Wow, blaming D&D really takes me back. Makes me want to put on some acid-washed jeans, listen to some ‘Hall & Oates’, then catch “The A-Team” on the tube.
I mean, its just a game. I used to know a guy who was a fundamentalist Christian-he thought playing D&D was akin to inviting satan into your house.
There’s a fundy school of thought that everything either is on God/Jesus’s side, or is on Satan’s side.
Well, I’m all for the article. We nerds are in dire need of more press treating us like hard cases.
I wish I’d had a bad rep when I was at high school, my life would have been easier and wedgie-free.
Sober I’ll buy. Insisting that all the other D&D players you’ve played with have been clean is less credible. 
I was in a group once that met weekly at a friend’s house. Eventually his neighbors told him how much they admired his faith. Turns out they’d observed young men arriving every week with books under their arms, and concluded that the only thing it could be was Bible study.
Now, I never played D&D, BUT, when I was in high school, most of the things we did involved involved alcohol (which counts as a drug when you’re that age.). If we DID play D&D, we would have been drinking.
Hah! You gotta wonder about how some people’s minds work.
One nutcase reportedly started with D&D then graduated to LARPing with real weapons. He’s currently on death row in New Mexico.
OK, I do remember at least one guy who didn’t believe in bathing very frequently. He was eventually asked to leave the group for that reason, and because he thought that if he kicked in a dollar, that allowed him to eat all of the communally purchased pizza he wanted. Usually he didn’t kick in the dollar, but still wanted at least a couple of slices. So between the stench and and the greediness, social skills were just not his strong point, plus he was a bad player. He was a grad student, still living at home, so his parents had to know about his lack of hygiene at least.
I’d like to invite all the gamers out there to run over to Goblins and enjoy: ht tp://goblins.keenspot.com/d/20050625.html
Don’t forget the Tempts Fate donation comic.
These comics sometimes depict partial nudity and extreme violence, so don’t go if you’re underage or those things upset you. Link has been broken to protect innocent minds.
Well, a guy in the group got himself killed *by another member of our party *(by not caring that the bugbear was in the way, IIRC, when he blasted some fire spell at an encroaching zombie horde, and the bugbear then turned around and got three crits on him in a row), and I was the one who thought to ask the DM if the zombies were moving slowly enough that I could stop to loot his corpse, thereby saving a number of very useful items that he’d been carrying. 
FWIW, though, I won’t ever tank in WoW if I’ve been drinking. However, an MMO can’t make allowances for delayed reaction times the way a real-life DM can.
IMO, without any offense intended to fundamentalists, independent/creative thought. Bible literalism directly contradicts many things that humans have learned about the world through observation and experimentation. If you encourage people to be creative and exercise their minds to imagine other possibilities outside of our own reality, those are muscles they might apply to other things.
In my experience, this is exactly the case. Anything that has that many monsters and that talks about other gods is just an open invitation for Satan to grab hold and get into your heart. I’ve also heard the thing about ‘you shall have no other Gods before me’ when people who play often are putting D&D (or anything else) before God, church, etc.
And that man went on to become…
Cecil Adams.
And *now *you know…
The *rest *of the story!
Every game I’ve ever been part of has been drug and alcohol free. Like Lynn says, I don’t think you’d be making the right choices, drunk or stoned (though a couple of drinks couldn’t hurt!) And besides, that’s a great way to sell it to your parents.
But then I never ever became a big drinker at all so I never incorporated it into any other activity.
Oh, absolutely!
Well, obviously, if they’re kids, they shouldn’t be drinkin’ or druggin’ anyway. I just wanted to point out that there’s nothing that says you can’t (or that people don’t) include various recreational substances, legal or otherwise, in their gaming sessions, assuming they’re of an age to make that decision for themselves.
I remember, just after the big 60 Minutes expose on D&D, my mother wanted to watch us play one night. Just in case we were up to anything nefarious.
She got bored after twenty minutes and went upstairs.
Same here. The only problem we’ve ever had was one person who insisted we call them by their character name outside of the game. We ended up having to ask her to leave. She was more unstable than we were willing to deal with.
Is that when the goat blood came out?
I remember preparing for a game many years ago. The plot revolved around a mystery, and one of the clues the players were to find was an old parchment with various mysterious symbols on it. I actually drew them on a sheet of notebook paper, then burnt the edges of the paper to make it look old.
Proud of my handiwork, I showed it to my roommate, who freaked that we were going to perform Satanic rituals.
I must say, since I’ve hit my 30s, I’ve never *ended *a game as sober as I started. I generally go through at least 1 bottle of red wine a session. More if I’m DMing.
MrDibble, how many of those turn into “ROCKS FALL, EVERYONE DIES”?