Be sure it is understood. TTRPGs can be therapeutic but they are NOT therapy and if you are not a professional, licensed therapist you should not try to treat it as such. Doing so is irresponsible and potentially harmful. And yes, this is a reedit of an old video. Don't worry. Many new videos on the way for 2025! Thanks!
@@welovettrpgs Take a look at the group Geek Therapeutics. They’re licensed mental health professionals, many of who. Use ttrpgs as a part of their practice.
In retrospect, one amusing part of the 1980s Satanic Panic = Many of those concerned parents were clueless about where their teenagers were or what they were doing.
My Mom picked up on this in the early 80s and readily agreed to host games for me and my brothers friends to play AD&D in our home because that way she at least knew where we were.
My dad, who worked at sea and saw me for two weeks each six months, called my mom concerned that I was getting into something no one could control. My mom, whose dining room hosted the games, saw me having social interactions, doing arithmetic and learning to handle conflict.
I lived through the Satanic Panic too. Thank goodness my mom lacked the temperament of those swept up in it. I'm one of those classic cases of D&D being a refuge from abuse and bullying. While I don't have an official diagnosis, C-PTSD checks way too many boxes for me for it to not be a factor. Existing in those worlds with those creatures and conflicts, and with a simplified world that was much easier to tell good from bad, probably saved my life. I know it improved my reading comprehension, my problem solving, and my match skills. It also awakened in me a love for philosophy, ethics, and morality that are still with me today. I'm grateful for D&D and the positive effects it had on my life.
There are so many stories that I could tell about this topic. I don’t even know where I would start. The one that best fits is a friend who none of us knew was trans. He was totally shocked that he didn’t have to play a male character. When he asked about it, I even encouraged him playing a female character. To make him feel less self-conscious about it, I rolled up a female character too. I got a call out of the blue from his therapist. The therapist wanted to know everything she could about D&D, because it had been such a major impact. The therapist and I met a couple times to talk about it and she ended up walking into a book store and buying a copy of every book they had in stock. This was in the ‘90s, mind you, so it wasn’t a small purchase. As far as I know, she still uses D&D as part of group therapy. That trans friend of mine started another group on her own. They met regularly and it was full of trans, gay and lesbian players. I was their token straight friend who regularly sat in on their game. The last I heard, there is still an empty chair and a blank character sheet for me at every session of a game she runs. You get out of the game what you put into it. That’s what the people who are afraid of it don’t manage to see. I have seen horrible people turn games into horrible things, but I have also seen horrible people turned into some of the nicest people by their games. As a side note, you have no idea how hard it is to tell a story like the one above. My trans friend was male for one part of it and female for one part of it. She knows that there is a point before which I use male pronouns and after which I use female pronouns because that’s how I comprehend the magnitude of change in her. There is a definite point where it changed from one to the other, but it wasn’t based on her surgeries. You should see the grin on her face when I talk about things before that point. She gets to hear about herself, but not herself in those times. She knows that she and he are the same, but not the same and they are both my friends. Understanding that is part of the magic of this game and the hobby in general. She knows that she just rerolled a new character at that point for new adventures and it didn’t really change a thing. That never fails to make her happy, even with all the other crap she has had to go through.
And now it's the transformers who are responsible for destroying the hobby and making it all about genders and making orcs and goblins good (and spitting in the face of all the established lore in the process) so it's funny you are responsible for bringing one into the hobby, and they are responsible for destroying it.
Yeah, the panic was pretty bad where I lived. I had to hide my books, character sheets, dice, everything. I learned to live a parallel life and keep secrets.
I guess there are some people who read the human-centricness of the core setting of the game as a metaphor for racism in the real world. Also, the hobby has traditionally been more appealing to males than females, and that has led to some having concerns of the game promoting mysogyny. I suppose those are valid concern ... maybe. What people fail to understand is that no one who plays D&D is forced to create a setting that is racist, mysogynist, or anti-lgbt. While some things that are written in the published material for the game might be construed as those things, it's ultimately the DM and the players themselves who decide how their games approach those things or even if they approach them at all.
One guy I know had to hide his dice bag in his sock drawer for years. His christian parents would not let him D&D with us. But he was allowed to play Star Wars (WEG D6) and TMNT (Palladium) with us.
I did the same thing. The D&D books were at a friends house and everything else was fair game. I ran or played in Cyberpunk 2020, Mekton Zeta, Rifts, Robotech/Macross, Castle Falkenstein, and the board game Hero Quest. Which we would play with my cousins at the dinner table with a lot of the same stuff you find in D&D, but it was Hero quest and there were no issues with it. To this day I have never told my mom I play or played D&D. It's quite hilarious.
Yeah, my mom took a look at my D&D books when the panic got rolling around 1984. She saw the front cover of the DM manual, with the Effriti grabbing the scantily robed princess and sat me down and had me explain what we did when we played. Once she understood that what we did was imagine we were big strong warriors, cunning thieves or Gandalf, instead of a bunch of nerds eating Cheetos, she relented.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane. I recall when this was happening and it was no less bizarre then than it is hearing the re-telling for those who didn't experience it. Thank you again. May your holidays be warm, safe and happy.
By helping to boost math and reading comprehension, D&D showed progress exactly where schools did not. Naturally, this would not sit well with educators who saw it as both a bad reflection on their performance and a challenge to their position. By encouraging an interest in history, D&D made it more difficult for politicians to rely on tried-and-true tactics of fleecing an ignorant populace by keeping them distracted, disinterested, and disunited. Naturally, it was going to make powerful enemies. EDIT: Spielberg used D&D as part of the casting process? Maybe that explains why that waitress in Lake Geneva thought the TSR employees discussing ideas for 2nd Edition SpellJammer worked for him.
Back then our educations systems hadn’t turned into propaganda outlets for the left. DND didn’t intimidate teachers becuase it made them look bad. It was almost entirely based in the Christian anti-magic crusade of the era. Had nothing to do with modern abysmal teaching standards. Can’t read or write? But you believe a boy can become a girl? A++
As the saying goes "The road to hell is paved with good intentions." - often people can mean well but it ends up having an opposite and negative impact instead. Great video and thank you for making it.
My Mom was darned happy I was socializing with friends. But where I lived, they shut down the high school D&D club after two years (this was in 1982) , same school shut down a successful program using D&D to teach special ed students, and a cousin of mine was concerned about my eternal soul and pleaded with me to stop playing. Oh, those were the days.
I'm a 51 year old who started D&D with the red box when I was 10 (1983, roughly). I also was gifted CPTSD from my childhood, and had my books burned. What joyous memories! Thanks for talking about it and letting people know what went on. Note that this was in Southern California, not somewhere in the Bible Belt, as I've heard people suppose.
I have never forgotten watching my mother, filled with fear and anger spurred on by some dude on TV, burning my original AD&D books. A few days later my grandfather, a fire and brimstone preacher himself, showed up to chastise my mom for doing what she did. Said I was a good kid, not some tool of the Devil or something. Mom felt bad enough to give me $100 and drive me to the book store. I still have those replacement 1st edition but they'd changed the covers.
Crazy, I remember those times but my experience was the opposite. My mom would take me to Toys R Us so I could buy AD&D books and lead figures with my allowance.
Preach bro. Living through the Panic was so goddamn awful and here we are with another made up moral panick by people who mock ones who caused the one in the 80s, not realizing they are the same bullies and terrible people.
@0:30 second in, I love everything in this shot! The map, the Books, the angled book shelf, the rarely used City of Cats... Ok, let's watch the rest of the video... Ahhh - the Satinic Panic. Among my group, I (meaning- my books) was the victim. The other parents in the group were a little more chill.
Having played D&D (and sold it owning two game stores) I agree with the many positives of TTRPG, but there is a negative side. Like many things, it can be overdone. I have seen many people so obsessed with it that they neglect being productive members of society. Rather than get jobs, be involved with family, have a life outside of roleplaying, they just want to play D&D (or other TTRPGS) seven days a week and when not playing just become absorbed in it. They end up being couch surfers, living at home with their parents in their forties, or getting some form of government support.
Addicts need therapy. That's not the fault of the game. Those are people who are self medicating using the game just as some people use food or mind altering substances.
@@welovettrpgs Exactly and it has the traits of drugs in that it is escapism. Anything can be abused, but some things are more prone to abuse, TTRPG is one of them.
Mom and Dad tried this crazy thing called, “Talking with your kids” (Pffft, I know, right?) Then they leafed through the DMG. Dad said it looked interesting (never did get him to play). Finally they decided, under no circumstances whatsoever would they pay for more than 2 pizzas and 2 bottles of Mountain Dew on game night.
I remember the satanic panic I spent hours explaining and showing my mother of what fearful individuals were really complaining about the monsters from the deities and demigods and the monsters manuals and after her watching my younger brother play a few rounds and explaining fantasy tropes as long as we didn’t take it to a couple of family homes we were good to go
I was a bit of an introvert in high school (late 70s to early 80s). I enjoyed playing D&D and formed our schools first ever D&D club, which took a bit of arguing and convincing the school administration to allow it. Between this and writing my Advanced Comp Research paper on witch craft (yeah I sided with the accused) my fellow classmates dubbed me a Satanic Devil Worshiper and someone claimed my eyes could turn red (turns out it was some fluke effect while I was in the photo-lab darkroom. I would just laugh it off but it did cause some strife with a long term girl friend and her family.
You could have said, "If I was a Satan worshipping witch, then why don't I have straight A's? Why aren't I a millionaire? Why aren't I the captain of the football team?"
It is a little known fact that Spielberg was a hardcore DM, the type that hated his players. This is why, when asked if the Atari 2600 E.T. game was good, he said, 'yeah, it is fine. Ship it.'
Thankfully in my place and time (Sweden, 1990's/00's) when I was getting into the hobby, there was very little negativity associated with the hobby. I found it a great source of imaginative fun, and I am absolutely convinced doing my own translations of domestic Swedish games for when I was living abroad gave me an eye for interpreting complicated texts. An older friend of mine however had one negative experience, and that was at the time when local parishes often had hobby locales they would loan to youths for social activities, but his TTRPG group suddenly "could not get any slots". It was a time and place when games like Kult was getting popular however, so, y'know. He reacted with drawing an upside down cross with a red marker on the bathroom mirror that last night. He was 15, so I think he handled it pretty well.
