Are there still people who think that d&d is some occult creation used to lure kids into worshipping satan...

I still wonder why there is no religious rpg made by a church, to teach history and shit like that to the young people

They are too busy fondling the chirldren.

That rumor came about later to attempt to give credit to the hysteria.

It was a combination of a faked suicide and bible-belt "rock n roll is the devil's music" retard mindset.

There is

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DragonRaid

Never seen Testament have you?

I picked up a copy simply because it advertised SMITE PHILISTINES! on the back.

Organised religion discourages creativity and independent thought, so it's fairly unlikely a game like that would be good. That's not to say it's not been done, it's just they're all shit due to forcing messages onto the player rather than offering decent gameplay.

Now i want to play rpg about crusades in a church, DEUS VULT

...

So have you been shunned now, or do you pretend to still be part of the cult while with family?

Ohh
Wonder if there's rules for smiting and burning your fellow players and NPC's for not being holy enough or worshipping pagan stuff?

It still baffles me that this was even a thing in America. I could have imagined it in some bumfuckistan country or some shit but America was always supposed to be not shit.

In Britain the introduction of D&D was met with a resounding meh of indifference from just about everyone.

Even the Rock and Roll is evil movement didn't really take off and most people only objected to it because they thought it sounded weird, loud and unpleasant.

I was introduced to D&D by a kindly old priest who ran a youth group. Half the children who attended were Baptists and they were there with the full knowledge and consent of their parents.

Did the people of the USA collectively forget to brain for a couple of decades or something?

Current American culture is very anti-brain. Too smart and white, must be a kissless virgin. Too smart and black, just trying to act white. There is also a strong undercurrent of distrust in science as we see in the climate change deniers, and anti-vax movements.

>America was always supposed to be not shit.
Nice joke

What? They don't celebrate birthdays? Those guys that come door to door guys never told me that.

It's true though, the USA is pretty much the Anakin Skywalker of modern countries.

America is a weird mix of shit. It's the definitive first world country with all that encompasses, but it's got a strong undercurrent of religious backwards-ness, anti-intellectualism, and xenophobic suspicion of anything different. And it's not just that there are more of these sorts of crazies, but that the crazies are more zealous and therefore make a louder noise. And an alarmingly large segment of the Christian population has embraced an us-vs.-them socio-political struggle that resists anything that threatens their world view (like science or reason) by doubling down on a dogmatic belief in righteousness.

>the Cold War has been over for 25 years.

They are edgy and kill kids?

They come from a broken home and have anger management issues

From America's perspective, you're the one who's evil.

Dogs in the Vineyard is heavily based off of the early days of Mormonism in the US

No, at most normies think we are retarded
quoting one of them from my class:
"So I went o play dungeons and dragons"
"So, do you dress up in costumes?"

That's probably at the far end of the spectrum of society, spent a few months in the US and for the most part people are pretty moderate and easy going, though none of them ever shut up.

kek!

I was talking with my schools librarian and she looked like she saw a ghost when I said it would be neat to do an after school D&D thing for the kids. She said that's for devil worshippers and satanists. Never met anyone like that before.

America was founded by a bunch of religious nutjobs that got kicked out of their sects in England for taking things too far, and once they got to America they promptly started excommunitating themselves for not being pure of faith (read: "not thinking exactly like I do"). America has a long and storied history of religion-related wackiness.

Anyone got PDFs of these? I would love to run one for a lark.

Oh, it's a minority that I'm talking about, but a sizable one. And then there is the group of people who aren't as crazy but kind of halfheartedly buy into some of the same ideas. Like, they aren't on a crusade or anything, but they still kind of believe that America's values are under attack and that a lot of the religious propaganda has a basis, even if it's exaggerated. The number of seemingly reasonable people who don't believe in evolution is astonishing.

