The great 1980s Dungeons and Dragons panic
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Really? GTA? Every FPS ever? Video games in general?
This "moral panic" behavior is by no means limited to conservative/traditionally religious causes.
As an example that will likely challenge many here, try comparing environmental panics (historical and present) with religious ones. There is a very similar pattern of catastrophic predictions, frantic hyperbole, disregard of contradictory data (usually combined with demonizing those pointing it out), and the inevitable eventual shift to a new topic for panic.
Care to name some examples? Because the past ones I can think of (acid rain, ozone hole) do not fit the pattern AT ALL, they were well grounded in reality and abated because things were done that actually eliminated or mitigated the causes of the problem.
Peak oil (oh, we just mean "conventional oil"). Many resource exhaustion forecasts (it will happen, just wait). Mass species extinctions (it's happening! Dozens per day! Which species?)
Each of these is based on an element of truth, extrapolated without allowing any mitigating factors, and published with forecasts of imminent doom.
Declaring victory over the ozone hole appears premature. Nasa says current changes are driven by wind and temperature, not changes in chlorine levels. http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/new-results-from-inside-...
There's a severe difference between people thinking a video game will make you anti-social, violent, or a killer and people being concerned over your immortal soul. Keep in mind, D&D was going to make you summon demons, have blood sacrifices to pagan gods, commit suicide, and then after all that evil you were going to burn in Hell forever.
As there is something to what you say in comparing environmental panics but most of the time that was often based on something real that was then overblown, taken out of context, or misunderstood. Acid rain and the ozone hole turned out to be not as bad as some were predicting, but they were real. Summoning demons is not.
That and the more recent nonsense over video games possibly causing anti-social behavior cannot even come close in comparison.
I remember poring over rulebooks and probability tables for hours, and writing computer simulations (in Visual Basic or Excel) to try and find some edge in the game. I think my parents were pretty worried about me.
I now write stock market simulations and come up with trading strategies for a living, using essentially the same methods that I used in the mid 1990s to win at roleplaying games, so I guess it all worked out okay?
OMG, parents should have intervened!
So playing all those chaotic evil characters really had an affect on you eh? :)
Then again I later majored in statistics, so maybe they had a point ^_^
Which is basically a standard deck of cards but with four colors for four suits, and numbered from 1-14. Just getting rid of the standard symbols is enough for people to pretend that they can't gamble with them. Popular with Mormons.
The next step in that argument being "Well, no more maths for me then!" She half jests.
I've often wondered whether extremely basic statistical ability could be enhanced by having kids play those sorts of games. Dice and cards and so on.
Of course, I'm playing hold'em on my other monitor right now, so maybe he had a point too...
Wait, unless his point was that you like card games, gambling or otherwise. If so, you're on your own.
Good luck!
No, that's just stupid, could you not gamble with a cardboard spinner?
It's interesting to have seen, first hand, part of our long unbroken chain of freaking out, from rock and roll to instagram; this giant perennial wave of overreaction that's done nothing but persecute innocents and make the world a less beautiful, exploratory, and lively place.
Is there an example of a popular fashion that's been of actual concern? The only example I can think of off-hand is the dancing plague of 1518, and even that was probably worth the casualities.
It's amazing to me that a mode of thinking that has been so consistently incorrect for so long seems to be dominant, whereas the "let kids do whatever it is they're into this week" is considered a fringe hippie thing.
For the first time, kids had easy access to cars, and thus they could be away from their parents more often. The cultural construct we have today of teenagers being so independent from their parents didn't really exist in the generations prior.
Not only were these teens in their cars, away from parents, they were listening to the radio in the those cars. Outside of adult supervision. And so white kids could hear black music for the first time. So they were crossing racial lines, and eventually the lines became more and more blurred, which is how rock music grew.
And, of course, those kids were having sex in the back seats of those cars. Away from parent, and while listening to rock music. Which, in the pre-pill era, led to a lot of unplanned pregnancies.
So while early rock didn't really cause negative effects, it's not hard to see how worried parents could make the associations. The kids were indeed literally out of control.
You have a very distorted and limited view of history (but then, mine is surely as distorted, just differently!)
My parents were just sharing stories of how, at age 10, a friend would take the sheep, a horse, and a dog, and literally be alone for the full day, before returning at night.