Can't remember DnD players ever accused of being satanists in Germany (at least we weren't). The worst thing was that the girls at school were not suposed to know that we were playing DnD, because it was considered so uncool in the 1980s.
That is exactly right. The reason most didn't play D&D wasn't because of some obscure passage from a book they never read but because it was considered very geeky and uncool. Male D&D players weren't known for being good looking.
@@welovettrpgs Or didn't care for looks. Besides extroverts have the spotlight and are considered the golden ratio despite many of them having an IQ at room temperature. Intelligence is not sexy or understood.
All I remember back in the 80s was defeating social isolation and anxiety as young teen and building a lifelong friendship group - we might not play together anymore but I still have strong contacts with several members of my former gaming group. Great video :) I don't think I would have my love of reading without TTRPGs as young person either. Fortunately, my parents were never religious like others.
I was fortunate, in the '80s, I wasn't playing D&D, I was playing BattleTech, Star Trek and Star Frontiers. But, I was also fortunate in that, when the issue arose, my mother took our books, read them, then gave them back with no issues.
Way back in the old days I made the maitake of leaving ALL of my D&D books at a friends house her mom's overzealous boyfriend burned them all to dust in a woodstove so I'm right there with you on all of this.
I was lucky growing up in South Texas, below the Bible Belt and deep into the, um, Catholic Codpiece? Anyway, they were much more excited about Madonna. My 8th grade English teacher in an Episcopalian private school actually handed out pages she'd photocopied from the back of the DMG, from the section on character creation with all the random tables to develop an NPC's personality, as part of an exercise for creative writing.
My mother is a nurse at an incredibly expensive mental health care facility; Over the past six or so years, she's actually helped to establish a table top program for the residents, and they absolutely love it. The facility has had residents ranging from orchestral musicians from China to mathematicians from the UK, and I would absolutely love to be a fly on the wall during one of their sessions; To give any more information than I already have would possibly put her retirement at risk, so I'll leave it at that. All of that aside, I hope you have an enjoyable Yule and holiday season brother. \m/
It became part of my culture shock when moving across the country (though not for the first time). When I started playing D&D in middle school, in mid-1980s New Mexico I don't remember any stigma, it at seemed to be going through cool fad phase. When I moved to Tennessee, just in time to start high school, it was shocking how many people ended up thinking I worshiped Satan. Before that, my only real exposure to that view was from a religious right TV "documentary" which I watched out of a mix of morbid curiosity and ridicule and which basically claimed all secular toys, games, shows were secretly Satanic.
In Australia, we got a severely watered-down version of the Anti-D&D Satanic Panic. I know of a couple of groups here that had venue doors literally slammed shut in their faces, and I also knew someone who had their D&D stuff burned by idiot parents. Our local franchise of '60 Minutes' did an utterly disgraceful hatchet-job of the game, involving a sometime player who went on to cross-dress in order to commit murder. There was also a highly publicized instance of a school principal somewhere banning the game in their school, and a certain politician who took a few shots in between railing against immorality. In general, though, we did OK. Groups openly met and did well. Game shops all remained open, with D&D stuff staying on shelves and, aside from an occasional idiot, there were no problems there. I think the reaction of most Aussies, upon meeting an enthusiast who explained things to them, was to let gamers be - we have never had the religious fervor of the USA. (The old joke here is, "Britain sent its religious fanatics to America, and its criminals to Australia, and Australia got the better half of that deal." ;) ) It's a nice irony that, a long-standing group I am part of was church-founded (Anglican) and met in the local church hall. I would also comment that, as regards concerns about "obsession", the people making those claims never seem to dwell on, say, religious fervor, or obsessions with sports or certain sports teams. Finally, I'm also someone who benefitted greatly from TTRPGs - there were aspects of my childhood I won't go into. But finding the hobby was a major and positive effect on me - and my parents never had issue with it.
Excellent video. During satanic panic my father asked me about it since I played the game. I showed him my books and explained a bit about the game and he thankfully was a reasonable human being and said carry on. Thinking back it’s not surprising he was so level headed. He was born in 1919 and had me late in life (1967). After living through the depression as a teen and fighting in world war 2 he had a keen sense of cutting through the noise getting to the facts of a matter.
As an 80's teen, I was fortunate to have parents who were more concerned that I had friends and wasn't getting into trouble. If they had concerns about my friends and I playing TTRPG's they never mentioned it. It certainly didn't save us from the bullying though. Still playing with some of the same people all these years later, and still loving it.
I distinctly remember the Satanic Panic outrage from when I was just getting involved in gaming/RPGs back in the late 1970's/early 1980's. We had to basically play in secret because our parents would get all up in arms about it. I distinctly remember wanting to buy the Dragonriders of Pern board game (bonus points if you remember that game) at our local Waldenbooks (additional bonus points if you remember that store...) and my sister absolutely losing her mind and screaming it was devil worship at the top of her lungs in the store. Good times.
As someone who had a parent who believed it was evil and kept me from it till i was in my late teens, and then when i tried it on my own i found it was one of my top hobbies and i have several projects in the works for the last decade i want to publish. When my dad found out he was concerned at first, but stranger things actually showed him it wasn't really anything to worry about and you get what you put in. Could you do an evil campaign? Sure, but it's not normally the case.
I played DnD back in the 80's and agree with the points made throughout the video. It's been some 30ys since I last played DnD, and wouldn't chya know it, the local library is having a DnD night next month. It'll be interesting to roll the dice again and see if DnD is something I want to get back into. Cheers!
5E would be great if it didnt have death saves and long/short rest mechanics. Those turn it into superhero dnd with unkillable characters. So I dont use those rules.
One of the weirdest experiences I've had as a gamer is a guy I knew in college gave me a funny look when I told him I played D&D, apparently he knew a group of people that used the game as an excuse to host Orgies in the late 90's and he was once invited to one. I bet that group are the same people that think we need safe words in D&D today.
Imagine my infinite disappointment when the AD&D DM's guide did not, in effect, conjure up demons using foul eldritch incantations. It did, however, require the use of a mighty codex to decipher the elder knowledge, some whisper it's name as the Thesaurus!
I really do love your videos and how you maintain a consistent but ultimately neutral view of the hobby. You're more matter of fact on many things and I love the simple set up! It really does feel like a properly small channel that deserves more love in the space!
I made the same observation about the attacks coming from within in an article I wrote a while back. That point alone tells people what this is all about out.
Great video. I think D&D probably saved me from a wasted life by energizing me to create worlds for the adventures to take place in, which opened me up to geography, sociology and political systems in a way that school never could.
Excellent. Well done. Liked and Subscribed. Kids have been playing RPGs long before D&D. We played Cops and Robbers and Cowboys and Indians riding our bikes around the subdivision, but somehow moving this activity from the streets and neighborhoods to a table with pencil, paper, and dice made it an influence of the Devil. Largely due to the art of the books, I'm sure. I was there, though only suffered minimal impact from the Satanic Panic. You draw an accurate parallel to modern gaming. Again, well done. Thanks for this.
The Satanic Panic made was the best thing to happen to D&D, it got the name out and made kids interested! I was already addicted to reading, with an overactive imagination, TTRPG's are just an extension of that!
Played DnD since pretty much its begining and never dealt with any satanic panic issues, even living in a pretty strong bible belt area. So while I know it happened, it just never was my actual experience growing up. Nowdays, my biggest issue is trying to learn VTTs so I can get some gaming going with family spread across the US. Glad to see more new(old) vids, and can't wait for more.
You're very lucky it didn't hinder you. I've been using Fantasy Grounds for three years and if it wsn't for my player's Id still be unable to use it. But thats my shortcoming not it. They are however in the midst of a major overhaul and it keeps improving all the time. It's great because it's so versatile but more options means more complexity.
Hi Aten. I too have experienced inhibited people come alive over time through collaboration, empowerment and bringing out their innate skills and intelligence to perform brilliant critical thinking in response to incredibly difficult problems. I'm also glad that the UK where I live is predominantly a secular society, unlike many parts of the US where gun ownership and belief in the supernatural are still a thing.
As an American, I can attest that many of my countrymen prefer to worship guns, as they seem reluctant to actually read what Jesus said. You know, feed the hungry, help the needy, give money to the poor, those kinds of things.
I learned to play Dungeons & Dragons in a Catholic private school courtesy a classmate. However within a month or so of that he stopped wanting to play because his parents told him that it wasn't a Christian game. So I gathered a few others to play and that was that. The faculty never had a problem except when my players and I would pass notes during class about the game.
I remember the satanic panic. We just played and didn't pay too much attention to it. Some church showed up at a con once. (Pacific Con 81 in SF.) Anyhoo thanks for the share!!
It's not a moral outrage(well... maybe on twitter it is, that place is a cesspool. But like, in the real world with real people), it's just striving for a more complete understanding of the history of our hobby. There are 100% some questionable elements of early dnd. Just to name a less-cited example, in the "types of men" section there's a description of Derishes as "fanatically religious Nomads who fight as Berserkers, never checking morale[...]". Thing is, a Dervish is just a member of a distinct sect of Islam. They're normal people who exist today. They pay their taxes, they walk their dogs, they post on facebook. To describe real people alive today as blood-frenzied fanatics who will stop at nothing to kill you IS morally wrong and does say something about the authors of those early editions. At the very least that they weren't infallable geniuses. Our discussions of ODnD shouldn't just ignore that aspect of the game. Doing so would be historical revisionism, censorship. We can still appreciate the work they did to create the hobby we love today, much like we can still appreciate old movies that were pivotal to that art form but contain some not-to-great elements as well. Aknowledging the bad, talking about it, and learning from it is necessary for a more complete understanding of our history.
Hi, thanks for commenting. As I commented elsewhere, what started for both groups as legitimate concerns has turned into moral outrage. I'm going to sound snarky and I apologize in advance. And I'm sure this will fall on deaf ears but I need to at least try. My snarkyness is because I am exhausted by people on both extremes just repeating stuff they read on line without thinking deeper. And you sound very sure of yourself, I do not doubt you truly care about the feelings of marginalized groups. However, respectfully, it sounds a lot like you have copy and pasted your beliefs from the intro of the 50th anniversary book (or that online thread which says pretty much exactly what you're repeating.) Since history sounds important to you, I suggest reading some. For example, D&D was based on historical wargaming. If you read a few history books you'll soon discover that history is filled with racism and sexism. At no point in time was D&D ever promoting racism and sexism. (You'd need to read the bible for that) D&D offered those themes as historical facts and evil to be overcome. It's a game about defeating evil. By your logic every history book that includes racism and sexism is racist and sexist. When Southern states want to remove slavery from their history books we rightfully recognize that as racist. But when D&D - a game about defeating evil - wants to do it, well, that's somehow not erasing those horrors from history, that's "the good kind of book burning." The natural progression of what you are promoting is a game where evil doesn't exist at all. There are no bad things that have ever happened. Remove all weapons and replace them with soft cushions. I'll just end with this: Empathy is vital. Looking outside of ourselves is vital. And that also means white people need to stop telling black people how they should feel about stuff. Because that mentality seems pretty darn racist. Thanks. I hope you're doing well.
