Did your parents ever tell you that D&D was evil or whatnot...

Did your parents ever tell you that D&D was evil or whatnot? My parents went completely overboard when they found out I was playing, and I remember they confiscated my monster manual to "check it for satanic messages." My mom came back later and told me that the front cover had the Devil's penis hidden in plain sight. You see she said that the red dragon's wings were in fact legs of an upside-down man and the neck/head of the dragon was the penis. Yes, she was serious about this and yes this was the reason given as to why D&D was banned from the house for years.

Do you ever bring this up in conversation with her now that you're both older? My grandmother (parents are ded grandma raised me)
Had a very similar reaction and I love to bring shit like this up, she tries to deny it but deep down she knows she was being stupid.

2e Monster Manuals are the best
Also, you wrote some words but I didn't really care, sorry.

My mother gifted me my first box of D&D first edition when I was oh, seven? Eight? My parents were into it, I grew in the RPG environment, my children will grow into it as well. Luckily my soon-to-be wife is not into it, so at least they would have some good sense and world-savvy skills unlike me :D

I think it's one of those situations where everyone just doesn't wanna talk about it. My mom also got my grandparents and our local priest to lecture me about this too. Knowing my mother if I did bring it up she'd completely flip her shit so I think I'l just bury my feelings deep down, the healthy way.

I actually used my mother's irrationality towards "demonic" imagery to get her locked up in a mental hospital. She was very abusive to both me and my adopted sister on an emotional and physical level. Good times.

Inherited my dad's old AD&D books which he used to run games with, with my mom as a player.

In high school when I told my dad I was going to a friend's to play D&D he jokingly asked, "Wait, so are you a nerd or a stoner?" and we shared a laugh.

My friend's ultra-Christian parents confiscated his D&D books and burned them in the fire place. So he and his brother just made up their own games to play. When they grew up, one converted to Catholicism, which was scandalous until the other decided he was pagan. Years later, the pagan one decided he was gender queer, so so much for the parents' strict baptist bullshit. To their credit though, they didn't disown him or anything, and told him they still loved him, I could definitely have seen something like that going worse. The mom kinda freaks me out though. You can't have a conversation with her that lasts more than a couple of minutes without god coming up. Anything good that ever happens in your life is directly because of god's intervention. You get lucky and win a free sandwich? God did that. You get a raise at work? God. Your apple pie came out really tasty this time? God. It's pretty creepy.

But... uh... yeah. They burned his D&D books due to their evil influence or something. I guess this would've been around the time of the great satanic scare way back when, though maybe in its waning days. Sometimes living in the bible belt really sucks.

Nah, my parents figured rolling dice in the basement with friends and at worst consuming too much sugar and caffeine was a lot better than other teenager activities.

Not D&D, but with other games they did. WoD, mostly.

Nah, not evil, but my dad did tell me I wasn't allowed to play them because it was for losers.

You must understand, this was when there was still hope for me.

>You must understand, this was when there was still hope for me.
This is a bullshit point of view and you should be ashamed of thinking it. There was never any hope for you.

The D&D scare never reached my country so all of my friends played it without any issues when we were growing up

Both nigggggahhh

They were just happy i wasnt getting into drugs like some of the other kids. Even though our sessions were largely bullshitting around with some character sheets in front of us while we smoked a bunch of weed.

Threadly reminder:
2e is GOAT edition

My mom asked once about it just to make sure I wasn't becoming some edgelord about it or anything. Overall they've been fine with it though

>growing up in a highly repressive religious environment just makes kids deviate from what their parents want more than if they just left them alone
Huh... really makes you think

Britfag here, we played warhammer fantasy instead of d&d. My dad thought it was fine and my mom figured it was educational.

My parents thought it was cool, and even played a couple of games with me. My mom did draw clothes on all the naked monsters in the MM tho since I was pretty young.

My parents bought me D&D books because they wanted to encourage me to read more. My mom had a slight panic after seeing a scare piece about Vampire on the news, but I lied and told her that I only played D&D so she was fine.

I dated a girl in high school whose mom made her break up with me after she found out that we were playing D&D together, though. Apparently she burned all her daughter's character sheets.

This was around 1996.

Same. My mom liked to show off how accepting she was to every one else by talking about it, though.