But the zealots aren't likely to swim in the same circles as you do. I live in the bible belt but the folks I hang out with are an island of sanity, and it's not because I selectively questioned them all about their socio-religious beliefs or anything. But the folks who are interested in the same sorts of things as I am--the same sort of folks who are interesting to me--aren't likely to be dogmatic. In passing, in casual encounters, I run into it fairly frequently though, and I've found it's best to stay the fuck away from politics. And I'm not talking about arguing over the Democratic or Republican position on a particular issue, but bringing up anything remotely political or mentioning political figures at all. Because that's when you get into the nutball right-wing radio show bullshit, like how Obama is trying to ban the pledge of allegiance or Obamacare is designed to take away our guns or some shit. And the political flows freely into the religious in a way that I find disturbing, like Christianity (their brand of it, anyway) is just another political movement... or maybe it's the other way around and their politics is their religion.

There are still people who believe just about anything is the work of Satan. Music, spicy food, the way girls dress, non-English languages, reading, pokemon. There are always idiots, and there always will be, and they will always believe in boogeymen.

I'm from Sweden, where we used to be, and still are to some extent, freakishly over represented when it came to playing role-playing games and forming metal acts (our biggest domestic role-playing game sold 100 000 rulebooks over a decade or so, in a country that had a population of like 8.5 mil when it was published).

Back when the old guard published Kult here it got blamed for murder and some sociologist nutjob put out a book about how role-playing groups are really just teaching kids how to form extremist terror cells, but nobody spouts that nonsense any more, and the people who honestly believed it even back then was mainly the usual suspects who are always looking for something to blame for everything. You have to go to the US or be part of some off-shoot of christianity, like the Jehovas to find people who still think Drakar och Demoner is the devil.

On the other hand, write an article about how games made for boys having hot girls in them is proof that the patriarchy is still in charge and you can have a column in a newspaper.

I think we all can agree that Sweden is a pretty different deal than the US(uck) but there is a church/congregation here using ttrpgs as a method of education (in a "basis of discussion" kind of way) for Confirmations and such. They even published their own scifi RPG, and honestly it looks pretty solid. GURPS-inspired and with a lot of lore. Pic related

Yeah, I was mostly Virginia and Florida, though I did get out to Texas, through the southern states and as far north as Maine, spent a couple of days in Cali but not enough to really have much of an opinion either way on them.
Most countries tend to have their share of crazies and wall licking shitheads wherever you go though.

One thing I do know, you don't want church+state in the same basket, that's when poor cunts start getting stoned to death, heads cut off and other random acts of bastardry in the name of god.

Veeky Forums Let me tell you about the "Satanic Panic" of the 80s and the bullshit that went on.

skeptoid.com/episodes/4462 - Skeptoid #462: Satanic Ritual Abuse
The history of claims that secret Satanic cults are abusing children.

Click the listen link if it's too tl;dr for you.

Everything you've just described makes me believe you're just some liberal hippy who just doesn't like Conservative and or religious individuals.

I mean, can you not enjoy a spiritual or economical discussion? Will it really hurt you?

>Kvothe.png

The thing is that having a discussion with someone who believes they're objectively right and don't need any evidence for that point of view are really pointless to have a discussion with.

What would a religious person possibly get out of talking about religion with me, and what would I get out of talking about it with them?

The only thing that's worse than having a discussion with someone who totally agrees with you is to have a discussion with someone who doesn't feel they have to bother with logic.

>The only thing that's worse than having a discussion with someone who totally agrees with you is to have a discussion with someone who doesn't feel they have to bother with logic.
He said on Veeky Forums.

>One thing I do know, you don't want church+state in the same basket, that's when poor cunts start getting stoned to death, heads cut off and other random acts of bastardry in the name of god.

It's kinda weird. A LOT of countries don't have a formalized separation and yet it naturally doesn't intrude on each other too much. Yet America's formalized separation seems to have people running roughshod over it every day.

America has a higher percentage of the population who are religious than any other developed country except Vatican City. We actually have a higher percentage of our population who are Christian than some sharia countries have of Muslims.

>Designers: Dick Wulf.

Is burgerland truely as retarded as the internet suggests? Cos half the shit I see about america is either a fool blaming an atrocity on a minor detail or a bunch of fat dudes on motorised scooters

>area of USA: 9.857 million square kilometres
>area of Europe: 10.18 million square kilometres
It's a question of scale.
Also, people being retarded is entertaining, so of course the media are going to run stories about idiots doing stupid things.

