never forget your roots . . .

classic_roleplaying_illustration.jpg

"Do you play D&D?"

I gasped. According to our ultra-religious school, D&D was Satanic. I looked up for teachers, but none were close to us. A hundred feet away on the playground, another game of dodgeball was underway. I involuntarily flinched when I heard the hollow pang! of the ball as it skipped off the ground.

"You’re going to get in trouble if you get caught with that," I said.

"No, I won’t," he said. "If I just keep it turned upside down, they’ll never see it. So do you play or not?"

"I have the red box set," I said, "and a bunch of characters, but I don’t have anyone to play with."

"That’s Basic," he said. "This is Advanced."

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35 thoughts on “never forget your roots . . .”

  1. Werd, yo! I learned in 5th grade from my neighbor’s son… who learned from his frikken preacher!!! Come on, ppls. Devil worship is cool.
    Now, this is funny….

  3. Funny thing is, I was taught the same stupid things – D&D is satanic and bad – you cannot play it.
    My family (as a child) was ultra religious and therefore I had no one to play D&D with. It wasn’t until High School that I met with some great guys who played D&D and we migrated to GURPS for ease of play. Loved it.
    Today, I play D&D sporadically and way enjoy my WARHAMMER universe (White Dwarf, Warhammer and 40K universe and modeling).
    I am waiting for my son (8) to grow up just another year or so before I introduce him to either WARHAMMER or D&D (or both).
    I love being a geek! (and I am 36 years old also).
    Thanks, Wil.
    Bill Teeple
    San Jose, CA

  4. I’m too old to have memories of D&D as a kid, but I still have game roots. For me, that means the dice game Cosmic Wimpout when I was in college (and avoiding homework). Though the dice only have the traditional 6 sides, there are some mysterious-looking symbols, and a lot of the fun was in “house rules”. And yes, the game is still being produced and played!

  5. My aunt gave me the Red Box when I was a kid, but I didn’t have anyone to play with. But damn, did I enjoy reading the material and imagining what a real game would be like.
    When I finally did join a game (which didn’t happen until college) it was as awesome as I imagined. I’ve been really lucky to have gotten to play with some really talented gamers.
    Clay
    (Also in San Jose, CA)

  8. I started playing at the age of 10. Like so many others it was a neighbour that got me in to it. He was 16 and all of the others in the group were the same age range. Unlike a lot of players though, my family encouraged it.

  9. Ironically, I think it was Easter Weekend the first time I was introduced to Tunnels & Trolls. April 1978. I got my blue box shortly thereafter, and the 1st ed Player’s Handbook was published that summer. Good times.

  10. Funny you should mention D&D. I’m about to head down to the basement (mine, not my mother’s!) to take my seat at the table. For the first time in seven years, I get to be a player since we decided rotate DMs for the H series of modules. We’re starting H2 tonight. May Avandra smile on Higgs the Elusive, bounty hunter extraordinaire!

  11. I started with Palladium (Heroes Unlimited) in 5th grade, then moved to GURPS, Toon, and WoD. My religious parents kept me from really playing AD&D much (didn’t want to get busted in with it). Not like that helped. My mom went through my gaming books, highlighted everything that was “an affront to God,” and lectured me just before throwing it all away. That did it. I grew a pair and played AD&D just long enough to “understand” THAC0 before they changed to 3rd ed.
    It’s so great not to live with the parents so that I don’t have to hide my books anymore.

  12. Yeah, my family thought D&D was Satanic and I couldn’t play it.
    I’m an adult now… and I’m playing tonight. I play every weekend. 🙂 Go ahead and give me the Nerd Queen of the year award.

  14. I too remember hearing the hollow pang of that damned ball and did what the other kids did to hide from that evil ball. We hid in and around the large tractor tires built into the play ground which were meant to be played on. At my school the tires were our sanctuary. My first taste of gaming however came when a couple of guys I knew were playing Gamma World. It was not long after and it was D&D and GURPS all the way, with the occasional sprinkling of Heroes Unlimited thrown in. Rifts and Car Wars also crept in from time to time as well. As for the religious aspects of it all; I knew a few people growing up that had issues with that stigma but my parents were cool, they were happy I was reading and doing math even if it was only doing THACO calculus.

  15. I was kind of annoyed by the people who insisted that AD&D was somehow superior to D&D.
    In fifth grade our lawnmower man saw me reading D&D books and told my mom it was satanic. She asked me if it was and I told her ‘no’ and that was the end of that.

