As an ’80s child reared in the Bible Belt, I had the common fear that tabletop roleplaying games–specifically Dungeons & Dragons–paved a pathway to eternal torment. Fast-forward to the present, and I find myself writing supplements for leaders of such games. What’s more, I see the abundant benefits of playing TTRPGs to be capable of offsetting the alienating effects of social media, phone addiction and political polarization. What caused this about face? I found worth in embracing the boogeyman.
A Brief History of Dungeons & Dragons
Dungeons & Dragons was the brainchild of Gary Gygax, someone who was a huge fan of two things: the super-detailed worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien and tabletop war games. At that time (during the late ‘60s), there were tabletop games in which you could recreate historic battles like Waterloo or Gettysburg. Gygax and his friends thought it would be cool to tie in the fantasy worlds from his bookshelves with the interactive play of war games, and so he created Chainmail, which was somewhat like playing Risk in a medieval setting.
From there, he and his friend, Dave Arneson, got together to tweak the rules, placing more emphasis on individual characters over the battle formations, and Dungeons &Dragons was born (in 1974).
Like Tolkien, Gygax and Arneson wanted their world to be extremely rich. Since players would essentially be creating their own stories as they go, they wanted to offer lots of possibilities for characters, monsters, locations and the like. So along with the game, they created these exhaustive encyclopedias of characters and monsters from ancient mythology, religious texts, and fantasy and sci-fi literature. These companion books gave the person orchestrating each game (usually called the “Dungeon Master” or “Game Master”) great source material from which to craft a group’s imaginative adventures.
As the first modern role-playing game that heavily inspired literally every RPG or fantasy game that came after it, D&D rose quickly in popularity.
The Misleading Catalyst
In 1979, however, an incident was reported that forever changed the perception of the game. A 16-year-old college student named Dallas Egbert went missing in the steam tunnels beneath the school, where he allegedly killed himself while playing a live-action version of Dungeons & Dragons.
Except that’s not what happened at all.
What started as a missing persons case took police to the steam tunnel where they found evidence of a failed suicide attempt but no actual body. During this phase in the search, private investigator William Dear told news reporters that Egbert “probably got carried away while playing a live version of Dungeons & Dragons,” though he wasn’t aware whether Egbert had actually done any live-action roleplaying. The media picked up on Dear’s claim and ran with it.
At that same time, a novelist named Rona Jaffe snagged the story while it was hot, and she fictionalized it into the novel Mazes and Monsters. That novel was quickly adapted into a T.V. movie starring a young Tom Hanks as a guy who essentially “caught schizophrenia” playing a D&D-like game with a friend who killed himself because he “got too caught up in the game.”
Mazes & Monsters was taken as fact by some talking heads in the infancy of 24-hour news, and even though Egbert was later found hiding out at a college friend’s home, the media had already moved on to the next topic, giving the religious right time to pick up where the news left off.
Five years after the incident, Dear published a book (The Dungeon Master) trying to clear up the media misrepresentation of the event along with his inaccurate assumption, but the damage had already been done. D&D was now “linked” to teen suicide.
But psychologists like Armando Simon scrambled to determine an actual link between D&D and suicide. The results not only showed there was no significant correlation between playing D&D and emotional stability, but some researchers discovered the social component of the game actually lowered the suicide rate among players as compared to their non-playing peers.
A Handful of Core Detractors
Another key figure in the D&D rage of the ‘80s was Patricia Pulling, founder of the one-member organization Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons (BADD). In 1982, her son, Irving, committed suicide. She blamed that suicide on a curse she had alleged was placed on his D&D character before his death. None of the other players in Irving’s group made reference to any such curse in police interviews, and her lawsuits against Irving’s high school principal and D&D’s publisher were soon dismissed.
Pulling was the first to make public claims about D&D leading to devil worship, witchcraft, murder, rape, homosexuality, gambling and a variety of other feared outcomes. She took her BADD message to conservative Christian outlets, worked her way into mainstream media and dubbed herself an expert on the harmful effects of the game. She also became a consultant and expert witness in gaming-related lawsuits (though all of them lost in court). As the fervor died down, though, her statements were challenged, revealing misrepresented credentials and tampered newspaper accounts. She died discredited and alone in the ‘90s, and her organization died with her.
Another prominent detractor of D&D was William Schnoebelen, who initially seemed like a valid source when Jack Chick (of the infamous Chick tracts) pitched him as a former witch high priest. During the late ‘70s, Schnoebelen was allegedly approached by “a couple of game writers” (in the town where D&D originated) who asked him for specific authentic rituals. Schnoebelen claimed they wanted to write these spells into the game so they could recruit promising occultists to their nefarious ranks. When Schnoebelen also later pitched himself as a former Satanist, a former Mormon, a former Mason, a former Catholic and a former vampire (who had retractable teeth) for other Chick publications, his validity became not-so-reliable.