I grew up in a Christian household where the effect of the Satanic panic was very relevant. It was rolled into a larger moral panic over music, movies, video games, card games, and books. My mom saw me and my brother gravitating toward these things she was concerned with, and realized over time that they didn't turn us into evil, violent, or weird children, but we still received criticism from our larger community. The current moral panic we see in the role play space is a direct reflection of that same phenomena, and it too will go away, so keep playing your elf games the way you like to, and it will be fine.
Wow you've struck a chord here. I was playing AD&D in the early 80s at the height of the satanic panic and my mom was hearing what you're talking about on the news. I didn't know until many years later she actually had some concerns. However being the intelligent woman she is she thought to herself but those are his most intelligent and well adjusted friends and thankfully blew it off. For context one of those friends was an inventor for the Byrd corporation who make medical equipment. His enprovment on a human incubator was prevalent in the US for 20 years. Yes a bright group. Thanks mom for not blowing that up
Well, I applied for a position as an exchange student to the US back in 1983/84. Unfortunately I mentioned my hobby ... you guessed it.... fantasy role-playing games. The organizations I applied at all told me in friendly ways that no way was I ever going to get into the US with that hobby. Fortunately a family that my brother had made friends with when he was an exchange student 4 years earlier invited me over. And of course their kids played D&D. A really beautiful family that made me fall in love with the US and the people living there.
My Staff Sergeant in the Army ran D&D at his house for a bunch of us new recruits. If it's good enough for the U.S. military, it should be good enough for everyone.
Great video, so few talk About those dark days of satanic panic anymore. Mostly my parents thought it was a silly hobby and I remember them think less of a handy man who was doing some work on my grandparents place when he revealed he played the game. I saw mazes and monsters before ever playing and I think it made me more interested. My friends mother kept trying to take his books away because of the panic so we switched to other games like marvel super hero’s or teenage mutant ninja turtles. Keep up the great work.
Ironically, Marvel Super-Heroes Roleplaying Game had a whole supplement of magic, with Dr. Strange on the cover. You could also make your characters have magic armor and swords, thereby having a D&D game where you fight Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four.
I also live with C-PTSD. RPGs, fantasy media, and horror were refuges for me in those moments in my youth where the psychological weight of my situation became difficult to bear. There was an element of escapism, to be sure, but I also discovered a creative impulse that led me to writing, music, visual arts, and even coding all of which in turn helped me come to terms with my trauma in their own ways. Intense therapy didn't hurt, either. The Satanic Panic was at it's tail-end when I found TTRPGS . I never truly experienced the sort of extreme reactions your friend received from his mother. The closest I got was my elementary school banning Magic the Gathering allegedly due to concerns about gambling. The reality was a mother of a Jehovah's Witness family threatened to sue the district if it wasn't banned due to her belief that it promoted occultism and Satanism which violated the church-state separation clause. The policy stuck for about a year until the administration realized no judge was going to rule against them for allowing a card game about dueling wizards summoning flying hippos and sea serpents on school grounds. I do have to add that I enjoy the releases from indie developers who embrace the witchy black metal aesthetic to purposefully to make their games resemble the Satanic grimoires that existed in all those fundamentalist charlatans fever dreams.
I'm seeing a lot of wokeness thrown about. To me, the term wokeness is a little too jingoistic and means too many different things to different people. The root of this in the TTRPG community is the bio-essentialism argument, which (to quote the Hitchhikers Guide) is a load of dingos kidneys in my personal opinion. And a lot of what newer players are holding up as "proof" that D&D was sexist, and racist ignores any sense of context of the times, the context of how the game was developed, what vibes the developers were trying to capture (classical sword and sorcery for the most part) or the context of how we played the game at the time. It's presentism at it's worst, and stands as an ignorant critique of the early days of the game.
I was watching a British call-in show, and the host asked an instead caller what he meant by "woke". The caller said, "it's anti-British propaganda!" So, there we have a real definition, at last. Someone should tell Ron DeSactimonious what it means.
I went through it. Started when I played D&D First Quest, then moved into Kingdom of Karameikos. When the realization dawned on me that I was being lied to, damn right I became aggressive. I aggressively countered my catechism teachers and it devolved into a screaming match with one who tried to have me unsuccessfully excommunicated. When that didn't work, she and her daughter who was in the same class as me circulated vicious rumors which got me threats and once even sent me to the hospital. Now, I hear Christians are playing and want me to join their church and my response is "I'll join your table but not your church...ever..." Needless to say the invitation gets withdrawn most times. Can't seem to get them to understand that, in my day, every one of them would have been targets, especially where I used to live. The biggest common cautionary message I can give is this. Stop Lying. Stop Pushing People Who Don't Agree. You will lose those that may side with you for now and when you do, you will lose them for good. It does not matter how much vitriol or hate or wanton property destruction you cause, we will despise and resent you and everything you represent, no matter how "right" it may be to you. I see some are starting to act up again and want to bring this type of thinking back. Personally, this time...since I've got some old injuries that nag me, I won't be running this time. Just a fact.
I had a friend in the 80s whos parents wouldn’t let him play D&D because of Satan & witchcraft and all that…so instead he played a lot of Car Wars and Gamma World with us (which was fine apparently). Go figure lol
Seems to be more common than I thought. We did the same thing in my group. D&D at one friends house who's mom didn't care. Everything else anywhere we wanted.
It is a frustrating thing. From hearing it from a co-player (and GM of other games) that "Drow were explicitly made as a stereotype of black people in America" when she only has her understanding of that history come from online articles (and I suspected Reddit). Hearing this from people in the sunny land of Sweden is pretty head-scratching when our history of these topics - in our domestic games and in the social climate of racism in society - looked entirely different. I also suspect she learned this from reddit, because the moment I started to disagree with her on it she just raised her voice, get visibly flustered, and called me ignorant. I lived in North America for 6 years before this and she's never lived outside her home province, btw.
I'm a professional paranormal debunker. (There is so much fraud in that work, people profiting from the grief of others) I may start discussing my work here on the channel as a way to teach critical thinking and how to properly research / fact check claims made by others.
@@welovettrpgs Please do. If you have any experiences on how to deal with these people IRL (the only interactions that actually matter as far as how we should compose ourselves), and the different ways to handle people and arguments. Because, I am sure you know, there's different folks and different ways to stroke those folks. ... you know what I mean.
Not as unjustly as D&D. (There have been a couple really really gross attempts to publish some truly horrifying racist, sexist garbage that were rightfully shut down. For example some people tried to steal the Star Frontiers name and publish a horrible white supremist version.)
The irony, of course, being that Gary Gygax was a moderate conservative Christian a coin flip (or dice roll, if you will) from being an endearingly embarrassing youth minister.
Yep - I remember the Satanic Panic well. My group always played within sight/earshot of our parents, most of the time, non of whom were regular church -goers, so we had it a bit easier than others. I do remember very well though all the church groups going door to door with their bags full of tracts every weekend. And yes, I see very similar behaviors nowadays. Reskinned for the current zeitgeist. It's really a shame, too. I really enoyed running games for my kids and their friends before it got all whacked out and people decided they had to pick a side... Though to be fair, thats not why we dont play now - life got in the way, as it tends to do. I'd still be happy to run a game for them sometime - they were a fun group.
Ignore the worst of it. Some of what's happening culturally is the result of marginalized people wanting to be heard after literally thousands of years of feeling (and being) silenced. That's legitimate. If the worst thing marginalized people are asking for now is to be heard after thousands of years of being dominated we should be OK with that. But then there are those who just want to feel empowered by using the plight of those marginalized groups to gain personal status. These are the people you're talking about. For example, white people telling black people what they're supposed to be offended by. I'll be addressing all that in a future video. Meanwhile, play other games. Support what you love and though there's a lot of noise to push back against, if we lift up that which brings us joy and ignore the troubled people and their drama, others will eventually come around. D&D is going through something called mainstreaming. It's popularity has not been great for the hobby. Lot's of opinionated tourists now. When Hot Topic and Manson mainstreamed goth it essentially ripped the heart out of it. EMO was born from the carcass of goth. Modern D&D is to emo what OSR is to goth. I use that analogy because the TTRPG community is experiencing the same process and has finally reached it's natural conclusion. That's why so many people are turning to OSR games. Thanks buddy!
The sex and violence in games is hard to wrap your brain around. It isn’t for people who don’t want to consider the ramifications of it. I once played a Habbalah of Andrealphas, the demon prince of lust, in an In Nomine game. I couldn’t do what I did in that game without having a group that could separate the game from reality. It was really, really dark in tone. Even the other players were somewhat disturbed by it, because I played it as the perfect anti-villain, using the temptation of the flesh to lure out the lust of the easily-corruptible. By the end of that game, they couldn’t tell if I was working against heaven or for heaven, because I was targeting the ones who were already corrupted and protecting the innocent by doing it. That game is a moral quagmire that would drive the Baptists into a frenzy. The full title of it was originally In Nomine Satanis, Magna Veritas, or “In the name of Satan, Greater Truth”. It got shortened to In Nomine to slip in under the wire of the satanic panic of the ‘90s. I’m genuinely surprised Steve Jackson Games didn’t catch more flack over that one.
I've heard tales of the Satanic Panic. . . For me the cloest I've experienced is the wotc outrage. I'm not a fan of where wotc has taken the game in recent years per say but I also get flak from the other side from not hating them enough or not being outraged with them. Also I've felt the feeling of gatekeeping wherin I've sat quiet while other around go on and on about how stupid 5e (and even 3.5) is and how 5e isn't *real* dnd and if you didn't play in the 80's your not a *real* player yada yada. . . .