  16. Personally, I thank Tom Hanks for getting me into D&D.
    The summer before I began High School, the movie ‘Mazes and Monsters’ was on TV. I had never heard of role-playing games before, and was fascinated by the notion of this game where you could act out fantasy characters.
    True, the movie was totally about getting kids to NOT play these games. I also know that, like myself, it introduced a whole lot of kids TO the games.
    Shortly after watching the movie (which Hanks was in, hence my opening statement), grade X began, and during the morning announcements, the formation of a D&D club was, er, announced. I went that lunch hour to check it out, told my parents about it that evening, and, by the time my birthday rolled around, my dad had bought me the red box Basic set.
    I still have most of the dice from that set. The white crayon is long gone, and I eventually filled in the numbers in silver paint. I don’t know what happened to the books and the game box itself, but I did recently purchase one of the game books from that set (as well as one of the books from the ‘Expert’ set) to go in my collection of 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 3.5 AD&D/D&D stuff.
    And I just began playing ‘D&D Tiny Adventures’ on Facebook. Everyone feel the wrath of CRUSHER HEARTSTOMPER, half-elf Paladin, yo!

  18. Hey Wil, all — I was really happy to see Wil spinning tales about Car Wars recently. Among many other table top games, I really enjoyed playing Car Wars during the 80s.
    I haven’t picked pen and paper gaming back up since the halcyon days, but I have participated in a few Play by Email Autoduels. There are a couple of PBEM Car Wars groups with recent activity; one of the strongest is headed up by Jimmy Anderson over at the Madhatter’s Inn, home of the AADA chapter of the Midsouth Auto Duelist & Handgunners Attack Team:
    http://www.cwhnj.com/madhat/carwars/default.htm
    Car Wars’ turn based system lends itself better to PBEM than most games; I talked to Jimmy earlier today and he’d be happy to have you all cruise over for a look at his archive of PBEM Autoduels for your edification and to stoke the embers of old school Autodueling.
    If enough of you twisted his arm you *might* tear him away from Darkwind long enough to referee an Autoduel for you, but watch out! Among the rusty vets (like myself) and the host of greenhorn duellists trying to make their mark, there be dragons thar!
    Lesser known heavyweights and at least one bonafide AADA World Champion (John Blaylock of SHAAG — Southern Hitmen Autoduel Assassin’s Guild, 2049-50 AADA World Champ) are known to buckle up and test their chops in the arena.
    Drive Offensively and make sure ur Gold Cross premiums are right up to date!
    PS: I’d also like to thank Tom Hanks, tho Mazes and Monsters wasn’t his peak of awesomeness, lol.

  19. Didn’t have anyone to play D&D with in high school, but made up for it in the Air Force. *Many* nights playing 2nd Edition on duty at our help desk!
    Just getting back into it now. Had our first 4th Edition session tonight, actually:
    http://www.flickr.com/photos/phraktyl/2874900608/
    Which reminds me, there’s a Flickr group for Wil’s books in the wild; why isn’t there one for his shirts?

  20. Satanic? I guess I’ve heard some people try to make that stick before, but it always struck me about as nonsensical as saying the whole “play the record backwards thing.” (not on the ones which were clearly done backwards, and here I’m thinking of that classic album, “The Great White North” with Bob and Doug Mackenzie.
    I wished I’d had the box when I was a kid. I just had to wait for my friends to devote a weekend to playing a campaign and invite me over (queue up the melancholy violin…)
    I never saw any box, red or otherwise.
    FWIW, I’d much rather encourage my kids to play that than to play any MMPORG I can think of.

  21. I played D&D a few times between grade and high school (1975-1983), but I was never any good at it.
    I believe it was because I never asked enough questions.
    Apparently, it wasn’t enough for me to ask the DM if there was light in the room because he created a 30-foot pit right inside the entrance that I didn’t think about until it was too late.
    I also played Gamma World once and did well with that because the other players couldn’t make it to the game meeting after lunch on the day the story was scheduled to end. I cleaned up.
    I met a guy in grade school (and we were still classmates through high school) who said his parents told him that using a Ouija Board was bad (they were Jehovah’s Witnesses), but he himself not only played D&D, he was the DM for that one time I played Gamma World.
    I also played some kind of RPG that used comic-book characters. I didn’t do well in that one, either, but that could’ve been the result of some bad throws.
    There was one comment from the DM (again, this same friend of mine) about our merry band of comic-book misfits and how in comic-book reality, there’s no way these four particular superheroes would ever spend any time fighting any bad guys together.
    RPG Snobs.
    I suppose another odd thing is that I used to work at Wizards of the Coast (1999-2001) and in a box somewhere, I still have a hardcover copy of the 3rd Edition of D&D — and I still haven’t played since the early 80s.
    And that hollow “pang” still makes me flinch when I hear it. I didn’t avoid “Dodgeball” because Ben Stiller was in it. I avoided it because it was about dodgeball.