>Dick Wulf.
Time to lock up your livestock and uglier female relatives

Most people in the bible belt with grey hair have some form of anxiety about D&D.
~t. southerner

I have a coworker who believes the world is flat and I listened to him rant for minutes about how the edges of the world are bordered by ice walls miles high and guarded by "the government". He also believes AIDs, Ebola, and Lead are all conspiracies to kill black people.

But regarding D&D, my mom didn't believe it was Satanic in and of itself, but did think it was something some Satanists did to try and recruit people. When I told her I had played at a friend's house, she started asking questions like, "Did he light candles, set out crystals, or have anything strange hanging around his neck?"

Her real fear, though: Magic the Gathering and the Pokemon TCG. She heard some email/bullshit internet rumor about a kid being sent to the hospital- apparently because a psychic type pokemon card in his pocket was giving him chronic migraines. She came to me, demanding to know which pokemon was "the psychic pokemon."

I remember coming home on more than one occasion and finding my D&D books and magic cards thrown away. I just started hiding them.

Then there was the time she thought I was furry. And another time she thought I was gay.

And the hullabaloo over me being agnostic/atheist.

Now that I'm older and married and didn't turn into a crazy asshole, my mom has admitted that she may have overreacted when I was younger. She grew up in a small Mississippi town.

She's also more appreciative of my open mindedness and comes to me with lots of questions about "weird people". This has increased lately since she went back to college and is really being exposed to different kinds of people. She's more curious and amused than fearful now.

I'm okay with folks disagreeing with me; I'm just not a fan of people who have entirely divorced themselves from reason. If you think Obama is trying to ban the pledge of allegiance, that shows a distinct lack of rational thought. It has nothing to do with whether you like Obama or not; it's whether you hold crazy conspiracy theories. And you usually don't see the same craziness on the left down here, probably because "the left" is actually fairly moderate (given that the political centerpoint of a bible belt state is decently right wing compared to the country as a whole, going left from there brings you to the center while going right from there lands you in crazytown).* But I reckon that there are places where crazy left wing shit like "9/11 was an inside job by the Bush administration" overshadows any stuff from the right.

To bring things full circle, however, my friend's parents burned his D&D books and dice in the fireplace because they thought it was a tool of the devil or some such bullshit. His mom can't go for more than like two sentences without mentioning Jesus. Somebody stole her sheet that she had hanging on the line outside and somebody else she knew was like "I have a couple of sheets I'm not using" and suddenly the whole thing was a plan by god to multiply her gifts or some shit. That shit makes me uncomfortable.

*To illustrate my point, this whackjob was my congressman up until the last election cycle: youtube.com/watch?v=ms0PYAr2qFw

>lead is a conspiracy
Is this what happens when you don't go to school?

>It's a question of scale
What are you trying to say? That Ameriburgers need motorised scooters because the area of their country is 9.857 million square kilometers?

Turned out to be true in Flint, MI

This is very true.

>And you usually don't see the same craziness on the left down here, probably because "the left" is actually fairly moderate (given that the political centerpoint of a bible belt state is decently right wing compared to the country as a whole, going left from there brings you to the center while going right from there lands you in crazytown).* But I reckon that there are places where crazy left wing shit like "9/11 was an inside job by the Bush administration" overshadows any stuff from the right.

Your crazier lefties tend to be in the big cities. We live in Austin, my wife volunteers with NORML, and is a fucking bisexual neo-pagan vegan and even she comes to me frustrated by the insane troll logic arguments she gets bombarded with everyday.

Monsanto/Government Vaccines/Bilderberg Group is out to control/cull/overthrow the population with GMO's/vaccines/pop music.

He went to school. He has a degree. He's an administrator.

No. Yes.

Add up all the retardation from all of Europe, divide by two to account for Europe being about twice as densely populated, and see what comes out. It's probably still less, though.

He's saying the USA is the size of all of Europe combined, and has an utterly absurd population compared to most European countries.

So America has about as many rural fuckwits as ALL OF EUROPE, except they all seem to be coming from one country.