I'd characterize the difference more as "large numbers of youth with no responsibilities", rather than "away from their parents more often". Industrialized societies with child labor laws tend to keep children more separate from adult responsibilities, and prevent them from having meaningful responsibilities.
D&D was great. I was absolutely obsessed with it as an early teenager in the mid 80's. I carried the rule books around all times and even had a club at the school lunch table. I remember the vice principal...a bearded guy who was probably like 28 coming over and congratulating us saying he played D&D also and he believed only smart people played the game.
I also remember the ridiculous religious hysteria and my parents becoming concerned after someone at church giving them a cassette of some guy warning of demonic possession from rock music and D&D. The were reasonable though eventually let it go after investigating the rule books and my father actually playing a game (he frankly thought it was dumb which in retrospect is understandable). It all seems so tame compared to what is around now.
D&D was my great love at that time. Well... that and my TSR 80:)
D&D (and the subsequent Arduin rules) were a HUGE part of my teenage years in the 80s. I had to sell all of my collection to buy tires for my car when I was about 19. Come to think of it, it was more or less my coming of age moment.
I've since purchased almost every book I had as a young kid on eBay, but it's incredibly hard to find anyone who still plays with these rules. Kind of a bummer actually.
I spent a great deal of time in my youth studying the demons and devils sections of the Monster Manual.
Only years later did I learn that the devils were all sourced from actual religions (tiamat, beelzebub, etc). It helped spur my interest in ancient civilizations.
These days, I get calls from friends- all successful, happily married with family and kids- to play D&D.
The people who complained about this back then had NO IDEA how powerful games and myths can be to developing children- in a very positive way.
My parents (mostly my mother) are very religious and I remember being driven around town with the local Christian radio station on and it being just wall-to-wall fear mongering about Satanism, backmasking in rock songs and D&D. Just endless talk, hour after hour, about how all this will lead your child to drugs, pornography, satanism and suicide -- numerous "concrete" examples were included as the local Christian "research team" swept the country (pre-internet! so most of it was probably just invented whole-cloth) for police reports and court records for Satanic rituals, Rock music and D&D. All reported with deep urgency and absolute truthful authority between gentle praise songs I heard in church every Sunday. Of course they'd never play a couple seconds of Led Zeppelin back and forth so you could hear the hidden messages revealed, lest you want to kill yourself during the next commercial break or continuous praise song power hour.
Terse descriptions of D&D were provided. "A game where players assume the roles of various characters, demons are involved, sometimes, like gambling, dice are used!" without any cultural context about how it's exactly like any other game where people assume different identities, like Cowboys & Indians, or super space spy or whatever.
It was a perfect storm of cultural events simultaneously pumped up by various social moralists who, like most groups like this, take tiny kernels of truth and wrap them in heaping piles of agendas, fabrications and outright lies and blanket every form of sensory input to drive the masses into full foaming at the mouth hysteria.
The publicity eventually leaked out into regular media and I remember seeing some of these "issues" (which had all been masterfully woven together into a single moral crisis by the religious media my mother listened to) break into the regular nightly news my father forced me to sit and watch every evening (to build culture and character).
My mother was absolutely obsessed with all this and was driven to hysteria. One time pulling the car over to the side of a busy highway and making me promise, promise, I'd never roll D&D dice and risk letting Satan into my heart - tears streaming down her face while she shook like a leaf -- because I might commit suicide when the game is over. She'd listen to hour after hour of pronouncements of how the country was going to sin...I'd watch her cleaning the kitchen while this played on the radio, her scrubbing getting more and more vigorous as her emotions became more and more upset.
Even at the tender age of...6 or 7, I knew the entire thing was a ridiculous pile of malarkey. I honestly had no clue what D&D was, had only heard rock music in passing (my music selection was pretty heavily regulated) and certainly wasn't involved in Satanism of any kind. I was more concerned with the severe mental instability this seemed to be drawing out in my mother...who seemed to be the only person I knew who couldn't separate fantasy from reality in this situation.
When the D&D cartoon started airing, curious, I'd sneak a few minutes of it in, titillated that something so dangerous was in cartoon form and on television before bed time. The show was pretty tame so I usually got bored and turned it off and did something else with my time. (He-Man was also banned in my house).