Yes, after 50 years of toxic outrage I'm worn out. that's one of many reasons we keep our community here positive and don't allow politics. Thanks! (And the Satanic Panic was terrible. We had teachers trying to shut our D&D club down.
I thought this was gonna somehow end up a video about how evil Gary Gygax was or something and was about to click "don't recommend channel" since I'm completely new here. But then I saw a rather wholesome video that made me feel what I feel in the metal community. And so I subbed instead.
The Satanic Panic was so overblown. It was nowhere near as bad as people remember it as evidenced by the games continually growing popularity into the 1990s.
We would narratively play sessions between classes in the 90s and we had teachers who would forbid us from doing so because they were firmly still clutching pearls for the panic. We could only do so during Phys Ed, chess club or Lunch and compartmentalized most rolling to a single smuggled d6 we'd roll in hand with our backs forming a wall. These days it's been just another of the many dozens of IPs that have had their pendulum swung wildly into the other direction of toxicity and modernity where non should exist what so ever, they have just been co-opted by tribal cultures whose goal is to erase history both real and mythical for their replacement theology and beliefs, that it isn't enough to accept, but to tolerate and now partake of it or you are the baddie should you refuse one or all three.
D&D has demon and devil summoning, taken from "real" summoning techniques. It also uses real devil nicknames. From there the game was moved into the Satanic panic. I don't belive in God and I've run a couple of 5e campaigns. My favorite is CoS. Also, I love Lovecraft and Howard. The thing is, if you believe magic is evil, dieties that are not God are demons and a plethora of other stuff, there is definitely "Satanic" stuff in D&D.
DnD was really important to me, as an introvert. I agree that there is a bit of exaggeration in the moral critique, but I do think it is good to be conscious of potential prejudices. For example the language of DnD products in the 70s was common for the time, and it was sexist, yes. What we should learn from it is not to hate its creators, burn the content and never look at it again, but to take what's good and try not to make the same mistakes in the future. And people do not immediately become monsters because they joined the zeitgeist of their era and did not update their minds. To the example of Gygax, yes, I think he was sexist the same way my dad is, for example (don't know about racism). It just wasn't in his mind to try and be inclusive, but he wasn't actively hating women or something. The same way I see my dad's faults and still love him, I can look at Gygax' work and appreciate it while recognizing that he was creative, but also sexist. Idolizing people can be as bad as spreading hatred.
All that matters to me is fact based conclusions obtained through critical thinking. I don't idolize anyone. Part of my real life work as a paranormal debunker is teaching critical thinking from an unbias perspective. To think Gary was sexist and racist means you must also believe all the people who actually knew him are lying when they say he wasn't. Furthermore you must believe the people who didn't know him and interpret the minimal evidence in the worst possible way while ignoring mountains of evidence that suggest otherwise. For clarity, I didn't know him and he may very well be all the things some people want to believe him to have been. However my video on the topic will be examining the evidence and the proper way to examine evidence.
I think a good parallel would be Gene Roddenberry. Did he have an affair with Nurse Chappel? Yes. Did he run to the dressing room when women's costumes were being fitted? Yes. But, did he also create a future where racism and war and poverty were consigned to the dustbin of history? Yes. Did he put an African-American woman and a Japanese man on the bridge of the flagship of Starfleet, along with Satanic-looking First Officer? Yes. First inter-racial kiss on network tv, despite what the backwards Southern idiots would say? Yes. Was Gygax just not exposed to women and minorities in his wargaming days, and therefore didn't think they would love the game? I don't know. Sounds logical to me, but there's a saying: "You don't know, what you don't know."
Religious fundamentalist right wingers attacked the game back in the 90s and now we have people from the other side of the spectrum doing the same thing. Can a guy just sit the #### down and play a game of dice these days?
Here's my two cents on the matter now that I've talked it over some and had time for my opinions to mature; Obviously, DnD isn't racist or bigoted or anything, but WotC trying to market it as a progressive game about found families trying to do right by people is.... very wrong, DnD is usually about murdering acceptable classes of people, which isn't progressive. Now, I take no issue with this-- I don't expound upon the horrors of WWII on both sides when I see Indiana Jones punch a Nazi, cus that's a Nazi; they're obviously Bad Guys But if someone tries to sell me Indiana Jones as a complex take on World War 2 taking into account that many of the grunts were basically just regular guys, same as ours, I'd (understandably) be skeptical.
There's a bit of a difference, I think. The Satanic Panic was started by one woman looking for a scapegoat, and spreading misinformation about this new game that people didn't fully understand. I think a lot of the modern hostility coming from experienced players is directed at a company who seems to be watering down their game to follow the cultural trend of inclusivity, by trying to make sure their game doesn't offend anyone. The new DMG even has guidelines for dealing with sensitive topics and signalling to the group when you're uncomfortable. Now, I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing, but a GM should know their players well enough to at least have some idea of their maturity, and while I don't see a problem with including some gritty, dark moments in your game, there's no reason to be explicit beyond pure shock value. That being said, I'm of the mind that if you can't separate yourself from the imagined game world happening on a tabletop, you should probably be in therapy rather than at the game table. What really bothers me is that these new guidelines don't seem to set a boundary for just how much a player can object to. "Oh, you failed your save and take 55 damage." "But I only have 30 HP left!" "Then, it looks like you're dead." "That makes me really uncomfortable." "Oh, I'm sorry, you only took 31 damage, so you're only unconscious." Maybe a bit of an extreme example, but the DMG does suggest that if an in-game event makes a player uncomfortable, the GM should consider changing it. That's not how the game is supposed to work. If you can't handle the fantasy, you probably shouldn't be playing. I don't want to make this into a political thing, but in doing this, WotC is trying to be more accessible to a minority, and they might just be alienating the majority who feels this sort of thing is a step too far in the wrong direction. Personally, I say there's nothing forcing you to buy the new edition. I haven't bought new books since 3.5. I hardly even play D&D anymore. Play the game how you want. If the new edition really offends you, don't buy it. If enough people ignore it, WotC loses money and maybe they'll learn, but if WotC makes money on it, then obviously it still appeals to enough people that it's worth it for them to continue in this direction. Of course, there's also a discussion about how they're trying to monetize the new edition with digital subscriptions, and that's a whole other reason for contention.
As far as the difference, that's too nuanced to really discuss in a social media post. The short version is: Both sides of both issues have/had legitimate concerns. It's important to hear other people's concerns and recognize that just because we don't experience something, doesn't mean someone else hasn't. However, both sides were taken over by extremists with agendas. They encouraged a legion of (possibly well meaning?) people who lack critical thinking skills and are unaware of how their own confirmation bias controls what they believe (good quote: Don't believe everything you think) Those people then take up arms against things they don't understand. What started as honest concerns then turns into emotion fueled arguments where nobody is listening to anyone else and any constructive criticism turns into "you're basically Hitler."
I wonder - and don't mean that as an insult or anything - why is this channel called "We Love TTRPGs" but talks exclusively (from what I hear so far, I've seen like 5-6 videos) about D&D? I am genuinely interested in other systems.
I was covering other games (look at old videos) But I haven't recorded a new video since August. I became frustrated with a dead channel, RUclips burying and killing every video within 12 hours of upload. RUclips won't share videos that aren't D&D because there aren't enough viewers who will watch them. If I decide to continue making videos I have a huge list including other games. But that depends on if I can return this channel to life. Which is why I recently began taking some of my first videos and re editing them to be higher quality.
@welovettrpgs understandable and sad at the same time. D&D and GURPS were the first games I've ever played (that was in the 00s), but I've moved on since then. I wish more people would not rob themselves of the wealth that is other TTRPGs. D&Ds overwhelming popularity is a detriment to the hobby, I think. It stifles growth and development.
@@arcanefeline btw - here's a good example. Look back in July at my James Bond rpg video. It's a great video that required a lot of time and work. Five months old and it still has only half the views as this video received in less than a day.
![Felix "Unfair" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Oswujxm2Ag0/mqdefault.jpg)
Be sure it is understood. TTRPGs can be therapeutic but they are NOT therapy and if you are not a professional, licensed therapist you should not try to treat it as such. Doing so is irresponsible and potentially harmful. And yes, this is a reedit of an old video. Don't worry. Many new videos on the way for 2025! Thanks!
@@welovettrpgs Take a look at the group Geek Therapeutics. They’re licensed mental health professionals, many of who. Use ttrpgs as a part of their practice.
In retrospect, one amusing part of the 1980s Satanic Panic = Many of those concerned parents were clueless about where their teenagers were or what they were doing.
My Mom picked up on this in the early 80s and readily agreed to host games for me and my brothers friends to play AD&D in our home because that way she at least knew where we were.
The irony of a moral panic about a game all about beating the evil monsters and people isn't lost on many of us, I'm sure.
I believe alignments helped the game survive the satanic panic by showing the concepts of good vs evil.
My dad, who worked at sea and saw me for two weeks each six months, called my mom concerned that I was getting into something no one could control. My mom, whose dining room hosted the games, saw me having social interactions, doing arithmetic and learning to handle conflict.
I lived through the Satanic Panic too. Thank goodness my mom lacked the temperament of those swept up in it. I'm one of those classic cases of D&D being a refuge from abuse and bullying. While I don't have an official diagnosis, C-PTSD checks way too many boxes for me for it to not be a factor. Existing in those worlds with those creatures and conflicts, and with a simplified world that was much easier to tell good from bad, probably saved my life. I know it improved my reading comprehension, my problem solving, and my match skills. It also awakened in me a love for philosophy, ethics, and morality that are still with me today. I'm grateful for D&D and the positive effects it had on my life.
Thank you for sharing your story!
There are so many stories that I could tell about this topic. I don’t even know where I would start.
The one that best fits is a friend who none of us knew was trans. He was totally shocked that he didn’t have to play a male character. When he asked about it, I even encouraged him playing a female character. To make him feel less self-conscious about it, I rolled up a female character too.
I got a call out of the blue from his therapist. The therapist wanted to know everything she could about D&D, because it had been such a major impact. The therapist and I met a couple times to talk about it and she ended up walking into a book store and buying a copy of every book they had in stock. This was in the ‘90s, mind you, so it wasn’t a small purchase. As far as I know, she still uses D&D as part of group therapy.
That trans friend of mine started another group on her own. They met regularly and it was full of trans, gay and lesbian players. I was their token straight friend who regularly sat in on their game. The last I heard, there is still an empty chair and a blank character sheet for me at every session of a game she runs.