My mom was a volunteer after school bible study teacher for kids and was very involved in her church. Other people had more of a problem with her letting her kids play D&D than she had with us playing it.

She thought the monster art was cool, she still has a print of a red dragon somewhere that I gave her when I was in like Jr High.
She also used to get into arguments with old ladies at her church about letting us play D&D, she'd tell them that a game where kids use math and their imaginations is better for us than tv and video games so why shouldn't she let us play it? Plus we knew the difference between fantasy and reality, unlike some of those people it seemed, so those made up stories about cults and suicides weren't something to worry about with us.

There was a time where she let the priest borrow my PHB for a bit and I got worried he'd do some crazy book burning bullshit and I'd never see it again. Instead he gave it back like a day or two later with a laugh and said people were getting up in arms over nothing, as usual.

Man you're lucky. You should read up on the American Satanic Panic if you want to understand just how bad a lot of us had it. Shit was batshit insane.

Me and my brother started playing with a national system that was heavily influenced by anime, and most illustrations were in that art style or a parody of an anime, so there were no issues there.

When there was a little of panic when a guy killed someone and said it was because of a ritual of one of the Vampire books my mother just asked us if what the guy said had any basis in reality and when we said no she proceeded to calm down the lady that used to clean our house.

Our dad just said that as long we were not rotting our brains with tv or playing any more of those videogames with church music (Final Fantasy) everything was ok.

Never with RPGs, the only problem I had was when I started going to play Magic at a local store I had my grandfather call me because my mom had told him that we were playing cards at some store and he thought we were betting in poker and he had all this thing about how we should get out of it while we hadn't lost anything and how he had a friend who lost his house playing poker.

That's kind of sweet.

I'm from the Satanic Panic, started playing in 81. My book sets were burned three different times by overzealous Christian family members between 81 and 91, each time costing me several hundreds of dollars (the last one was estimated at ~2000). At one time my dad had two Reader's Digests, one from the 70s and one from the 80s, where they go from 'Roleplaying is the greatest psych breakthrough ever!' to 'Holy shit its all Satanists' and (swear to God) it actually said you could play skeletons and get xp for raping npc's (how does a skelly rape literally anything?).

Yah, my family is nuckin' futs.

All I remember is my mom nagging me to focus on my studies and not get addicted to games. My dad thought it was cool.

I grew up in a Jewish family and they didn't care, but my aunt was worried because she said she heard that it was satanic and teach you how to do satanic stuff.

The weird part about that is in Jewish tradition the devil isn't the same as in Christianity, so the claims D&D would teach you to cast real spells, summon demons, and bend reality were a Christian concept of 'evil' rather than the Jewish concept of 'doing bad things and giving into temptation'

What's the Jewish concept of satan and demons like?
I thought Solomon had 72 of the bastards

He's still evil, but he isn't directly opposed to God because there's at least a few stories where God and Satan have a back an forth, he mostly works to temp and lead people astray, and test the faith of others.

Satan is more about getting people to turn away from God or have them give into their temptations, but things like possession, magical spells, and other mysticism stuff weren't the devils forte like it is in christian teachings.

Younger players or people who didn't play in the 80s and early 90s don't know how good they have it. Gamers today at worst have to deal with being called a nerd or neckbeard, back then being outed as a tabletop gamer got people ostracized by entire communities as an animal sacrificing child murderer.

My mother was completely swayed by the Satanic Panic. She made me feel terrible about playing D&D. She told me she was so worried and so upset about it that I took all the books and burned them in the backyard. When I told her I had done it, she said, "I want you to understand that this was your own idea and I didn't manipulate you into doing it."

I bought the old books again a few years ago, to kind of psychologically "undo" what had been done to me years ago. I read through them and fell in love all over again. I now realize that I was being severely manipulated and as a result it is very hard for me to trust people, especially my DM.

And the demons?

nvm
Read the wiki, didn't know it was so recent, and another solomon I guess

Honestly, that's just cute.

My mom once bought these little baby figures and said they were for D&D. Like.. they were about the size of a miniature... except crawling babies. So of course they were way too big- they were like dire babies.

My mom was worried when I first told her I had played D&D at a friend's house. She was asking all kinds of questions like, "Did they light candles. Was anyone wearing crystals? At what level do you become the dungeon master?" Had to hide my D&D books after she went through my Forgotten Realms book, found an entry on the Cult of the Dragon and threw it away.