I vaguely remember the acronym BADD from those times and the name Patricia Pulling, and the claim that players would get so wrapped up in the fantasy of their characters, with reality and imagination so tangled up, that when your character died, there was some non-trivial chance you would go out and kill yourself, with probably a recently listened to Led Zeppelin tape in the boom box and with some kind of Satanic connection, or sacrificed chickens or something nearby.
And suddenly, one day, the Christian "news" sources my mother listened to moved on to something else and it was all over. Rock music was still around, Led Zeppelin was still for sale, D&D was still a game, but apparently the moral crusaders had stopped something and had moved on to something else. I think this was when all the major lawsuits had concluded with BADD losing all of them.
It was still on my banned list, but the hysteria was over. Like most kids I just ignored it and played a little D&D over at my friends' houses till I got bored of it and listened to rock music just the same. Years later, remembering the hysteria, a friend and I figured out how to reverse a cassette tape and we experimented listening for hidden messages in Rock Music cassettes to little success.
The early 1980s were a really weird moment in American history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bothered_About_Dungeons_and_Dr...
Me and my brother played D&D frequently, had the books (the ones with devils on the covers), and it never bothered anyone. I don't think my parents were too worried a game was much danger to me.
Common sense for the win, I guess.
Because that stuff can turn outright dangerous. What if she caught you watching that cartoon and decided you needed to be ritually cleansed by (for example) submerging into holy water until the demon's convulsing stopped? Just a thing I randomly thought up, but TBH I'm sure it happened.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UCKG#Victoria_Climbi.C3.A9.27s_...
Same basic mechanism and response, just different subject material.
I wonder what the end effect of this trend:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7535218 [Internet use is associated with non-religion]
will be on these kinds of "generated worries"? Will the fear mongers simply fade away, or will they find some different way to incite fear in others for their own gain?
And for completeness http://xkcd.com/1289/ (alt text in particular).
I don't see anything about what you've described (other than the specific subjects of D&D and rock music) that identifies the 80s. The reaction you describe is typical of all time periods; the same thing is happening all over all the time. For some period in the 90s-00s it was violent video games.
http://basicinstructions.net/basic-instructions/2014/2/4/how...
It was a really special kind of holistic life-pastiche that I don't think really existed before or sense. The closest I can think of is the late 50s early 60s as being quite so cohoesive and holistic.
I experienced it as a child growing up, so my take on the 80s is from that angle, but when I walk around the toy section at my local store these days, it's like a pale shadow of the vibrancy from that time -- most of the really popular toys are still more or less the ones that came into popularity when I was a kid. It seems like most of the big franchises from the 90s (the last time I really had awareness of the toy section) have died off or been replaced.
My wife is South Korean, and when she grew up, her country was just emerging from a long dictatorship. The popular media was heavily controlled and given their neighbor, was almost a more intense version of what we had in the 80s. In fact, I'm frequently surprised at how much of our 1980s American culture was wholesale imported into hers, but not our 1970s or 1990s culture.
What values and ideas were they reinforcing that made them examples of the weirdness of the 80s?
I can get the USA! from GIJoe, but the others that I recall as a kid seem to just fit into the typical good vs evil theme that is older than the written word.
This isn't just childhood memories either as many of my favorites from childhood are on Netflix and have been recently revisited.
Like I said, just curious.
I agree about the vibrancy though. My memories of childhood seemed much interesting in some terms such as toys, Saturday morning and after school afternoon cartoons then what's available for my kids today. They are out there, but it seems you have to work to find good ones when I had multiple options to choose from.
1. There are good and evil, only. The role of good is to fight evil, using violence.
2. The origin of evil is either irredeemable people or irredeemable ideologies. They cannot be reasoned with and do not have internal logic. The only way to end evil is by force.
3. Wishy washy good guys negotiate, but it never works. Manly good guys shoot first. That works.
4. If you are not succeeding with violence, use bigger, shinier violence.
5. Violence solves the problem, and once it's solved, it's over, and everything goes back to happy.
bane's reply is more of what I was curious about.
Christianity, for example, regards violence as only useful backed by supernatural aid, and doesn't see it as the only way to fight, only assigns irredeemable evil to supernatural entities, nominally prefers peace, and does not expect human agency (exploding or otherwise) to be sufficient alone. The 80s could well be viewed as a repudiation of christian ideas of evil.