  23. I actually started with Chainmail, then graduated to the Red and Blue Boxes… haven’t played since high school, when my friends moved on to other games (like Robotech, pfui) and left me behind.

  24. My first role playing game experience was with the TSR Marvel Super Heroes role playing game. I believe it was a nice yellow compact box, and it always came with us to Boy Scout camp every summer.
    It was at summer camp where I was introduced to GURPS and D&D, which lead to Battletech, Warhammer, Shadowrun, RIFTS, and many others with friends.

  25. It’s funny when people say stuff like “it’s the Devil’s Work” I was introduced to D&D when I was in high school and just thought it was a way of being one of the characters in a story…which it is I guess. But I digress. The point I was trying to make was that I learned from a family that helped bring me back to a church and reaffirm my belief. So, Not only that, but can you really call a game “Evil” that develops creativity and allows people of common interests to come together and enjoy each others company. I don’t think so.
    Rock On!!

  26. It’s kind of ironic that you mentioned D&D on the same day my gaming group and I had our third campaign using 4e. Hubby’s really into Eberron, so he’s trying to fit everything into the Eberron world without having the specific guidebooks handy, yet. So far, so good. It’s also kind of ironic that I grew up in a household (well, at least with a mother) that believed D&D’s a satanic game. That’s part of the reason I never played it until now. I guess my D&D roots will always rest in 4th Edition, then. Sorry to disappoint all of you ultra role players out there!

  27. Actually, I should probably mention that I did play Call of Cthulhu before ever setting foot in Eberron. Talk about totally rebelling against your parents! I bet if my mother knew anything about that game when I was younger, she would have really had a fit!

  28. I never actually was into D&D, but as a (mostly) Catholic Christian, I don’t believe it’s devil worship at all. That said, @mondain, I think you could have stated your atheistic views in a less offensive, more mature way. Some of us do believe there is a God and a devil. Please don’t effectively call us idiots for our beliefs.
    -Alicia
    [email protected]
    http://www.thewagband.com

  29. The picture of the blog post sketching out D&D Dungeons reminds me of when I worked at a consulting engineering firm in the mid-90s and we created our DOOM levels in CAD (MicroStation, and then saved to DXF) to pull into the DOOM WAD Creator. Ah, good times.

  31. One summer, 1975 I think, a friend of mine I begged to come up and visit me in the NW MD countryside since I’d moved away the previous fall came up for two weeks. I was playing bored games a lot, like Inventor and Easy Money (a rip off of Monopoly) and asked him what his favorite game was. “Dungeons and Dragons.” He tried to explain it to me using the line from the original manuals – “It’s a game you play with paper and pencil.” Sounded boring to me.
    I convinced him to invite me back for a week to his home inside the DC beltway where I use to live. He had a 6 person game running and allowed me to create a character. I cheated of course and had to make one with an 18 (I’ve since gotten over that problem.) They all laughed when I named my fighter ‘Fellwind’ which I didn’t like. But the playing and moreover, watching their enthusiasm in a dungeon crawl got my interest piqued.
    When I got back, I quickly went out to the local hobby store and picked up the original version (now collectors version) and got lost in the rules. I sorta understood parts but not fully. By the time I got things figured out with the help of some friends, the new “AD&D” started coming out. I picked that up and proceeded to devour the MM, PH and DMG. I bought several modules and soon started my high schools first, and only, D&D club. Several other people were interested and I’m convinced this marked me, incorrectly, as some sort of leader in the teachers eyes.
    There was no preaching about devil worship or other stuff there, much to my surprise as I look back. All the smart kids, even the smart and popular kids, knew D&D to be cool and everyone else thought it was hard and, of course, weird. This was the same school that had briefly outlawed KISS t-shirts because they thought it was a command by the girls wearing it to have guys kiss their breasts! Seriously. Much embarrassment ensued when they figured out it was a rock band.
    But the principle and teachers of the school in otherwise no-where MD were actually quite cool and tolerant. They even got a handle of the burgeoning drug problem (speed and pcp) in the school and managed to keep it small by – get this – EDUCATION! Now, with the huge insurgence of conservative non-morals, I wonder whether they would be so tolerant. A girl I had a crush on back then for instance, wasn’t even allowed to dance because it was Satan’s work. I hope she escaped her childhood unscathed and that her parent’s ilk didn’t take over the school board.
    Go BHS Warriors!

  33. Hey, I went to that school. I’m still pissed off that my mom and dad never let me play. I never even knew anyone who played ’til I was out of high school. Damn it!

  34. Dude! I rolled a natural 20 to Save vs. Panicky Parents! \m/
    When I got into RPGs, Mom and Dad decided that knowing I was spending evenings with real friends, doing something that didn’t hurt anybody, SOBER, was the trifecta of parenting a teenager, and they rolled with it.

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