Annalee Newitz has declared “Mission Accomplished” in the decades-long resistance to the ignorant theocrats who wanted to destroy Dungeons & Dragons. There have long been regressive Conservative Culture Warriors who railed against the game, and I remember a time in the late 70s and 80s when there were lots of silly stories in the media about the corrupting evil of fantasy role playing. Those just don’t happen now.
And yet the half-elf thieves and evil clerics and dorky kids with dice won at least one melee in this particular culture war. That’s abundantly obvious when you consider that the media is dominated by D&D-influenced stories. Meanwhile, the anti-D&D campaigns today have been reduced to items like this shabby little pamphlet, digitized by a gamer who wanted to memorialize a hard time in geek history. It’s a clear example of history being written by the winners.
When D&D types win a war like this, however, they don’t try to erase the perspective of the enemies who once threatened them. They have too much respect for the source material. In the 1980s, angry mobs of parents burned their kids’ D&D books. Those kids, now grown up, digitize and annotate the pamphlets that once condemned them.
Realistically, though, the bad guys never had a chance. It was a lot like the War on Christmas: conservatives grimly tut-tut about dangers of changing mores, while everyone sensible blithely goes on putting up Christmas trees and buying presents and getting together with their family. Similarly, we all went on throwing dice and inventing fantasy scenarios while the geezers clutched their Bibles and moaned.
It was hardly any kind of war at all, which is how we “won”. Just wait a few more years, and people will be finding old footage of Bill O’Reilly, and pointing and laughing.
So, the geezers did without the dice, but adding moaning? Sounds about right.
Yay! Now that war’s over, we can finally turn our full attention to those pesky SJWs who are absolutely no different in their universal and unquestioning condemnation of all things fantasy.
I wish I didn’t believe anyone really had that exact thought.
“A few more years”? But I’m *already* pointing and laughing at Bill O’Reilly!
And yet, one of the cast of Critical Role, or maybe it was the other Geek and Sundry show Larps (not sure) commented less than a year ago, I think (they have a lot of episodes and I am not sure which one it was in), that where she grew up, i.e., in certain states, the war still goes on and you will still be treated like you have arrived with a pack of taroh cards and a spirit board, if you try to go out in public with a players handbook.
The problem with “winning” some wars is that some idiots are still out there putting out minor fires, among places where the “moral people” are still fighting – sort of like the people wanting the south to still rise again.
I wonder what those conservatives think of Call of Cthulhu. They might actually like the focus on religious devotion among cultists and whatnot? :-P
I remember seeing lots of libertarians who worshiped the first Bioshock game. Their explanations and arguments were juvenile, at best.
I’ve always viewed religion as both a scam and as role-playing. This was just a brand loyalty fight between rabid fan boys of one product, and well-adjusted gamers who enjoyed a superior game.
That NPC “Jesus” was crazy OP anyway. Game was totally unbalanced. No real enemies of any threat at all.
@davidnangle: Yes, they are just jealous because things like D&D are usually way more consistent and interesting than their religious texts could ever be. I always said that religious and esoteric stuff ist just bad fantasy, written by someone who obviously never gave it much thought.
Truly those were dark tiimes for our intrepid heroes. Beset on many fronts by the media, friends, family and complete strangers alike. I remember those days. Being accused of being a satanist trying to recruit others to satanism is an unpleasant thing for an adolescent to handle.
Luckily, my mom, who bought me my first set*, grokked that it was really a story telling game. Being a big reader, she was quite keen on the notion of collaborative story telling. Woe to anyone that called the game (or her son) evil in her presence. I distinctly remember her rising up, in our church, like a flame haired Valkyrie, and arguing with the pastor right there in front of the entire congregation. Funny thing, though, she never once actually played with it. Looking back, I guess she didn’t want to intrude into my space, but she would sit in her recliner and pretend to not be listening every time we played at the dinner table.
Ok, I’m getting verklempt.