The unrealistic settings are due to the narrative demands of action-oriented storytelling. If you're watching the Ninja Turtles or Superman or whatever, you want to see the good guys kicking the bad guy's butts.
If a show is about engaging the bad guy in a big moral debate and realizing there are no good guys or bad guys, it would just be lame -- not as much entertainment value.
That being said, I love shows that have moral ambiguity. Four that immediately come to mind are Death Note, Game of Thrones, Puella Magi, and Gunslinger Girl. But that's not everyone's cup of tea. And even though that's my taste, I don't want all my entertainment to be in shades of gray -- I watch Fairy Tail, too.
Transformers are an interesting robot spin on the same theme. Let's be honest, the Autobots were stationed out of America and were largely defending America from the Decepticons. They were super high tech robots and fit nicely into the Star Wars (defense) theme of the Reagan administration.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApTnYwh5KvE - Reagan Star Wars speech (I actually remember some of the graphics from this speech)
I agree with the good vs evil spin on those shows. But I think that the actors who filled the good and evil roles were largely filled with American and Soviet/Nazi/Terrorist idealized stereotypes.
I'd add that in the cartoons the motivation of the evil archetype was always nonsensical and unclear. The Decepticons for example were always after energy resources and converting them to energon cubes. Yet the Autobots never seemed to have energy procurement problems. I think this was fed by the larger propaganda of the communists as being nonsensical, vague "bad guys" who were acting as constant aggressors.
MASK, Inspector Gadget, He Man, Danger Mouse, to some point Thundercats, Gobots, etc. all kind of fit this mold. Cartoons from the 70s and 90s largely don't really reflect this kind of good organization vs. nonsensical evil organization zeitgeist of the time.
I can't agree with the Transformers as much. I don't recall anything specifically stating they were in America other than suggestions in the dialogue. With redubbing the show could have been placed just about anywhere only limited because of the appearance of the main human characters. I believe there was a British version as well. I could agree that maybe the Reagan administration co-opted Transformers for their own use (much like they did with the Star Wars name but I doubt Lucas was a government propagandist) but you seem to be suggesting that the Transformers exists for the benefit of Reagan's Star Wars program. That's the bit I'm curious about because I just don't see that. It seems too conspiracy theory to me. My reasoning is that Transformers was a part Japanese effort and originally based off existing Japanese toys. It was essentially a Japanese company entering the US market. To say they were propaganda for the benefit of the US government is a stretch to me.
I agree with the stereotypes, but I would say they were more of the typical good vs evil stereotypes. Just because they matched the good vs evil actors of the day doesn't necessarily mean they were created with that in mind. That seems some form of bias to me.
The reason the Autobots didn't have energy issues like the Decepticons was because they weren't attempting to conquer. They only required what was needed to survive. The Decepticons were gathering resources to destroy the Autobots on the planet, conquer said planet, and then return to Cybertron to finish the war. Works for me. I think it was the major plot point in several episodes.
I disagree with your final statement. There are many modern examples of more-or-less the same themes of good vs evil with similar stereotypes, archetypes, and plots. It's just a lack of interest or failure in connecting them to modern events.
I just don't buy the propaganda for government benefit in the Saturday morning cartoons from my childhood. Now, propaganda for me to want the toys they were selling? Sure enough, and it works.
Yeah Bumblebee was a VW Bug and Jazz was a Porsche, but there really weren't any other European cars in the show and both of those cars were pretty common in the U.S. Most importantly, Optimus Prime was very clearly an American style semi-truck rather than a British Lorry or Euro style truck.
I guess I wasn't clear though. Those shows really felt like they were at least reinforcing the prevailing propaganda, at a kids level. Part of this was no doubt marketing savvy rather than Government control, but it really made the propaganda machine pervasive, from young to old, top to bottom.
The modern movies are very much an extension of this. The Autobots are allied with Americans, operating out of a base provided by Americans. There's the occasional Aussie or Brit, but by and large it's all American. The cars are all GM cars. It feels natural because it's just an updating of what the Transformers were already doing.
It was brilliant. It tapped into so many threads floating around during the 80s and just pulled them together. High tech robots that fought evil and turned into blue collar American trucks! Bad ASS.