The vast majority of Americans are depressingly average, just like the vast majority of Europeans. But there's just a fuckload of them.

So, what's the conspiracy? Big Gubmint puts lead in the water to keep the black man down, and Flint was them fucking up and getting found out?

Yep. I'm liberal as fuck in most regards but I still have to deal with psychopaths who tell me that I'm autistic because of vaccines (when I only survived my childhood due to extensive medical care - I had trouble with a barely-functioning thyroid when I was born) and that my anxiety is simultaneously a. all the result of negative energy in my mind and chakras and b. the result of eating too many GMOs.

For some reason I'm stuck with a family where one half is hardcore bible thumping 'a livable minimum wage kills jobs, Trickle Down is a miracle passed down by the God Emperor' pickup truck drivers and the other half is trying to cure cancer with magic salt licks.

>Your crazier lefties tend to be in the big cities.
Well, living in Austin might contribute to that. I've never actually been to Austin, but it has a reputation as hard left "refuge" in hard right state, and I mean, its unofficial motto *is* "Keep Austin weird".

>Monsanto/Government Vaccines/Bilderberg Group is out to control/cull/overthrow the population with GMO's/vaccines/pop music.
Yeah, that kind of thing. (Wait... pop music?)

Wait. I thought it was the other way around.

>So, what's the conspiracy? Big Gubmint puts lead in the water to keep the black man down, and Flint was them fucking up and getting found out?

Pretty much. He also thinks that not only the moon landing was staged, but that every space launch since then, including all satellites, have been staged as well.

Because rockets are powered by propane, and propane doesn't have enough energy to lift you out of the atmosphere.

All the images you've ever seen of the Earth from orbit, of other planetary bodies, or anything set in space is all the result of skillful digital manipulation.

And satellites don't exist.

Satanic worship used to lure people to play DnD?

>probably

definitely

Ireland/South/Eastern Europe is basically the Midwest/South US. Everyone tries to act like Europe is only the UK/France/Germany/Belgium/Sweden/Norway are the only places in Europe when they compare it to America.

jesus christ, and I thought my aunt was insane for thinking autistic people are the result of aliens breeding with humans to create superhumans that will save the world and who can detect auras
or how she legitimately believed the world was gonna end in 2012
or how the government is trying to keep the poor Mexican laborer down
or how Donald Trump is brainwashing America to bring about the apocalypse

And everyone outside of the US acts as if it was only Texas+NY+Washington DC.

>For some reason I'm stuck with a family where one half is hardcore bible thumping 'a livable minimum wage kills jobs, Trickle Down is a miracle passed down by the God Emperor' pickup truck drivers and the other half is trying to cure cancer with magic salt licks.

Sheeeiiit
Have they found out the internet exists or is that part of their 'problem'?

>Have they found out the internet exists or is that part of their 'problem'?

The internet usually exacerbates this kind of bullshit because it's so easy to go onto Google and find some stupid forum or geocities website that supports your conspiracy.

>the other half is trying to cure cancer with magic salt licks.
If that doesn't work for you, maybe you're using the wrong kind of salt.

They're aware of the internet. On the Right side of the family, despite using it to run a limo business for several years, the internet is a frivolous waste of time and nobody can possibly use it productively and it's certainly not a tool for research or cooperation or finding a job (if you want a job, just walk into the building, shake the hand of the manager, and demand to be hired on the spot! No, that has nothing to do with the fact that you knew the manager for fifteen years thanks to growing up in the same town of 3000 people)

On the left side... hooooo boy.

What this guy said:
My cousin is a member of a Facebook group that exists solely to push memes about how anyone who isn't 'enlightened' is a zombie pushed along by corporate advertising, without any will of their own, and how it's justified to disconnect from and ostracize anyone who can't accept 'the truth' of how they've been manipulated by [insert 'fascist' entity here]

>Ireland

Americuck pls stop with the racial profiling

Trickle Down economics isn't actually a thing. The term was invented by liberal talk-show hosts to disparage any tax plan that didn't involve extorting the living shit out of everyone who makes more than 90k a year.