* The 1981 Basic Set. She had no idea what it was, but it had a dragon on it, so figured I’d like it. It took me and my friends quite some time to figure out how to play because none of us had ever even heard of a role playing game. Hmmmm… Now that I think about it, it’s pretty remarkable that, out of all of the Christmas presents I’ve received over my lifetime, that one made such a profound impact that literally decades later, it still resonates with me.
Link?
I can confirm that there is at least some hardcore religious pushback to tabletop gaming still. One of my friends had his warhammer army thrown out in the garbage by his housekeeper – now fired – with the explanation that they were “ungodly totems” or somesuch. Given that a warhammer army can be significantly expensive, this was really ill-advised on her part.
Another epic win in the battle was when the Chick tract Dark Dungeons was made into a movie. Not as a parody, mind you, but by using the source material as an actual script. The result was so over the top hilarious that it became very difficult to treat the hysteria as anything other than the ravings of a small bunch of deluded lunatics.
prae,
I Think J R R Tolkien’s opus is waaay more consistent than any religious corpus of narrative!
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Also, in regard to victories:
“Texas Grand Jury Indicts Anti-Abortion Video Makers : http://www.patheos.com/blogs/dispatches/2016/01/26/texas-grand-jury-indicts-anti-abortion-video-makers/
HAHAHAHAHAHAHHA!
@birgerjohansson: lol, I think that’s another league altogether. I mean, who else went as far as inventing 3(?) whole languages for his setting?
At the ttitle of this OP and seeing reference to Annalee, I immediately jumped over to IO9 to read the original. Couldn’t find it, so slunk back here and found the link embedded in one of the first sentences in the OP. Which blipped me back over deep into IO9 (surprise, surprise, huh). I then saw that the date at the top of the IO9 article, was 3/26/2014
It’s nice to be reminded the history of the victory.
With all the “War On xxx” that has been ubiquitous since ’14 it seems their loss against D&D is being redirected against secular Xmas. Instead of imagining religion being put into a fantasy game, they’re accusing us of taking religion OUT. [huh?] They want it both ways. Indirect contradiction seems to their ‘strategy’.
So, is the OP advising us that the unrecognized collectible are all the youtube rants about pulling jeebus out of christmas?
Or save the DVR recordings of his (you know who) FauxNoise rants.
Is this the speak of an ORLY shill, to increase the value of his brainfarts focused at secular solstice celebrations? /satire
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OTOH. Thanks for “digging up” this gem of an article [“digging up” & “gem”: being D&D references]. I am a fan of Newitz being an IO9 fanboy, recent customer of her latest book Scatter, Adapt, And Remember (to shill for Annalee)
Not only is D&D alive and well, but the oldest, continuous roleplaying convention, DunDraCon, will happen for the 40th time in two weeks. See http://www.dundracon.com for data about DunDraCon 40. (And if you’re interested, pre-reg closes Sunday night, 1/31, and the main hotel is *full*, but there are overflow hotels.)
(Yes…that’s a shameless plug, but it is–in its way–on topic. My disclaimer is that I am head of ConReg for DDC.)
Re: prae @ #14…
Actually, JRRT invented a world to go with the languages he had invented. He was, after all, a philologist long before he was a fantasy writer.
To be fair, nobody’s religious parents collected all their Not-Christmas stuff and threw it in the trash.
And yeah, the war may be over but skirmishes are still going on. Just like comic books, even though the Comics Code Authority lost its relevance in the 1980s. (Just as the D&D war was heating up … hmm.)
I considered this war won when my 10 year old son signed up for the D&D club in his school and found that he was lucky enough to make the 20-person cut and not have to sit on the waitlist.
Christians always hated D&D because they realized that their religion is similar to a beer and pretzels game, only a whole lot less fun and the dungeonmaster has to wear a special outfit to have any authority.