You get out of the game what you put into it. That’s what the people who are afraid of it don’t manage to see. I have seen horrible people turn games into horrible things, but I have also seen horrible people turned into some of the nicest people by their games.
As a side note, you have no idea how hard it is to tell a story like the one above. My trans friend was male for one part of it and female for one part of it. She knows that there is a point before which I use male pronouns and after which I use female pronouns because that’s how I comprehend the magnitude of change in her. There is a definite point where it changed from one to the other, but it wasn’t based on her surgeries.
You should see the grin on her face when I talk about things before that point. She gets to hear about herself, but not herself in those times. She knows that she and he are the same, but not the same and they are both my friends. Understanding that is part of the magic of this game and the hobby in general. She knows that she just rerolled a new character at that point for new adventures and it didn’t really change a thing. That never fails to make her happy, even with all the other crap she has had to go through.
Thank You! I'm very happy to read your story.
Wonderful story and perspective! How refreshing!
And now it's the transformers who are responsible for destroying the hobby and making it all about genders and making orcs and goblins good (and spitting in the face of all the established lore in the process) so it's funny you are responsible for bringing one into the hobby, and they are responsible for destroying it.
Yeah, the panic was pretty bad where I lived. I had to hide my books, character sheets, dice, everything. I learned to live a parallel life and keep secrets.
@@aaronabel4756 that’s a life skill.
I guess there are some people who read the human-centricness of the core setting of the game as a metaphor for racism in the real world. Also, the hobby has traditionally been more appealing to males than females, and that has led to some having concerns of the game promoting mysogyny. I suppose those are valid concern ... maybe. What people fail to understand is that no one who plays D&D is forced to create a setting that is racist, mysogynist, or anti-lgbt. While some things that are written in the published material for the game might be construed as those things, it's ultimately the DM and the players themselves who decide how their games approach those things or even if they approach them at all.
One guy I know had to hide his dice bag in his sock drawer for years. His christian parents would not let him D&D with us. But he was allowed to play Star Wars (WEG D6) and TMNT (Palladium) with us.
"Is that D&D you're hiding?" "No, mom, it's porn." "Oh, ok."
@@welovettrpgs Somehow my experience XD
I did the same thing. The D&D books were at a friends house and everything else was fair game. I ran or played in Cyberpunk 2020, Mekton Zeta, Rifts, Robotech/Macross, Castle Falkenstein, and the board game Hero Quest. Which we would play with my cousins at the dinner table with a lot of the same stuff you find in D&D, but it was Hero quest and there were no issues with it. To this day I have never told my mom I play or played D&D. It's quite hilarious.
Yeah, my mom took a look at my D&D books when the panic got rolling around 1984. She saw the front cover of the DM manual, with the Effriti grabbing the scantily robed princess and sat me down and had me explain what we did when we played. Once she understood that what we did was imagine we were big strong warriors, cunning thieves or Gandalf, instead of a bunch of nerds eating Cheetos, she relented.
D&D and TTRPGs really helped me become more social. I have a much busier life seeing people regularly outside of my house.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane. I recall when this was happening and it was no less bizarre then than it is hearing the re-telling for those who didn't experience it. Thank you again. May your holidays be warm, safe and happy.
By helping to boost math and reading comprehension, D&D showed progress exactly where schools did not. Naturally, this would not sit well with educators who saw it as both a bad reflection on their performance and a challenge to their position. By encouraging an interest in history, D&D made it more difficult for politicians to rely on tried-and-true tactics of fleecing an ignorant populace by keeping them distracted, disinterested, and disunited. Naturally, it was going to make powerful enemies.
EDIT: Spielberg used D&D as part of the casting process? Maybe that explains why that waitress in Lake Geneva thought the TSR employees discussing ideas for 2nd Edition SpellJammer worked for him.
Excellent comment! Where was this story about the waitress reported? Seems pretty amusing.
Back then our educations systems hadn’t turned into propaganda outlets for the left. DND didn’t intimidate teachers becuase it made them look bad. It was almost entirely based in the Christian anti-magic crusade of the era. Had nothing to do with modern abysmal teaching standards. Can’t read or write? But you believe a boy can become a girl? A++
As the saying goes "The road to hell is paved with good intentions." - often people can mean well but it ends up having an opposite and negative impact instead.
Great video and thank you for making it.
Never forget TTRPGs are our fairy Tales and Hero's Journey.
My Mom was darned happy I was socializing with friends. But where I lived, they shut down the high school D&D club after two years (this was in 1982) , same school shut down a successful program using D&D to teach special ed students, and a cousin of mine was concerned about my eternal soul and pleaded with me to stop playing. Oh, those were the days.
I'm a 51 year old who started D&D with the red box when I was 10 (1983, roughly). I also was gifted CPTSD from my childhood, and had my books burned. What joyous memories! Thanks for talking about it and letting people know what went on. Note that this was in Southern California, not somewhere in the Bible Belt, as I've heard people suppose.
I have never forgotten watching my mother, filled with fear and anger spurred on by some dude on TV, burning my original AD&D books. A few days later my grandfather, a fire and brimstone preacher himself, showed up to chastise my mom for doing what she did. Said I was a good kid, not some tool of the Devil or something. Mom felt bad enough to give me $100 and drive me to the book store. I still have those replacement 1st edition but they'd changed the covers.
Crazy, I remember those times but my experience was the opposite. My mom would take me to Toys R Us so I could buy AD&D books and lead figures with my allowance.
Preach bro. Living through the Panic was so goddamn awful and here we are with another made up moral panick by people who mock ones who caused the one in the 80s, not realizing they are the same bullies and terrible people.
@0:30 second in, I love everything in this shot! The map, the Books, the angled book shelf, the rarely used City of Cats... Ok, let's watch the rest of the video...
Ahhh - the Satinic Panic. Among my group, I (meaning- my books) was the victim. The other parents in the group were a little more chill.
Having played D&D (and sold it owning two game stores) I agree with the many positives of TTRPG, but there is a negative side. Like many things, it can be overdone. I have seen many people so obsessed with it that they neglect being productive members of society. Rather than get jobs, be involved with family, have a life outside of roleplaying, they just want to play D&D (or other TTRPGS) seven days a week and when not playing just become absorbed in it. They end up being couch surfers, living at home with their parents in their forties, or getting some form of government support.
Addicts need therapy. That's not the fault of the game. Those are people who are self medicating using the game just as some people use food or mind altering substances.
@@welovettrpgs Exactly and it has the traits of drugs in that it is escapism. Anything can be abused, but some things are more prone to abuse, TTRPG is one of them.
Absolutely fantastic! My experiences growing up are similar to yours, so with all of my heart, I thank you Aten!
Sincerely,
Alicia from Sweden.
Mom and Dad tried this crazy thing called, “Talking with your kids” (Pffft, I know, right?)
Then they leafed through the DMG. Dad said it looked interesting (never did get him to play).
Finally they decided, under no circumstances whatsoever would they pay for more than 2 pizzas and 2 bottles of Mountain Dew on game night.
I remember the satanic panic I spent hours explaining and showing my mother of what fearful individuals were really complaining about the monsters from the deities and demigods and the monsters manuals and after her watching my younger brother play a few rounds and explaining fantasy tropes as long as we didn’t take it to a couple of family homes we were good to go
Merry Christmas and happy new year everyone 🎉🎉🎉
I was a bit of an introvert in high school (late 70s to early 80s). I enjoyed playing D&D and formed our schools first ever D&D club, which took a bit of arguing and convincing the school administration to allow it. Between this and writing my Advanced Comp Research paper on witch craft (yeah I sided with the accused) my fellow classmates dubbed me a Satanic Devil Worshiper and someone claimed my eyes could turn red (turns out it was some fluke effect while I was in the photo-lab darkroom. I would just laugh it off but it did cause some strife with a long term girl friend and her family.
It is far better to side with the witches.
I wish someone claimed my eyes turned red high school. That would have been pretty bad ass.
You could have said, "If I was a Satan worshipping witch, then why don't I have straight A's? Why aren't I a millionaire? Why aren't I the captain of the football team?"
It is a little known fact that Spielberg was a hardcore DM, the type that hated his players. This is why, when asked if the Atari 2600 E.T. game was good, he said, 'yeah, it is fine. Ship it.'
Thankfully in my place and time (Sweden, 1990's/00's) when I was getting into the hobby, there was very little negativity associated with the hobby. I found it a great source of imaginative fun, and I am absolutely convinced doing my own translations of domestic Swedish games for when I was living abroad gave me an eye for interpreting complicated texts.
An older friend of mine however had one negative experience, and that was at the time when local parishes often had hobby locales they would loan to youths for social activities, but his TTRPG group suddenly "could not get any slots". It was a time and place when games like Kult was getting popular however, so, y'know. He reacted with drawing an upside down cross with a red marker on the bathroom mirror that last night. He was 15, so I think he handled it pretty well.
Can't remember DnD players ever accused of being satanists in Germany (at least we weren't). The worst thing was that the girls at school were not suposed to know that we were playing DnD, because it was considered so uncool in the 1980s.
That is exactly right. The reason most didn't play D&D wasn't because of some obscure passage from a book they never read but because it was considered very geeky and uncool. Male D&D players weren't known for being good looking.
@@welovettrpgs Or didn't care for looks. Besides extroverts have the spotlight and are considered the golden ratio despite many of them having an IQ at room temperature. Intelligence is not sexy or understood.
All I remember back in the 80s was defeating social isolation and anxiety as young teen and building a lifelong friendship group - we might not play together anymore but I still have strong contacts with several members of my former gaming group. Great video :) I don't think I would have my love of reading without TTRPGs as young person either. Fortunately, my parents were never religious like others.
I was fortunate, in the '80s, I wasn't playing D&D, I was playing BattleTech, Star Trek and Star Frontiers. But, I was also fortunate in that, when the issue arose, my mother took our books, read them, then gave them back with no issues.
Way back in the old days I made the maitake of leaving ALL of my D&D books at a friends house her mom's overzealous boyfriend burned them all to dust in a woodstove so I'm right there with you on all of this.
That's far worse than the neighbor's dog eating the head off my Darth Vader action figure.