These days people on both sides of the aisle believe that it's real because they were told so. The closest thing to it that actually exists in reality is corporate welfare, which has sadly become bipartisan economic policy now that both parties are essentially run by globalist neoconsevatives.

Don't you stick Ireland in with that gibbering mess.

I've been to and all over Ireland and it's a fucking beautiful if rainy land with kind and beautiful people. Even the gaming shops a nice and welcoming with almost no fat, obnoxious neckbeards in sight.

Kojima spent an entire Metal Gear game describing the effect the internet would have on radicalizing ideologically motivated people. It's frightening how closely he nailed it.

satobs.org/geosats.html Perhaps dragging him out back and making him look at one with his own eyes might convince him that he MIGHT be an idiot

You've obviously never been to Belfast. Never answer anyone who asks you what leg you dig with.

>Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying 'End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH', the paint wouldn't even have time to dry.

Terry Pratchett quote.

Was it from Thief of Time?

You mean Belfast, United Kingdom?

No, we played D&D to try and lure Satan here so we could get a forever DM and not feel bad about it.

The difference is that on Veeky Forums I can argue with a raving loonie about something that ultimately just boils down to taste and agree to disagree (by calling each other faggot a lot.)

But having a discussion irl with someone who'd have to revise their entire worldview to even fit in the notion that my opinion matters is not fun, it's just depressing.

Educated in a school set up by missionaries in Singapore. Back in the 90's, the principal (I think) called a school assembly at which she wept and ranted because some student brought MTG cards to school. Her big reveal was that one of these cards was labelled "The Lord of the Pit"

To be fair cards like this existed which probably did give huge red flags

Look I get being liberal as fuck, but I would hope you at least have the sophistication to realize the difference between conservative conspiracy theories, and the vast quantities of empirical evidence and robust economic theory the demonstrate minimum wage increases unemployment.

If anything the opposite is true, where thinking minimum wage has no downsides is a nutso conspiracy theory. Price floors are something that there has been an academic consensus on for a long time. You can support minimum wage for other reasons, but denying it destroys jobs is like denying climate change.

As much as you try to pretend they don't exist, the Northern Irish are Irish too.

>It's kinda weird. A LOT of countries don't have a formalized separation and yet it naturally doesn't intrude on each other too much. Yet America's formalized separation seems to have people running roughshod over it every day.

America was founded by descendants of people who left/got kicked out of their mother country for being too dogmatic and uncompromising in their religion.

The idea exists because Europe had mostly gotten over religion and it was just a part of daily life, but in the US, it was still SERIOUS BUSINESS.

Just like most businesses don't need a sign stating "Maintain personal hygiene, don't be an asshole, and don't be a creep," but some comic and game stores do.

And that doesn't funky smelling asshole creepers from going into the stores.

A higher minimum wage creates more disposable income. You can only raise prices so high before becoming vulnerable to competition. Jobs will be lost initially as companies cut back in an effort to not have to adjust otherwise, but the actual impact of even a large minimum wage increase in an economy of the scale the US is running on is minimal, while the benefits in terms of quality-of-life and increased viability of small business are significant.

Why are we talking about minimum wage and climate change? I'm talking about actual crackpot conspiracy theories.

>Never answer anyone who asks you what leg you dig with.

You've got me curious.

You know what else creates more disposable income? Not taxing everyone for 20% of their wages. Weird coincidence that everyone who wants a higher minimum wage also wants a higher federal income tax rate. What was Bernie's 25% for the bottom bracket? Combined with California State taxes that'd put me in the high 30s.

I'd rather work for 10 dollars an hour and be taxed one dollar than work for 15 dollars an hour and be taxed 5.

Over the late 2000s the average effective minimum wage rose by 30% across the united states, while the reduction in employment to population ratio that is considered to be linked to the rise in pay to be something like 0.7%

Losing less than a percent of jobs in exchange for giving the remaining 99.3 percent of workers in those jobs a more humane wage is not a loss.

Would you consider slavery to be a positive thing if it led to 100% employment?

Don't they see? The way the NFL gets them to worship muscular men is turning them all gay! Clearly a satanic plot!

It's Belfast slang for 'Are you Protestant or Catholic?'