My mom tried to stop me fro playing D&D when I was in my 20s on the grounds that “nobody else does weird things like that,” and citing her 60+ year old Conservative friends as evidence. Given that her 60+ year old Conservative friends were the kind of people I didn’t want to be like, this was not exactly a compelling argument.
So where does this leave the theory the ancient pyramids of Egypt are really a set of extraterrestrial alien multi-sided die partially buried in the sand?
blf @22
The aliens playing botched the roll, so they rage quit and never came back to collect their dice. Obviously. Sheesh, think it through.
;-)
whheydt @16,
I’m already registered. Of course, I live in town, so skipping is not really an option. I never seem to get into the games I want, but I can always fall back on Pathfinder :)
birgerjohansson #13
It is almost as though those religious books were pieced together from different sources and authors and squished all together. I find it amazing that people still believe that Moses wrote the Pentateuch.
I figure some people here might enjoy one of the podcasts I have been listening to, The History in the Bible Podcast, dealing with the modern synthesis of Biblical Studies.
@blf
Pyramids are not regular tetrahedrons as a four-sided die must be. Just sayin’
@YOB: “The 1981 Basic Set. She had no idea what it was, but it had a dragon on it, so figured I’d like it. It took me and my friends quite some time to figure out how to play because none of us had ever even heard of a role playing game.”
Man, you sound like my twin or something. Same story: Basic Set around 1981 (maybe a little earlier), and a hell of a long time before we all figured out how to actually play this newfangled “RPG” concept…
Sadly, in my case, the D&D sessions were cut off after a couple of years. Cut off by – yep – religion. “It’s an invitation to the occult…” sort of stuff. I remember creatively (yet somewhat sadly) having to create my own hand-written, D&D clone, taking care to disguise any “magic” or “devils” or what not, to avoid any appearance of “Satanism”…
In my opinion, many hardcore fundigelicals flipped from opposition to embracing role-playing fantasy games, in the form of prayer warfare. The only difference between them is that one allows players to fantasize about battling the forces of darkness, and causes obsessed behavior that leaves them emotionally stunted throughout adulthood and incapable of forming meaningful relationships. The other has wizards and orcs. It’s only a matter of time before they start taking credit for the genre.
No wonder the aliens ragequit!
I don’t know, I think the war on D&D was kind of lost when WotC took it over from TSR.
I mean, 3rd edition was bad enough, but 4th edition was utter trash. 5th edition is the first truly playable version of the game that WotC has managed to put out, but it’s still senselessly complex compared to the old-school editions.
This is why we have the OSR. Labyrinth Lord, Swords & Wizardry, OSRIC, and so forth are carrying the torch and keeping the real game alive.
Honestly, I always thought d&d was senselessly simplistic. I mean, roll against your armour class to see if you get hit? What? Surely armour only comes into play *after* you get hit? Or as you get hit, anyway. But after you’ve rolled to hit.
I’m entirely willing to believe that I’m just a massive nerd, though….
And then Dragon mag died, and was replaced with Pathfinder… Yeah, even when I didn’t have people to play with there where spells, spells, spells. The joke April addition, a number of comics, the ecologies, etc. All gone, and replaced with some damn thing that was basically Dungeon magazine in new clothes – all the meat gone, and just the empty maps, filled with rooms, and descriptions of things one found in them, more or less, with any and all content, even the stuff that wasn’t just dungeons, all geared to some new set of worlds no one gave a F about.
I am still, still, waiting for the new D20 editions of the priest spell books, and the wizard ones. I bought like 3 out of the 5? I think it was, with what little money I had at the time, and never got any more. The replacement of the monster manuals… the binder with all the monsters in it, some ass stole from me on the say out the door at college, and I didn’t realize he had done so (I thought he just had his, since he also owned one, and some of the stuff for it) until I got home, thousands of miles away and wondered where it went.
Yeah.. Maybe now, I might look into some of the stuff again, but.. so much material, all rendered useless, by the d20 conversion, then it being taken over by people that absolutely didn’t give a damn that all of it was going to just stop being on the shelves, lost, for good, until/unless they finally republish any of it.