I agree that if one lived in a country that didn't have deserts with small mountains it might be difficult to relate, but there are many areas of the world that appear much the same as the American southwest. Especially in the generic way it was portrayed in the show. Although, there's a point in there about the style of housing as I'm sure that varies quite a bit.
In the end, since it was a toy line intended to enter the American market, you are probably more correct in that than I am.
The modern movies don't count because what you describe is Michael Bay, not Transformers. The themes you describe in the movies is similar themes in just about every movie Michael Bay directed. A large number of the vehicles are GM cars, due to money I'm sure, but I would say the lineup of vehicles is more diverse than how you describe them in the cartoons.
As for your last bit, if you are stating that in lines of marketing to sell toys, I agree. If it is propaganda to benefit government something or other programs, I fail to see how you've supported that thought even though that seems to be what you are trying to say.
Am I misunderstanding?
The results was the gradual removal of children's programming to the point that my cherished Saturday morning and after school cartoons disappeared.
We've talked about it since, and he has no memory of telling us (me and my siblings) that listening to secular music would lead us to the devil. He wasn't religious before this episode, and hasn't been since. I've always held resentment toward him from this time, but to find he didn't even remember was a shock.
My question for you guys is: how did it effect you? How did you recover? For me the result was, at the time, going to school and spewing this nonsense to my friends and ostracizing myselft. I had socialization problems anyway an that just increased my perceived isolation. Took years to work thru all that.
Instead I became deeply skeptical of my parent's ability to parse these kinds of issues out for my well being. Which of course led to all kinds of wonderful moments as a teenager ;)
Over the years I also discovered that my mother was deeply susceptible to counter-mainstream, alternative movements. So I also grew up with all kinds of weird fad diet of the year, carb-load, bran, high citrus, vegetarian, soy, uncooked veggies, low-carb, acai, quinoa, dozens of others, or a stint where we all did Chinese medicine and ate lots of ginseng or a brief stint with homeopathy. No surprise my mother eats gluten free today but I suspect that's about to change as the next fad diet starts to infiltrate popular culture - Metabolism B, Dash, Paleo whatever. I usually indulged her at home (after all some of the diets were pretty tasty) and just ignored it all when I was out on my own.
More importantly it's made me very skeptical whenever large groups of people cotton onto something. It seems the more intense the group interest in something is, the less I'm inclined to go along...whatever it is. I grew up almost anti-cool - skeptic kind of personality. It saved me from most of the terrible fashion fads that everybody I grew up with regrets these days.
But in terms of what HN would be interested in, I tend not to really "get" large scale trends either -- since I've basically been trained to revolt from them unless there's a clear advantage to following it. So it definitely had an impact on my thinking in that sense.
I was warned against D&D, violent video games, and various harmless television shows. It was a bit silly at my house; violent games included Scorched Earth and Starcraft, and inappropriate TV included Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Simpsons. I thought at the time that my parents' fears were misplaced, and I argued as much . . . but I respected their rules because they were my parents. When I moved out, I asked my mother if she would prefer I continue to avoid those things out of respect for her, and she told me that as an adult, that sort of decision was mine to make. I promptly installed TONS of violent video games day 1 at college, and went on to form a rather excellent D&D group. ;)
I resented my parents a little bit for the parts of geek culture I missed out on. And it cost them a bit of respect that I couldn't rationally persuade them they were wrong (we had a relatively robust debate culture at our house). But you know, those have both since mended. It's easy to go back as an adult, and pick up things you missed. And their rules relaxed a lot, shortly after I moved out, to the point that my adult siblings and I can have a Left 4 Dead LAN in their living room, and they think nothing of it.
Looking back, it really was only a handful of things they taught me that were wrong; they taught me a lot of very valuable things that were right, too. I find that the older I get, the more I quote them. And while they laid down certain rules I disagreed with, they very much raised me to think for myself and make up my own mind, and for that I'm grateful. And I'm grateful for the opportunity to think hard about when rebellion against authority is necessary on moral principle, and when it would be selfish even if you're right.
As a kid, I had great respect for their judgement, and I don't think it was misplaced. They were occasionally wrong, but I think I was wrong a lot more often. I understood they had greater experience and wisdom than I did, and greatly valued their opinions. That's still true, and I still do. Part of me resents not playing Magic with my geek friends in junior high, but a larger part of me is glad that I respected their decisions. I think it was the right thing to do, and I'd do it again.