She also thought MTG and the Pokemon TCG were some kind of Satanic plot.

And when I borrowed my friend's Eddie Izzard DVD she threw it away because she saw him in drag on the cover and thought it was some kind of trannie porn.

She thought my Gorillaz CD had secret satanic messages in it.

She was really just scared for me. She was a black lady who grew up in rural Mississippi in the 60's and 70's. In stark contrast, I was your stereotypical teenage nerd- i.e. "acted white". My interests, my sense of humor, my ideas on religion... She had very little frame of reference for any of it, making it all weird and scary for her. She assumed that I was crazy and liable to fall into some cult or extreme alternative lifestyle and leave her and the family behind.

My dad (same background) was at least happy that I was smart and never got picked on/ He did at one point tell me that he thought I should make myself like sports and rap in order to better fit in and to never call myself a nerd though.

Pretty sure they both thought I was gay too as I didn't really start dating seriously until college or get married until I was 25.

But they always told me they loved me no matter what and they did indulge my love of science.

Both have gotten a lot better. They see that I've become a functioning adult who isn't an asshole, didn't run off to join some cult, and I tend to know my shit.

They also both went back to college in Texas-
as opposed to the original all black aggie Mississippi college they went to. I hate to sound like a cliche, but it really did expand their horizons.

>mid to late 90s
>parents chill af
>always get to watch The Labyrinth, The Dark Crystal, etc related
>teenage cousin slaughters me in HeroQuest many times
>at relatively young age get to watch basically any fantasy movie I want, gore, nudity, doesn't matter, very comfy
>Baldurs Gate comes out and blows my fucking middle school mind
>finally make my way to ttrpg in mid 20s and will never look back
best timeline. my parents made me keep up appearances but were total open minded hippies

>how does a skelly rape literally anything?
With his boner?

They found it a bit dorky but we were a diverse bunch of fellows and my parents liked them.
Also they did see that it renewed my interests in classical literature and myths and it allowed me to be creative.

I shouldn't have laughed at that, but I did.

Plenty of times. It's why the first RPG book I owned was Shadowrun because at least that didn't trigger HURR D&D IS DA DEBIL

My step mother made a comment that D&D was training me to kill, but not that it was necessarily evil. That one time was the only thing she's ever said on the subject and the only time I've ever heard her say something so ridiculous. I'm choosing to believe it was some kind of temporary madness.

My parents were both neo-pagans and active role-playing gamers when I was a kid, so that was never really a concern for me. Actually, I think they might've encouraged the 'evil' aspects of the game more than anything else. They always went on about Paladins being a cheesy class, how they didn't like Lawful Good characters, how great Drow Elves were, and so on.

This. The best way to make kids grow up the way you want them to is to give them freedom, but express sincere disappointment without punishment when they do something you don't want, while also being loving otherwise.

Without the allure of rebellion, they'll quickly fall in line.

My parents had an odd mix of indulging RP for "imagination and friends" and worrying that I was in a cult. Yeah, listening to metal and being a general 90s goth didn't help. But sweet Jane if I had to hear my mother tell me that I had lost my distinction between fantasy and reality one more time I was going to die.

No Mom, for real, I know dragons don't exist and I can't actually cast spells, it's just infinitely easier to talk in first person when discussing the game on the phone with friends so you don't have to say "And then I pretended that myy character...." every sentence, ok?

2e Monster Manual a best man.

What's up elegan/tg/ent with dark skin? I was starting to think we were all whitey here.

It's weird. I was sent to a Christian elementary school when I was a kid. but aside from some of the bullshit that was said in religion class (for example: Noah's ark had been found, but it was on a mountain in Iran, and they wouldn't let us get near it), it was actually a pretty good school. Additionally, we had to go to Sunday School every weekend, pray before every meal and so forth, but god was almost never a topic of conversation, and our lives were otherwise pretty areligious. And I remember when The Day After (a nuclear war flick) was coming on network TV and our church was warning people it wasn't Christian because of how graphic it was or some shit (which was weird, because our church was normally like that, from what I remember), my dad didn't say anything, but watched it in our family room while we were around. And yet, Fox News has now turned him into a "war on Christmas" "Christians are being persecuted in the US" "Obama is a secret Muslim trying to undermine the religious foundations of America" kind of guy.