@@welovettrpgs Yeah that's the thing...a dog is a dog and is going to do dog stuff, but a nut with a cause is capable of anything
I was lucky growing up in South Texas, below the Bible Belt and deep into the, um, Catholic Codpiece? Anyway, they were much more excited about Madonna. My 8th grade English teacher in an Episcopalian private school actually handed out pages she'd photocopied from the back of the DMG, from the section on character creation with all the random tables to develop an NPC's personality, as part of an exercise for creative writing.
Cool teachers are a blessing to us nerdy kids.
The author and national treasure, Mike Stackpol was instrumental in the downfall of the BADD campaign against TTRPGs.
My mother is a nurse at an incredibly expensive mental health care facility; Over the past six or so years, she's actually helped to establish a table top program for the residents, and they absolutely love it.
The facility has had residents ranging from orchestral musicians from China to mathematicians from the UK, and I would absolutely love to be a fly on the wall during one of their sessions; To give any more information than I already have would possibly put her retirement at risk, so I'll leave it at that.
All of that aside, I hope you have an enjoyable Yule and holiday season brother. \m/
and changed nothing to this day, but now it's wotc heading the moral panic as they condemn the game's roots in their ignorance
It became part of my culture shock when moving across the country (though not for the first time). When I started playing D&D in middle school, in mid-1980s New Mexico I don't remember any stigma, it at seemed to be going through cool fad phase. When I moved to Tennessee, just in time to start high school, it was shocking how many people ended up thinking I worshiped Satan. Before that, my only real exposure to that view was from a religious right TV "documentary" which I watched out of a mix of morbid curiosity and ridicule and which basically claimed all secular toys, games, shows were secretly Satanic.
In Australia, we got a severely watered-down version of the Anti-D&D Satanic Panic.
I know of a couple of groups here that had venue doors literally slammed shut in their faces, and I also knew someone who had their D&D stuff burned by idiot parents. Our local franchise of '60 Minutes' did an utterly disgraceful hatchet-job of the game, involving a sometime player who went on to cross-dress in order to commit murder. There was also a highly publicized instance of a school principal somewhere banning the game in their school, and a certain politician who took a few shots in between railing against immorality.
In general, though, we did OK. Groups openly met and did well. Game shops all remained open, with D&D stuff staying on shelves and, aside from an occasional idiot, there were no problems there. I think the reaction of most Aussies, upon meeting an enthusiast who explained things to them, was to let gamers be - we have never had the religious fervor of the USA.
(The old joke here is, "Britain sent its religious fanatics to America, and its criminals to Australia, and Australia got the better half of that deal." ;) )
It's a nice irony that, a long-standing group I am part of was church-founded (Anglican) and met in the local church hall. I would also comment that, as regards concerns about "obsession", the people making those claims never seem to dwell on, say, religious fervor, or obsessions with sports or certain sports teams.
Finally, I'm also someone who benefitted greatly from TTRPGs - there were aspects of my childhood I won't go into. But finding the hobby was a major and positive effect on me - and my parents never had issue with it.
Excellent video.
During satanic panic my father asked me about it since I played the game.
I showed him my books and explained a bit about the game and he thankfully was a reasonable human being and said carry on.
Thinking back it’s not surprising he was so level headed. He was born in 1919 and had me late in life (1967). After living through the depression as a teen and fighting in world war 2 he had a keen sense of cutting through the noise getting to the facts of a matter.
My friend knew a guy named Robbie, who looked exactly like Tom Hanks, that totally lost his mind when his character died in a game.
dang!
As an 80's teen, I was fortunate to have parents who were more concerned that I had friends and wasn't getting into trouble. If they had concerns about my friends and I playing TTRPG's they never mentioned it. It certainly didn't save us from the bullying though. Still playing with some of the same people all these years later, and still loving it.
I distinctly remember the Satanic Panic outrage from when I was just getting involved in gaming/RPGs back in the late 1970's/early 1980's. We had to basically play in secret because our parents would get all up in arms about it. I distinctly remember wanting to buy the Dragonriders of Pern board game (bonus points if you remember that game) at our local Waldenbooks (additional bonus points if you remember that store...) and my sister absolutely losing her mind and screaming it was devil worship at the top of her lungs in the store. Good times.
I remember both!!! :) We're old.
@@welovettrpgs I prefer to think of it as achieving XP...
I still have my Waldenbooks discount card for sci-fi and fantasy purchases somewhere in my apartment.
As someone who had a parent who believed it was evil and kept me from it till i was in my late teens, and then when i tried it on my own i found it was one of my top hobbies and i have several projects in the works for the last decade i want to publish. When my dad found out he was concerned at first, but stranger things actually showed him it wasn't really anything to worry about and you get what you put in. Could you do an evil campaign? Sure, but it's not normally the case.
I played DnD back in the 80's and agree with the points made throughout the video. It's been some 30ys since I last played DnD, and wouldn't chya know it, the local library is having a DnD night next month. It'll be interesting to roll the dice again and see if DnD is something I want to get back into. Cheers!
5E would be great if it didnt have death saves and long/short rest mechanics. Those turn it into superhero dnd with unkillable characters. So I dont use those rules.
One of the weirdest experiences I've had as a gamer is a guy I knew in college gave me a funny look when I told him I played D&D, apparently he knew a group of people that used the game as an excuse to host Orgies in the late 90's and he was once invited to one. I bet that group are the same people that think we need safe words in D&D today.
Imagine my infinite disappointment when the AD&D DM's guide did not, in effect, conjure up demons using foul eldritch incantations. It did, however, require the use of a mighty codex to decipher the elder knowledge, some whisper it's name as the Thesaurus!
Total let down! :)
The dreaded Thesaurus! It's almost as dangerous as the terrible Gazebo!
@@PaulCoyJR I will forever fear Gazebo Boy from the back of Dragon Magazine! (Superhero with the worst power)
@@PaulCoyJR oh wow what an awesome reference, I had forgot about that!
I really do love your videos and how you maintain a consistent but ultimately neutral view of the hobby. You're more matter of fact on many things and I love the simple set up! It really does feel like a properly small channel that deserves more love in the space!
Thanks, that's really kind of you!
I made the same observation about the attacks coming from within in an article I wrote a while back.
That point alone tells people what this is all about out.
Great video. I think D&D probably saved me from a wasted life by energizing me to create worlds for the adventures to take place in, which opened me up to geography, sociology and political systems in a way that school never could.
Yes TTRPGs help people in many ways.
Personally I have friends that I’ve made through the games for more than 30 years.
Good video
D&D was the most wholesome things I was doing as a teenager in the 80's, lol. Didn't understand the panic at all, and still don't.
there was a moral panic with the Mahabharata tabletop role playing game back in ancient I when people confused it with gambling
Oh Man Aten I love that 0:21 Wilhelm Scream. Love the Redux too.
Excellent. Well done. Liked and Subscribed. Kids have been playing RPGs long before D&D. We played Cops and Robbers and Cowboys and Indians riding our bikes around the subdivision, but somehow moving this activity from the streets and neighborhoods to a table with pencil, paper, and dice made it an influence of the Devil. Largely due to the art of the books, I'm sure. I was there, though only suffered minimal impact from the Satanic Panic. You draw an accurate parallel to modern gaming. Again, well done. Thanks for this.
The Satanic Panic made was the best thing to happen to D&D, it got the name out and made kids interested!
I was already addicted to reading, with an overactive imagination, TTRPG's are just an extension of that!
They made bank, that's true but then after Gary got pushed out of TSR they caved in to the panic removing demons and devils.
@@welovettrpgs It was a sad day when Gary was pushed out of the company! : (
Played DnD since pretty much its begining and never dealt with any satanic panic issues, even living in a pretty strong bible belt area. So while I know it happened, it just never was my actual experience growing up. Nowdays, my biggest issue is trying to learn VTTs so I can get some gaming going with family spread across the US. Glad to see more new(old) vids, and can't wait for more.
You're very lucky it didn't hinder you. I've been using Fantasy Grounds for three years and if it wsn't for my player's Id still be unable to use it. But thats my shortcoming not it. They are however in the midst of a major overhaul and it keeps improving all the time. It's great because it's so versatile but more options means more complexity.
You are doing the good work!
I left the game after 40 years when a young punk accused me of racism.
you should join the game again, because the punk is the racist.
I didn’t just lose touch with reality. I ran from reality!
Hi Aten. I too have experienced inhibited people come alive over time through collaboration, empowerment and bringing out their innate skills and intelligence to perform brilliant critical thinking in response to incredibly difficult problems. I'm also glad that the UK where I live is predominantly a secular society, unlike many parts of the US where gun ownership and belief in the supernatural are still a thing.
Look for my upcoming "Confessions of a professional ghost hunter" video in the near future.
@@welovettrpgs by supernatural I was referring (flippantly) to Christianity.
As an American, I can attest that many of my countrymen prefer to worship guns, as they seem reluctant to actually read what Jesus said. You know, feed the hungry, help the needy, give money to the poor, those kinds of things.
I learned to play Dungeons & Dragons in a Catholic private school courtesy a classmate. However within a month or so of that he stopped wanting to play because his parents told him that it wasn't a Christian game. So I gathered a few others to play and that was that. The faculty never had a problem except when my players and I would pass notes during class about the game.
I remember the satanic panic. We just played and didn't pay too much attention to it. Some church showed up at a con once. (Pacific Con 81 in SF.) Anyhoo thanks for the share!!
Thank You!
It's not a moral outrage(well... maybe on twitter it is, that place is a cesspool. But like, in the real world with real people), it's just striving for a more complete understanding of the history of our hobby. There are 100% some questionable elements of early dnd. Just to name a less-cited example, in the "types of men" section there's a description of Derishes as "fanatically religious Nomads who fight as Berserkers, never checking morale[...]". Thing is, a Dervish is just a member of a distinct sect of Islam. They're normal people who exist today. They pay their taxes, they walk their dogs, they post on facebook. To describe real people alive today as blood-frenzied fanatics who will stop at nothing to kill you IS morally wrong and does say something about the authors of those early editions. At the very least that they weren't infallable geniuses. Our discussions of ODnD shouldn't just ignore that aspect of the game. Doing so would be historical revisionism, censorship. We can still appreciate the work they did to create the hobby we love today, much like we can still appreciate old movies that were pivotal to that art form but contain some not-to-great elements as well. Aknowledging the bad, talking about it, and learning from it is necessary for a more complete understanding of our history.
