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Comment by rnoorda | Hacker News Reader

I recently set up a short campaign for a few people at work who had never played D&D but wanted a taste. I was surprised that several people were immediately worried for us because of the "darkness" it would bring into our lives. I always thought that was a concern from decades ago, but apparently I was wrong.

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> I always thought that was a concern from decades ago, but apparently I was wrong.

In the realm of moral panics I thought were settled in the 20th century see: https://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/ct-life-grand-thef...

The world has been seeing an uptick in religiousness; Christians have been amassing political and publishing power in many countries. Maybe that has something to do with the ”darkness”.

The western nations have been seeing the opposite of an uptick. Churches are generally in decline, while the number of non-affiliated is rising. Even in the US. Some American denominations still have considerable political power because of various factors, but their membership numbers are shrinking.

Yes, this is precisely what I mean: people are leaving the major denominations because they feel the churches have become too mundane, and choose to affiliate with more radical fundamentalist groups.

The narrative is often that the natural events of recent years and of course COVID are God’s punishment for maintaining support for the mainstream churches after their leaders voiced their acceptance of various oppressed groups of people.

Eh, there’s a lot of “evangelicals” in my social sphere, some that you may even consider radical, and none of them think this.

The whole “hurricanes are God’s wrath on the US for gay rights” kinda thing isn’t really a wide swath even for the more evangelical set.

At least in my experience which is a bit considerable.

In fact the only time I’ve encountered that sort of rhetoric has been from mainline denominations.

Note that you are talking about your social sphere, assumingly in the US, and generalising that to the world. I am taking nationwide trends outside the US and generalising them to the world.

https://europeanacademyofreligionandsociety.com/news/the-ris...

I'm always amused by this, because I have had to opportunity to DM for clergy several times, and my current group is run by our Deacon.

DnD started out as a kind of fantasy where we have the power to fight darkness directly. The way the genre has evolved has changed that, but to a large degree it's still a game where we act out stories and "practice being good guys."

and here all I wanted was to role play as a muscle wizard

Shadowrun, Physical Adept might be what you want. :-P

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