Anyway, the point of all of this is that D&D was never an issue with my family, despite living in the bible belt during the satanic craze. And it's not like they decide it was okay or anything; it never even came up. My family is a weird combination of open-mindedness and closed-mindedness. Sadly, the older they get, the more they (particularly my father) tend towards the latter.

Yes, they heard the word of steve jackson (pbuh)

Oh geeze. My mom bought into the whole "Satanic Panic" hook, line, and sinker.
Evil was lurking everywhere. In books, on TV, in music, at the movies, and at the core of it all? Dungeons and Dragons, a game that robbed innocent teens of their will to act on their own volition and drove them to suicide after making dark pacts with the devil.
So I played at my friends' houses. I read books at the library- yes, the public library had a set of AD&D 2e books! Found the local game store, and took my steps into a larger world. Hell, I escaped from a church youth summer camp to make my way to a place I'd read about in White Dwarf nearby, and I was accepted like an old friend, even though I'd never been there before, because I had a valuable talent: I knew how to GM 2nd edition Shadowrun.
Never could make her understand that it was all in my own mind, and that I learned more about life, leadership, right and wrong, and who I really was as a person from Role Playing Games then I did from years of early morning scripture study, bible school, and church every Sunday. At church I was an outcast. In the basement or around a table at an all-night diner, I was a king with paper and dice.

I'm curious why weren't any of these people who burned books locked up for severe mental illness?

I can totally see the dong, OP

>burn DnD books
>you son become gender queer
A Just Punishment.

Because nobody calls the police on them.

I thought Satan was always a tempter sent by God

>Tfw had atheist parents
They were commie fucks but at least I could play RPGs

The difference between people who are really in to Jesus when people who are in Davidian-esque cults is negligible

My dad was a grognard. Playing DnD since childhood. My mom thought like everything my father and I enjoyed, it was stupid and pointless. She freaked out when my dad bought me the 3rd edition basic rules as a set. Few months later she got a bug up her ass about it because of a fox news story and said that playing it would make me an isolated Satanist that would never find a girlfriend. Ignoring that her husband played for 15 years. She threw out all my books in a rage one day. I snuck out that night and dug them out of the trash and hid them in my room with the few comic books from my dad that she didn't trash after they got married.

Because a lot of them were also who you would call to report that kind of thing.

Never underestimate the power of the American religious right.

What I'm taking away from this is that I really need to step up my game if I want to mentally scar my kids.

fucking women

>She freaked out when my dad bought me the 3rd edition basic rules as a set.

A broken clock is right twice a day.

Just goes to show: Never stick your dick in crazy.

Are your parents still together? Because that sounds like the exact opposite of a healthy marriage.

>the front cover had the Devil's penis hidden in plain sight. You see she said that the red dragon's wings were in fact legs of an upside-down man and the neck/head of the dragon was the penis
My God, she's right! I can see it too.

>Chaotic evil
>Has a sense of honour

My father converted to a local fundamental protestant church when me and my brother were around 10yo and forced us to go with him.
Then shortly after, he proceeded to force me and my brother into throwing away all our RPG games for PlayStation, then we had to burn all our Stephen King books and RPG books ( including our GURPS ones ), and also throw away our MTG decks and and several of our toys.
The only thing it did was traumatize us.

I hope my dad leaves her when my sister goes to college, but I'm not counting on it. He is a good man, but a weak one. He needs sometime to basically run his life, otherwise he falls apart. We went on a two week vacation and he was lost without us. Forgot to pay bills, missed meals, the house wasn't a mess only because he didn't really do much to mess it up.

Ooof. That sucks, your parents sound a lot like the kind of people who were raised to believe their only value in life was getting married and having kids. Where the men are basically raised to be completely helpless without a wife and the women are raised to believe they have no value as a human except as someone's wife.

My father is a Vicar and an Oxford Theologian and he pretty much showered me with fantasy material from basically as soon as I could read; Moorcock novels, 2000AD, roleplaying games, wargames, etc.

Ha no. My dad was raised by narcissists that valued his older sister more because she married a multimillionaire douche lawyer and bled him for cash and status, and my mom is just a raving bitch that likes control.