Hi, thanks for commenting. As I commented elsewhere, what started for both groups as legitimate concerns has turned into moral outrage. I'm going to sound snarky and I apologize in advance. And I'm sure this will fall on deaf ears but I need to at least try. My snarkyness is because I am exhausted by people on both extremes just repeating stuff they read on line without thinking deeper. And you sound very sure of yourself, I do not doubt you truly care about the feelings of marginalized groups. However, respectfully, it sounds a lot like you have copy and pasted your beliefs from the intro of the 50th anniversary book (or that online thread which says pretty much exactly what you're repeating.) Since history sounds important to you, I suggest reading some. For example, D&D was based on historical wargaming. If you read a few history books you'll soon discover that history is filled with racism and sexism. At no point in time was D&D ever promoting racism and sexism. (You'd need to read the bible for that) D&D offered those themes as historical facts and evil to be overcome. It's a game about defeating evil. By your logic every history book that includes racism and sexism is racist and sexist. When Southern states want to remove slavery from their history books we rightfully recognize that as racist. But when D&D - a game about defeating evil - wants to do it, well, that's somehow not erasing those horrors from history, that's "the good kind of book burning." The natural progression of what you are promoting is a game where evil doesn't exist at all. There are no bad things that have ever happened. Remove all weapons and replace them with soft cushions. I'll just end with this: Empathy is vital. Looking outside of ourselves is vital. And that also means white people need to stop telling black people how they should feel about stuff. Because that mentality seems pretty darn racist. Thanks. I hope you're doing well.
I grew up in a Christian household where the effect of the Satanic panic was very relevant. It was rolled into a larger moral panic over music, movies, video games, card games, and books. My mom saw me and my brother gravitating toward these things she was concerned with, and realized over time that they didn't turn us into evil, violent, or weird children, but we still received criticism from our larger community.
The current moral panic we see in the role play space is a direct reflection of that same phenomena, and it too will go away, so keep playing your elf games the way you like to, and it will be fine.
Wow you've struck a chord here. I was playing AD&D in the early 80s at the height of the satanic panic and my mom was hearing what you're talking about on the news. I didn't know until many years later she actually had some concerns. However being the intelligent woman she is she thought to herself but those are his most intelligent and well adjusted friends and thankfully blew it off. For context one of those friends was an inventor for the Byrd corporation who make medical equipment. His enprovment on a human incubator was prevalent in the US for 20 years. Yes a bright group. Thanks mom for not blowing that up
vids like this deserve a like & comment to push the YT-algorithm to do its thing.
Thank You!
Well, I applied for a position as an exchange student to the US back in 1983/84. Unfortunately I mentioned my hobby ... you guessed it.... fantasy role-playing games. The organizations I applied at all told me in friendly ways that no way was I ever going to get into the US with that hobby. Fortunately a family that my brother had made friends with when he was an exchange student 4 years earlier invited me over. And of course their kids played D&D. A really beautiful family that made me fall in love with the US and the people living there.
Wow! That's wild!
My Staff Sergeant in the Army ran D&D at his house for a bunch of us new recruits. If it's good enough for the U.S. military, it should be good enough for everyone.
well said. Thank you for publishing this video. It is important to point out the benefits and expose the moral bias expressed by zealots.
Great video, so few talk
About those dark days of satanic panic anymore. Mostly my parents thought it was a silly hobby and I remember them think less of a handy man who was doing some work on my grandparents place when he revealed he played the game. I saw mazes and monsters before ever playing and I think it made me more interested. My friends mother kept trying to take his books away because of the panic so we switched to other games like marvel super hero’s or teenage mutant ninja turtles. Keep up the great work.
Ironically, Marvel Super-Heroes Roleplaying Game had a whole supplement of magic, with Dr. Strange on the cover. You could also make your characters have magic armor and swords, thereby having a D&D game where you fight Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four.
I also live with C-PTSD. RPGs, fantasy media, and horror were refuges for me in those moments in my youth where the psychological weight of my situation became difficult to bear. There was an element of escapism, to be sure, but I also discovered a creative impulse that led me to writing, music, visual arts, and even coding all of which in turn helped me come to terms with my trauma in their own ways. Intense therapy didn't hurt, either.
The Satanic Panic was at it's tail-end when I found TTRPGS . I never truly experienced the sort of extreme reactions your friend received from his mother. The closest I got was my elementary school banning Magic the Gathering allegedly due to concerns about gambling. The reality was a mother of a Jehovah's Witness family threatened to sue the district if it wasn't banned due to her belief that it promoted occultism and Satanism which violated the church-state separation clause. The policy stuck for about a year until the administration realized no judge was going to rule against them for allowing a card game about dueling wizards summoning flying hippos and sea serpents on school grounds.
I do have to add that I enjoy the releases from indie developers who embrace the witchy black metal aesthetic to purposefully to make their games resemble the Satanic grimoires that existed in all those fundamentalist charlatans fever dreams.
Thanks for sharing your story! Ill upload a video about cPTSD in the future.
I loved through the satanic panic. I’m still waiting for infernal powers!!! Where are my powers???
Maybe they're delivery time is slow? I'm still waiting as well.
They are probably going to show up when our flying cars do.
Merry Christmas & Festive love! 👍
Same to you!
I'm seeing a lot of wokeness thrown about. To me, the term wokeness is a little too jingoistic and means too many different things to different people.
The root of this in the TTRPG community is the bio-essentialism argument, which (to quote the Hitchhikers Guide) is a load of dingos kidneys in my personal opinion. And a lot of what newer players are holding up as "proof" that D&D was sexist, and racist ignores any sense of context of the times, the context of how the game was developed, what vibes the developers were trying to capture (classical sword and sorcery for the most part) or the context of how we played the game at the time. It's presentism at it's worst, and stands as an ignorant critique of the early days of the game.
I was watching a British call-in show, and the host asked an instead caller what he meant by "woke". The caller said, "it's anti-British propaganda!" So, there we have a real definition, at last. Someone should tell Ron DeSactimonious what it means.
Andrew, your nuanced fact based comment has no place here on the internet, few will understand it! :p
I went through it. Started when I played D&D First Quest, then moved into Kingdom of Karameikos. When the realization dawned on me that I was being lied to, damn right I became aggressive. I aggressively countered my catechism teachers and it devolved into a screaming match with one who tried to have me unsuccessfully excommunicated. When that didn't work, she and her daughter who was in the same class as me circulated vicious rumors which got me threats and once even sent me to the hospital.
Now, I hear Christians are playing and want me to join their church and my response is "I'll join your table but not your church...ever..." Needless to say the invitation gets withdrawn most times. Can't seem to get them to understand that, in my day, every one of them would have been targets, especially where I used to live.
The biggest common cautionary message I can give is this. Stop Lying. Stop Pushing People Who Don't Agree. You will lose those that may side with you for now and when you do, you will lose them for good. It does not matter how much vitriol or hate or wanton property destruction you cause, we will despise and resent you and everything you represent, no matter how "right" it may be to you.
I see some are starting to act up again and want to bring this type of thinking back. Personally, this time...since I've got some old injuries that nag me, I won't be running this time. Just a fact.
im very disappointed with the recent moral outrage about dnd. sure the creators had some flaws but they were only human! just enjoy the damn hobby!
I had a friend in the 80s whos parents wouldn’t let him play D&D because of Satan & witchcraft and all that…so instead he played a lot of Car Wars and Gamma World with us (which was fine apparently). Go figure lol
All great games!
Seems to be more common than I thought. We did the same thing in my group. D&D at one friends house who's mom didn't care. Everything else anywhere we wanted.
It is a frustrating thing. From hearing it from a co-player (and GM of other games) that "Drow were explicitly made as a stereotype of black people in America" when she only has her understanding of that history come from online articles (and I suspected Reddit). Hearing this from people in the sunny land of Sweden is pretty head-scratching when our history of these topics - in our domestic games and in the social climate of racism in society - looked entirely different.
I also suspect she learned this from reddit, because the moment I started to disagree with her on it she just raised her voice, get visibly flustered, and called me ignorant. I lived in North America for 6 years before this and she's never lived outside her home province, btw.
I'm a professional paranormal debunker. (There is so much fraud in that work, people profiting from the grief of others) I may start discussing my work here on the channel as a way to teach critical thinking and how to properly research / fact check claims made by others.
@@welovettrpgs Please do. If you have any experiences on how to deal with these people IRL (the only interactions that actually matter as far as how we should compose ourselves), and the different ways to handle people and arguments.
Because, I am sure you know, there's different folks and different ways to stroke those folks.
... you know what I mean.
Since 1974 I have enjoyed the game until this year… My question is has any other TTRPG has this treatment?
Not as unjustly as D&D. (There have been a couple really really gross attempts to publish some truly horrifying racist, sexist garbage that were rightfully shut down. For example some people tried to steal the Star Frontiers name and publish a horrible white supremist version.)
The irony, of course, being that Gary Gygax was a moderate conservative Christian a coin flip (or dice roll, if you will) from being an endearingly embarrassing youth minister.
Yep - I remember the Satanic Panic well. My group always played within sight/earshot of our parents, most of the time, non of whom were regular church -goers, so we had it a bit easier than others. I do remember very well though all the church groups going door to door with their bags full of tracts every weekend.
And yes, I see very similar behaviors nowadays. Reskinned for the current zeitgeist. It's really a shame, too. I really enoyed running games for my kids and their friends before it got all whacked out and people decided they had to pick a side... Though to be fair, thats not why we dont play now - life got in the way, as it tends to do. I'd still be happy to run a game for them sometime - they were a fun group.
So how do we deal with the moral entrepreneurs now that they're IN the hobby?
Ignore the worst of it. Some of what's happening culturally is the result of marginalized people wanting to be heard after literally thousands of years of feeling (and being) silenced. That's legitimate. If the worst thing marginalized people are asking for now is to be heard after thousands of years of being dominated we should be OK with that. But then there are those who just want to feel empowered by using the plight of those marginalized groups to gain personal status. These are the people you're talking about. For example, white people telling black people what they're supposed to be offended by. I'll be addressing all that in a future video. Meanwhile, play other games. Support what you love and though there's a lot of noise to push back against, if we lift up that which brings us joy and ignore the troubled people and their drama, others will eventually come around. D&D is going through something called mainstreaming. It's popularity has not been great for the hobby. Lot's of opinionated tourists now. When Hot Topic and Manson mainstreamed goth it essentially ripped the heart out of it. EMO was born from the carcass of goth. Modern D&D is to emo what OSR is to goth. I use that analogy because the TTRPG community is experiencing the same process and has finally reached it's natural conclusion. That's why so many people are turning to OSR games. Thanks buddy!
