be projected. Same as pretty much everything else, I'll wager.

I was on the football team and I loved D&D. We had a really small group of kids we played with and lived in constant fear of being "outed".

If you need any indication how times have changed, my buddy teaches high school and runs a D&D club whose members aren't remotely socially stigmatized for it. I graduated in '99, and even just 20 years ago it's not something I would have brought up at school.

My parents were caught up in that and assumed that Satan was coming for my soul through D&D and Judas Priest. I didn’t even know who they were at the time, the tracts I had to read told me all about them. Now I am an adult that enjoys D&D and Judas Priest, so mission accomplished Mom!

Having grown up in a liberal part of the country, I didn't even know people thought D&D was Satanic until I saw a 1983 episode of "The Greatest American Hero" called "Wizards & Warlocks" where there were references to the game being 'evil' (although the game in the episode was closer to LARPing, the nod to D&D was clear). I was confused and asked around. That was my first introduction to the wackiness of Bible-belters.

Thank you for that burst of nostalgia!

I remember Tom Hanks starring in some made for TV movie Mazes and Monsters - he was a college student who went CRAZY playing D&D. The game was going to brain wash you so you couldn't tell the difference between fantasy and reality.

A year later there was a Saturday morning cartoon... It was a confusing time to be an 11 year old.

When I saw this back in the 80's, I was totally WTF: Dark Dungons [1]

Just found out it inspired a film of the same name [2]

[1] https://www.chick.com/products/tract?stk=0046

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qc9JiIiOSQ

I however never worked out how to get my parents to buy me more D&D stuff whenever I wanted it.

The thing that grinds my gears are the people who claim that the reason it was so niche was that the people playing were insert your favorite -ism here. To be clear I think its great that more people are playing. D&D is an awesome hobby.

I love that some of the mini games have been written up as VASSAL modules so we can still play them :)

And I still have my handmade pieces for Lord of the Tabletop in a ziploc bag somewhere around here...

Walden books! Oh man..thank you for that dose of nerd nostalgia!

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