One is that the scientific community, or large part of it, has never been wrong about something. I guess that could depend on how you define what makes the community.
Two is that everyone in the religious community reacted the same as the loudest complainers in the group. Again, depends on how you define the community.
Loss of credibility doesn't necessarily come from being wrong, it depends on how you react to being wrong. Both communities have been wrong before, and both communities have on occasion reacted badly to it. But in any of those cases, I doubt there was any one thing that could be used to properly denounce the entire group for all time.
Pokemon's opposition was less religious, but still there, some complainers even likened it to promoting slavery in how a trainer owns and treats their monsters.
I remember meeting a cop at GenCon when this hype was happening, and he said, "The stats suggest that D&D players commit crimes at a miniscule level compared to the general population."
It was pretty counter-culture for the time. Some of my friends would have been called "goth" in later years, but this was before all that.
In college I drove down to Jacksonville for GenCon South, and got eliminated from the tournament pretty quickly (our party wandered the desert, got lost and died - we never even found the temple. Bah.) But it was amazing how many other people were into the game, way more than just the 4-5 people who played that I knew.
I actually got her to play D&D with me. It was interesting. We sat down and set up the game, had little tokens for our characters (it was the starter set), and dice and all of that. We selected our characters, entered the dungeon, and were promptly killed by the first orcs we came across. We stopped playing after that, but I think it opened her eyes to the misconceptions she had of the game.
BJU would go into K-Mart and demand they stop playing certain radio stations because the students couldn't shop there if they played rock music. They also caused a shitstorm when they tried to expel some students for holding hands when walking across campus because one was black and the other white, and this was in 2001. I even had a guy in my high school get into their weird religious beliefs trying to tell us in Biology class that the world was 3000 years old and the devil put dinosaur bones there to test us.
This is similar to the moral panic that happened around pokemon and harry potter in the 90s, and the daycare rape panic that happened in the 80s. It seems like moral outrage is a way that some people band together and identify.
It's still happening now, my university I went to is being attacked for giving a summer reading book that is about a lesbian. People are viciously attacking faculty and alumni from the university, and the state legislators have even taken to fining the schools for it.
In the days when car radios had dial pointers, BJU had a teacher whose job it was to go through the commuting student parking lot each day and issue demerits to those whose radio was tuned to the local rock station -- AM 1440.
Yeah, they finally racially integrated about ten, fifteen years ago. The feds put a lot of pressure on them, and their excuse of "We're integrated - we have two black students" didn't fly (obviously).
There was a documentary about Eric Chahi as he was finishing his work on Another World on Amiga (one of the milestones in Gaming!) in 1991-1992, and the reporters described him almost as being autistic. The media suddenly changed their stance on video games after Sony's success with the PS1 turned most young people into gamers and gained mass approval.
On a slight tangent I remember a Scottish religious group in the 1980s who did not let children use calculators because "Satan talks through screens" - they extended a ban on TVs to include calculators. This is the kind of thing that I find very hard to get results from a search engine with. So, any advice from DDG or Googlers about best way to get that info would be lovely!
Mass approval is a means of consensual intellectual deference. Mass media is perfectly made to broadcast these messages.
The story's always the same: $NEW_MEDIA is harmful, and the domain of ill-adjusted individuals. Until, of course, a vague future when it isn't, even though nothing has changed. No mention is made of the errors in perception made in the past: "we've always been accepting of gaming."
Pop culture can only exist in the present. It cannot bring itself to look back in time, for in doing so it'd have to confront it's mistakes and ephemeralness.
Lots of people play today. I strongly encourage anyone even slightly interested to visit local game shops, look for meetup.com rpg meetup and try it out. If you happen to be in austin http://www.meetup.com/dnd-823/
I'm happy to answer any questions about that meetup (which I organize), finding / starting a game, or RPGs in general. Here or email njharman@gmail.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Throne_of_the_Gods
Is it so bad that my cleric is lawful evil and gets his powers from Asmodeus? Does that make me a devil worshipper? Come on Mom, it's Asmodeus, not Satan.
Edit: Actually, I don't know if a cleric could get powers from a devil rather than a god. Dungeon Master's Guide check please? Ah, well. It's an RPG. We could do whatever we wanted as long as the DM approved.