The sex and violence in games is hard to wrap your brain around. It isn’t for people who don’t want to consider the ramifications of it.
I once played a Habbalah of Andrealphas, the demon prince of lust, in an In Nomine game. I couldn’t do what I did in that game without having a group that could separate the game from reality. It was really, really dark in tone. Even the other players were somewhat disturbed by it, because I played it as the perfect anti-villain, using the temptation of the flesh to lure out the lust of the easily-corruptible. By the end of that game, they couldn’t tell if I was working against heaven or for heaven, because I was targeting the ones who were already corrupted and protecting the innocent by doing it.
That game is a moral quagmire that would drive the Baptists into a frenzy. The full title of it was originally In Nomine Satanis, Magna Veritas, or “In the name of Satan, Greater Truth”. It got shortened to In Nomine to slip in under the wire of the satanic panic of the ‘90s. I’m genuinely surprised Steve Jackson Games didn’t catch more flack over that one.
I've heard tales of the Satanic Panic. . . For me the cloest I've experienced is the wotc outrage. I'm not a fan of where wotc has taken the game in recent years per say but I also get flak from the other side from not hating them enough or not being outraged with them. Also I've felt the feeling of gatekeeping wherin I've sat quiet while other around go on and on about how stupid 5e (and even 3.5) is and how 5e isn't *real* dnd and if you didn't play in the 80's your not a *real* player yada yada. . . .
Yes, after 50 years of toxic outrage I'm worn out. that's one of many reasons we keep our community here positive and don't allow politics. Thanks! (And the Satanic Panic was terrible. We had teachers trying to shut our D&D club down.
I thought this was gonna somehow end up a video about how evil Gary Gygax was or something and was about to click "don't recommend channel" since I'm completely new here. But then I saw a rather wholesome video that made me feel what I feel in the metal community. And so I subbed instead.
Welcome. We have a very civil and caring community on our discord as well.
The Satanic Panic was so overblown. It was nowhere near as bad as people remember it as evidenced by the games continually growing popularity into the 1990s.
Sort of like saying racism doesnt exist because it never effected you.
ya same thing with video games especially the "racist" "sexist" and "whatever-phobic" thing as well
Commenting so the Evil Algorithmic Overlords push your content.
Thank You!
"I, for one, welcome our new Algorithmic Overlords." -- Kent Brockman
Merry Christmas..
Same to you!
We would narratively play sessions between classes in the 90s and we had teachers who would forbid us from doing so because they were firmly still clutching pearls for the panic. We could only do so during Phys Ed, chess club or Lunch and compartmentalized most rolling to a single smuggled d6 we'd roll in hand with our backs forming a wall. These days it's been just another of the many dozens of IPs that have had their pendulum swung wildly into the other direction of toxicity and modernity where non should exist what so ever, they have just been co-opted by tribal cultures whose goal is to erase history both real and mythical for their replacement theology and beliefs, that it isn't enough to accept, but to tolerate and now partake of it or you are the baddie should you refuse one or all three.
D&D has demon and devil summoning, taken from "real" summoning techniques. It also uses real devil nicknames. From there the game was moved into the Satanic panic. I don't belive in God and I've run a couple of 5e campaigns. My favorite is CoS. Also, I love Lovecraft and Howard. The thing is, if you believe magic is evil, dieties that are not God are demons and a plethora of other stuff, there is definitely "Satanic" stuff in D&D.
Funny that now it's the DnD people who've lost touch with reality and see boogeymen everywhere. I'm glad I quit at 3.5.
D&D is good medicine. :-)
It sure is!
DnD was really important to me, as an introvert.
I agree that there is a bit of exaggeration in the moral critique, but I do think it is good to be conscious of potential prejudices. For example the language of DnD products in the 70s was common for the time, and it was sexist, yes. What we should learn from it is not to hate its creators, burn the content and never look at it again, but to take what's good and try not to make the same mistakes in the future.
And people do not immediately become monsters because they joined the zeitgeist of their era and did not update their minds.
To the example of Gygax, yes, I think he was sexist the same way my dad is, for example (don't know about racism). It just wasn't in his mind to try and be inclusive, but he wasn't actively hating women or something.
The same way I see my dad's faults and still love him, I can look at Gygax' work and appreciate it while recognizing that he was creative, but also sexist. Idolizing people can be as bad as spreading hatred.
All that matters to me is fact based conclusions obtained through critical thinking. I don't idolize anyone. Part of my real life work as a paranormal debunker is teaching critical thinking from an unbias perspective. To think Gary was sexist and racist means you must also believe all the people who actually knew him are lying when they say he wasn't. Furthermore you must believe the people who didn't know him and interpret the minimal evidence in the worst possible way while ignoring mountains of evidence that suggest otherwise. For clarity, I didn't know him and he may very well be all the things some people want to believe him to have been. However my video on the topic will be examining the evidence and the proper way to examine evidence.
I think a good parallel would be Gene Roddenberry. Did he have an affair with Nurse Chappel? Yes. Did he run to the dressing room when women's costumes were being fitted? Yes.
But, did he also create a future where racism and war and poverty were consigned to the dustbin of history? Yes. Did he put an African-American woman and a Japanese man on the bridge of the flagship of Starfleet, along with Satanic-looking First Officer? Yes. First inter-racial kiss on network tv, despite what the backwards Southern idiots would say? Yes.
Was Gygax just not exposed to women and minorities in his wargaming days, and therefore didn't think they would love the game? I don't know. Sounds logical to me, but there's a saying: "You don't know, what you don't know."
🤟🏼🤘🏼 FUCK YEAH
Religious fundamentalist right wingers attacked the game back in the 90s and now we have people from the other side of the spectrum doing the same thing. Can a guy just sit the #### down and play a game of dice these days?
Here's my two cents on the matter now that I've talked it over some and had time for my opinions to mature;
Obviously, DnD isn't racist or bigoted or anything, but WotC trying to market it as a progressive game about found families trying to do right by people is.... very wrong, DnD is usually about murdering acceptable classes of people, which isn't progressive.
Now, I take no issue with this-- I don't expound upon the horrors of WWII on both sides when I see Indiana Jones punch a Nazi, cus that's a Nazi; they're obviously Bad Guys
But if someone tries to sell me Indiana Jones as a complex take on World War 2 taking into account that many of the grunts were basically just regular guys, same as ours, I'd (understandably) be skeptical.
There's a bit of a difference, I think. The Satanic Panic was started by one woman looking for a scapegoat, and spreading misinformation about this new game that people didn't fully understand. I think a lot of the modern hostility coming from experienced players is directed at a company who seems to be watering down their game to follow the cultural trend of inclusivity, by trying to make sure their game doesn't offend anyone. The new DMG even has guidelines for dealing with sensitive topics and signalling to the group when you're uncomfortable. Now, I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing, but a GM should know their players well enough to at least have some idea of their maturity, and while I don't see a problem with including some gritty, dark moments in your game, there's no reason to be explicit beyond pure shock value. That being said, I'm of the mind that if you can't separate yourself from the imagined game world happening on a tabletop, you should probably be in therapy rather than at the game table. What really bothers me is that these new guidelines don't seem to set a boundary for just how much a player can object to.
"Oh, you failed your save and take 55 damage."
"But I only have 30 HP left!"
"Then, it looks like you're dead."
"That makes me really uncomfortable."
"Oh, I'm sorry, you only took 31 damage, so you're only unconscious."
Maybe a bit of an extreme example, but the DMG does suggest that if an in-game event makes a player uncomfortable, the GM should consider changing it. That's not how the game is supposed to work. If you can't handle the fantasy, you probably shouldn't be playing.
I don't want to make this into a political thing, but in doing this, WotC is trying to be more accessible to a minority, and they might just be alienating the majority who feels this sort of thing is a step too far in the wrong direction.
Personally, I say there's nothing forcing you to buy the new edition. I haven't bought new books since 3.5. I hardly even play D&D anymore. Play the game how you want. If the new edition really offends you, don't buy it. If enough people ignore it, WotC loses money and maybe they'll learn, but if WotC makes money on it, then obviously it still appeals to enough people that it's worth it for them to continue in this direction. Of course, there's also a discussion about how they're trying to monetize the new edition with digital subscriptions, and that's a whole other reason for contention.
Check out my safety tools video. I think you'll agree with my findings.
As far as the difference, that's too nuanced to really discuss in a social media post. The short version is: Both sides of both issues have/had legitimate concerns. It's important to hear other people's concerns and recognize that just because we don't experience something, doesn't mean someone else hasn't. However, both sides were taken over by extremists with agendas. They encouraged a legion of (possibly well meaning?) people who lack critical thinking skills and are unaware of how their own confirmation bias controls what they believe (good quote: Don't believe everything you think) Those people then take up arms against things they don't understand. What started as honest concerns then turns into emotion fueled arguments where nobody is listening to anyone else and any constructive criticism turns into "you're basically Hitler."
I wonder - and don't mean that as an insult or anything - why is this channel called "We Love TTRPGs" but talks exclusively (from what I hear so far, I've seen like 5-6 videos) about D&D?
I am genuinely interested in other systems.
I was covering other games (look at old videos) But I haven't recorded a new video since August. I became frustrated with a dead channel, RUclips burying and killing every video within 12 hours of upload. RUclips won't share videos that aren't D&D because there aren't enough viewers who will watch them. If I decide to continue making videos I have a huge list including other games. But that depends on if I can return this channel to life. Which is why I recently began taking some of my first videos and re editing them to be higher quality.
@welovettrpgs understandable and sad at the same time.
D&D and GURPS were the first games I've ever played (that was in the 00s), but I've moved on since then. I wish more people would not rob themselves of the wealth that is other TTRPGs.
D&Ds overwhelming popularity is a detriment to the hobby, I think. It stifles growth and development.
@@arcanefeline I'm excited to cover many other games. I just need to be making them for people to watch, not uploading to the void.
@welovettrpgs I hope your channel grows big enough for you to be able to discuss other games.
@@arcanefeline btw - here's a good example. Look back in July at my James Bond rpg video. It's a great video that required a lot of time and work. Five months old and it still has only half the views as this video received in less than a day.