My mom empty nested while my sister was on exchange and I'm long out of the house, and within 6 weeks she had a friend 20 years younger than her that she would brag she was like a mother to. "She just needs someone to guide her". Which was code for, "control and manipulate her because she is weak and childlike"

It was my mother who introduced me to tabletop roleplaying games back in the 90ies.

I had no idea that these games even existed, until my mom showed up with a core box set of Das Schwarze Auge 3rd edition. She never played it herself, but she heard about it and thought that it would be something for me.

I can only thank her so much for introducing me to my favorite hobby.

Why aren't these people in mental institutions?

Your dad sounds like Jerry

Basically, but less spineless and cowardly. I've seen him dive in to save a drowning baby, break the windows on a burning car to try and free a man, and stand up for his children when we needed it. He is selfless to a fault, a man with only others in mind.

With the /pol/ invasion people don't like to mention their race

Because in America these people and people like them were the ones in positions of power and influence.

>invasion
That would imply that we haven't always been here

M8 most of this stuff is from the USA
Look at the guy they voted in
He started talking about hot women at a boy scouts jamboree - and has talked about how hot his own daughter is - and his botminded followers lap it up
Look at the westbro baptists - going to people's funerals and shouting at the orphaned kids that their parents are burning in hell
American Christianity is mental - look at Facebook and all the hate filled posters have jesus as their profile picture

>when your parents are edgelords

>Trump
>Christian
To be fair, venture girls at Jambo are pretty hot, and his daughter is pretty hot too.

Nope, I lucked out. My parent's where Christian but not crazy about it. My mom was more worried about my video game addiction than anything else. If anything she encouraged my interest in tabletop games because at least there was some mental exercise and math skills involved.

This might be shocking to you, but there has always been people who hate niggers. /pol/ didn't invent it.

>ITT Americans finally realize religion fucks your brain up

desu Christianity does entail that God is litterally in everything good. It's only creepy if you see God as having the mindset of a human, which He doesn't.

>pagan
What do you mean? Did he convert to a polytheist religion because he believed it closer to the truth? Or did he simply proclaimed himself as pagan? If he only decided to be "pagan" just to spite his parents that's some seriously childish bullshit. Though I'd say being gender queer is quite pathetic in itself.

>yes, the public library had a set of AD&D 2e books!

That is so exceedingly rare, even now, that I call bullshit. There was an article I read where some Reddit contributors researched the prevalence of D&D manuals in public libraries in the US and found them to be almost non-existent.

>Just goes to show: Never stick your dick in crazy.

Guys who say that have obviously never experienced just how much fun it is having a mentally ill woman ride you like a jockey in the Canadian Crown.

Even from a Christian standpoint this makes no sense.

AD&D2e predates Reddit by decades

Jewish Satan is basically the equivalent of a police sting operation then?

American "Christianity" and Christianity are more often than not two completely different things.

Looks like your parents are retarded.

I can confirm our local public library certainly had D&D books. They specifically had a couple of class handbooks from 2nd Ed, I borrowed the priest's handbook and never returned it. I still owe them for it to this day.

He didn't say they invented it, he said abnormal scum have been shitting up Veeky Forums with pseudo-political bullshit. It's the same guys that mass-post "Blacked" threads in /b/, in an effort to rile up potential recruits. It's well observed and documented, don't pretend it isn't.

Ummm lots of people abandon their parent's religions when they become teens or young adults. It's just part of the individuation process. People don't convert out of spite, bro.

My parents watched that TV Movie of the Week where Beverly D'Angelo got murdered by two brothers who "lost themselves in the game". I'm glad they never watched that Tom Hanks telemovie where he does the same shit. I copped a lot of flak for playing WoD but D&D was largely viewed as benign. Then again, we were raised Catholic, and that denomination didn't have the same moral panics back then, just a general grumpiness directed at the distractions of the world and continual allegories about the "Prodigal Son" returning from it all when the money ran out.

2e is when executive meddling ruined D&D forever.

It doesn't have anything to with being American. If you played DnD during the middle ages, you would have been burned at the stake. Hell, they're still burning witches in Africa to this day.

Will we have a generation of christian cis-yupies by the 30s?