By this time, Jerry Falwell’s new Moral Majority was hitting its stride, and aggressive fundamentalists were finding footholds in in moderate Christian groups through fear mongering. Now-notorious fearmonger Pat Robertson hopped on the D&D hysteria and found a receptive audience in his faithful viewers of The 700 Club.
It was Robertson who first popularized the extra-biblical idea that demons dumbly twiddle their thumbs in Hell until accidentally summoned like State Farm agents by unsuspecting D&D players casting spells. Regardless of the player’s intent, the demons had found their hosts, and they were there to wreak havoc on all that the player loved.
The reality, though, is that the spell-casting words and motions in D&D come from the player’s imagination. What they’re given from the game is a name of the spell, plus a description of what it does. It’s their job to cast the spell “Who’s Line Is It Anyway?”-style with words or actions of their choosing. All they’ve got—despite what the Chick tracts claimed—are spell descriptions largely identical to those in Warcraft or other fantasy-based games. Most players simply say, “I cast [insert spell name here],” and move along with the narrative.
The Influence of Dungeons & Dragons
To say D&D has had an effect on gaming is a gross understatement. Its publication is considered the beginning of modern role-playing games. It launched an entire industry of RPGs. Where D&D is linked directly back to Tolkien’s Middle Earth, everything in post-70s fantasy gaming and storytelling is linked back to D&D. Warcraft is essentially a videogame version of Gygax’s Chainmail game, while World of Warcraft is D&D as a videogame. Anything with hit points, leveling-up characters, paladins, rogues, goblins, dwarves, tall/skinny elves… all that comes directly from D&D.
Why TTRPGs?
So, the obvious question to me was, “Why play Dungeons & Dragons? What makes tabletop roleplaying games so special?”
Well, discovering that D&D helped people socially in ways that the now-popular social media can’t, finding out that it has served as a narrative training ground for many acclaimed writers, and discovering personally how D&D-inspired gaming helped my son to break through to some really deep conversations about his personal struggles, I saw tremendous potential.
While my research didn’t come back to reveal D&D as innately evil, it didn’t reveal it as necessarily “good,” either. D&D, like many other formerly decried forms of communication (stage acting, T.V., video games, the Internet, etc.), was revealed to be a tool. And like the best tools, it has the potential for great good when wielded with purpose and responsibility.
In my personal life, I’ve been drawn to the idea of our lives as intentionally mapped-out stories. Playing D&D—with its frequent explorations of good and evil, and its focus on consequence-based actions—fits very nicely within those personal pursuits.
In D&D, the forces of good, when added together, tend to prove themselves stronger than the evil characters. Though there may be powerful evil monsters, their powers are overshadowed by the various good beings in those particular stories. Virtues like trust and cooperation give specific advantages to good characters, though bad characters aren’t always afforded them. Evil actions have game-altering consequences.
Character “Alignments” are another important part of the game (Good, Evil, Neutral, Chaotic and Lawful). This affects how a character should be played, but it also encourages philosophical comparisons to one’s own real-life alignment—how that person got there, and where that person truly wants to be ideologically. In essence, the whole game—like the best stories being told—is an ongoing discussion of the natures of good and evil, and where we find ourselves on that spectrum.
Where nefarious games like Monopoly or Life insinuate that wealth accumulation and materialism are of ultimate import, D&D encourages sharing treasures and using them to aid one’s fellow adventurers or society as a whole.
When sociopath-spawning games like Risk or Chess insinuate that there’s only one winner, and one does so by decimating one’s opponent, D&D pronounces victories when characters from different paths come together to overcome some great evil.
Embracing the Boogeyman
“So, what’s your point?” you may ask.
My point is that my secret, self-righteous judgment of D&D players was wrong. It came from a place of fear, and fear is a quality that’s supposed to be abandoned in my Christian tradition.
I’m sorry to the kids who played Magic: The Gathering in high school that I didn’t have the courage to just say, “Hey, how do you play that game?” and listen. I apologize for every fear-based withdrawal of my compassion toward all those who appeared too different for me to embrace. To the gay kids, to the loners, to the kids whose parents didn’t buy them deodorant–I’m sorry I embraced my own fears instead of you when you needed it most.
At their best, tabletop roleplaying games embrace community, cooperation and togetherness. They challenge us to be our best–to think outside the box when our obstacles appear too great. You may find yourself sitting across the table from someone completely different than you, but that’s the point. This world is filled with a diverse tapestry of people, and the sooner we start embracing the boogeyman, the better off we’ll all be.
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