Wasn’t, and still am not, in so many ways, a happy camper, from that BS.
johnquixote @30:
You never actually played any versions of AD&D, did you? Nobody who ever had to deal with THAC0, the 16 or so types of saving throws, and non-weapon proficiencies would ever call 3rd, 4th, or 5th editions “complicated.” Even 3rd Edition’s grappling rules were less complicated than that.
@30
Never been a huge D&D fan – World of Darkness games were more my jam – but I’ve enjoyed a fair bit of pathfinder, which is apparently based off of 3.5e.
Vivec @34:
Pathfinder is heavily derived from 3.5 edition D&D. It’s been frequently called D&D 3.75 Edition.
@35
Well, I guess I’m partially a fan of 3.5e, then.
YOB – Ye Olde Blacksmith (#9) –
My parents bought me my first set but soon turned fanatics and wanted the stuff out of the house.
Some would considere it sacrilege, but I always preferred the Basic (red) and Expert (blue) rules, not the AD&D books. They were simpler and games were more about talking than about rulebook minutiae.
whheydt (#16) –
Last March, those who run GenCon showed the world what sort of people that gamers are (the good kind).
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/gaming-convention-threatens-move-indiana-anti-gay-bill-article-1.2161498
Athywren:
It’s just the terminology*; the roll to hit indicates whether to then roll for damage, and the armour class modifies the likelihood of hitting. Different weapons have bonuses or penalties vs. different armours.
(*Don’t go into that level until you’ve reached a sufficient level!)
Travis #25 (& others):
The bible is an attempt to edit a thousand years of fanfic. Tolkien had it easy!
CJO #26:
They could be d8s – we’re only seeing the top half.
John Morales
Did you play D&D when it was graph paper and pencils?
chigau, yes. Started in 1980… still have the dog-eared books!
John Morales
I started and stopped at about the same time.
There were only three of us, in a tiny apartment.
If we hadn’t gone back to cribbage, there would have been blood.
I dreamt of four-sided dice today… COINCIDENCE?!
Anyway, on a totally unrelated note@Vivec: your name and profile picture just reminded me to check some Morrowind-related projects, and I’m pleased that both Tamriel Rebuilt and OpenMW are still under active development. And to get back on topic, do you know of any halfway decent P&P implementations of Elder Srolls?
Last year my parents asked me if I wanted the old box of stuff in the attic from my high school days.
In it were: chainmail, my first edition D&D books plus greyhawk and gdgah
My first edition copy of Traveller
My playtester’s copy of Squad Leader
A copy of the Anarchist’s Cookbook
A few rolls of punchpaper tape of my first programs
… Score!!
I have never owned a bible. The war between D&D and religion was a rout. Religion never took the field.
@44
I know there’s an unfinished Morrowind P&P project on 1d4chan but aside from that, none come to mind.
@ 33, microraptor:
>You never actually played any versions of AD&D, did you? Nobody who ever had to deal with THAC0, the 16 or so types of saving throws, and non-weapon proficiencies would ever call 3rd, 4th, or 5th editions “complicated.” Even 3rd Edition’s grappling rules were less complicated than that.
I write and publish OSR compatible gaming materials to this day, kiddo. And it’s five saving throw categories, hardly sixteen. THAC0 is *faster* and easier to use than base attack bonus and ascending AC values if you know what you’re doing. And, yes, the d20 System editions of D&D are indeed more complicated than the older editions, a fact which can be readily summed up in the phrase, “skills & feats”.
THAC0 requires you to remember a chart based on your character’s class and level. Third Edition combat requires you to be able to add two numbers together. Your claim that THAC0 is faster and easier than than 3rd Edition’s ascending attack values is the second greatest whopper I’ve ever heard someone claim about a tabletop game, beaten only by a guy who told me he didn’t want to get into Battletech because it was too expensive, he was planning to get into Warhammer 40K instead.