I was more into Dragonlance so things might be a tad different for you.
Plus, as you say, whatever the DM decides if there's no specific rule defining the outcome.
That's how I understood it as well. In the base AD&D 1st Edition, you had a cleric and no other backstory. There wasn't a backstory to go with the game, it was just the base rules to be applied to any world. Then there were different worlds which came later in expansion sets.
In Forgotten Realms, I believe your cleric could get certain unique powers based on which god your priest followed. For example, if you followed the god of magic, you would gain the ability to cast minor spells as you gained levels.
I also seem to recall the same info about following a devil. I believe you could follow certain major devils (probably had to control their own "circle" of Hell) but that you actually took a hit to your powers. Because these beings were less powerful than gods, you got less powerful abilities.
I imagine this was much the same no matter what expansion you went with. You needed the expansions to get a backstory and fill-in for the "lore." It's was a bit of a strange situation. There were specific gods for each setting, but each setting had access to the same "planes" with Hell being one of those. The way I remember this being setup is that each setting had a different world but they all literally shared the same planes. A Dragonlance player might actually be able to meet a Forgotten Realms if they bumped into each other in the planes. I think this was all intentionally left a bit blurry because it wasn't fully fleshed out.
Original D&D included Christian symbolism: Clerics used holy water and a cross. Gygax's 1975's D&D Supplement I: GREYHAWK (page 34) states:
"All Vampires are affected by the cross, despite any former religious background, as it is sovereign against them."
Furthermore, the demons and devils in early D&D were presented as adversaries, not as role models.
I started playing D&D in the early 80s. I went to Catholic grammar school. We were taught by priests and nuns. We played D&D in the schoolyard. Nobody discouraged us from playing.
I was also bullied quite a bit in grammar school and high school, and I think I would have gone nuts if I didn't have D&D as an outlet. D&D also got me interested in reading books and studying probability. D&D helped improve my grades from Cs and Ds to straight As. I eventually got a B.S. in math with a 4.0 GPA.
As a grown up, I played in a group DM'd by a fundamentalist Christian, who didn't see any conflict between his religious beliefs and fantasy role playing games.
One of the books about the case is called Cruel Doubt[1] and in 1997, I listened to the audio book in a road trip with my parents (I was like 14). It's a really well-done book (skip the made-for-TV movie starring Blythe Danner and a 16-year old Gwyneth Paltrow), but it focused a lot on the D&D controversy, because that was so much a part of the D&D narrative.
Anyway, I share all this because a) the book is really good (I got the Kindle version a few years ago and re-read it for the first time in 15 years) and b), my own mother still harbors negative feelings about D&D because of how the book explained the controversy and the supposed associations between the game and the murder.
She'd missed the whole brouhaha in the 1980s, because she had two daughters and the only one who could ever be interested in D&D (me) was born in the early 80s, and thus a toddler during most of the media maelstrom.
Yet the narrative of that book (which again, really isn't against D&D and doesn't make it out to be a catalyst for the murder, beyond sharing the real fact that yes, the murderers did lots of LSD and played D&D all day instead of going to work or school), was enough for my mom to give me a lecture at 17 when I happened to go hang out with my then-boyfriend and his college friends who happened to be playing a tabletop game.
Anyway. This comment adds nothing to the discussion, I just wanted to plug Cruel Doubt because it's a really good true crime book. And I associate it with helping corrupt my otherwise intelligent mother into believing a game was the product of the devil and evil. Don't worry, I set her straight.
[1]:http://www.amazon.com/Cruel-Doubt-Joe-McGinniss-ebook/dp/B00...
We lived really far out in the country at the time. Nothing but wells and septic systems for 20 miles in any direction.
Do you also feel the same way about Jews?
As for "the occult" in D&D, come on. Throwing a die to check the damage of a fireball never turned anyone into Aleister Crowley.
I meant that D&D contained occult themes, not that it presented these ideas as factual or encouraged people to take them seriously. A fair reading of my post would have indicated this anyway, since my post started with "While the idea of teenagers literally worshiping Satan was a moral panic..."
Nothing is as hard to control as an independent mind.
If any particular Christian finds something that would lead them to sin in D&D, then they should avoid it. But all things God has made are good in their proper place, and that includes imagination.