Over on the 80's thread, there's been an interesting dichotomy between people who laugh at the Anti-D&D Satanic Panic crowd and people who claim to have had real traumatic experiences as a result of the panic.

I will state my biases up front: I'm extremely skeptical of the second.  The worst story I've ever heard of is someone whose parents threw out their D&D manuals.  Which, on the scale of bad things that can happen to a teenager, is rather closer to the "Mooo-OOO-om, you're ruining my liiife!" end of the scale.

I also grew up in an extremely secular town in an extremely secular country, about as far from the Bible Belt as you can get and still be on the same continent.

So I'm prepared to be enlightened.  If you were gaming during the Satanic Panic, what was the worst thing that happened to you personally?

I grew up in a very republican Roman Catholic house.

In the early 80s, my aunt bought me a couple modules, and for the entire decade that I was a kid, my parents never had a problem with me and my brother playing.

Honestly, since we were so poor, my mom probably thought, "I could pay $9 for this book that they'll spend forever playing with, or $12 for the new GI Joe/Star Wars toy that they'll only play with for the first few months.

Not at all. I'm too old for that shit. In the eighties I was in my twenties and living on my own. Even if I had been younger though, it wouldn't have affected me. I live in Boston, not in Jeesus Country.

-clash

It's something i've heard a few American forumites talk about. That's it.

Pretty seriously but only in insanity-by-association.  I've mentioned before how the group of gamers I knew when I was a kid were all a bunch of psychos; this worried my parents more than what I might do did.

But the net result was the same.

I was nicknamed "Devil Worshipper" in 7th grade by a bunch of football and hockey jocks in my science class.  Three of them died later that year when they all got drunk and they crashed on a mountain road.  Coincidence?

Let's see.

I had my books -- which wasn't a 'couple of books', but rather a large collection of books and Dragon magazines sufficient to fill about half a cedar chest -- burned.  Then it was okay to play again...then they had to be burned again.  Then it was okay to play again...then they had to be burned again.  Three frickin' times, the last one around '87 or so.  Nothing worse than Christians who just can't decide how Christian they need to be.

That was probably the worst part overall.  There was also the inevitable 'talks' from 'authority figures' who just wanted to keep us safe, parents telling you how much of a horrible problem child you were (while everyone else was out getting pukingly drunk, smoking bowls, and worse (from a parents perspective)), and so on.  

See, if you were growing up in it it wasn't just the 'big' things that were the worst.  It was the little nattering things that add up over time.  The whispers, the taunting, the shunning, the things your scared parents yelled at you that they forgot 20 seconds later but you can, on a bad night, still hear years later.  At least that's how it was for me.  Of course...I live in the Bible Belt.

Quote from: KenHR;649552I was nicknamed "Devil Worshipper" in 7th grade by a bunch of football and hockey jocks in my science class.  Three of them died later that year when they all got drunk and they crashed on a mountain road.  Coincidence?

Depends if the 4th turned into a newt.

I wasn't even alive back then, nor has this trend spread outside of US (with an exception of an outrage in Poland over In Nomine Magna Veritatis).

Quote from: CerilianSeeming;649554See, if you were growing up in it it wasn't just the 'big' things that were the worst.  It was the little nattering things that add up over time.  The whispers, the taunting, the shunning, the things your scared parents yelled at you that they forgot 20 seconds later but you can, on a bad night, still hear years later.  At least that's how it was for me.  Of course...I live in the Bible Belt.

That's a great summary of what it was like for me, though my father was more of the "I think this game is taking away your social life" type of nagger.  (A game played with a group of people is anti-social?  But then, he only saw me prepping crap at home, we played at Matt's or Adrian's or EJ's place.)

And I live in the librul Northeast.

I was a kid in the 80s, and the late 80s is when I started gaming.

The satanic panic didn't affect me positively or negatively except I had to deal with a lot of idiots claiming they had the "first edition where you REALLY can summon demons!!!" ugh. I didn't play DnD (or any fantasy game) back then because I thought wizards and elves and halflings were beyond lame. I thought it was more funny than anything that adults could seriously get bent out of shape about that crap.

My parents are very conservative, but they didn't really mind that my brother and I played games. As long as we weren't doing drugs and knocking up chicks, they were cool with whatever. We would have massive multiplayer games of Battletech on our basement ping pong table, and big groups playing TMNT over at the house. I was very shy back then, so my parents were happy I had a bunch of friends over.

Quote from: CerilianSeeming;649554Let's see.See, if you were growing up in it it wasn't just the 'big' things that were the worst.  It was the little nattering things that add up over time.  The whispers, the taunting, the shunning, the things your scared parents yelled at you that they forgot 20 seconds later but you can, on a bad night, still hear years later.  At least that's how it was for me.  Of course...I live in the Bible Belt.

I suspect that had little to do with roleplaying games, and a great deal to do with you being geeky. In other words, if you hadn't been a gamer, the same people would have made the same fun of you for something else.

Quote from: flyingmice;649549Not at all. I'm too old for that shit. In the eighties I was in my twenties and living on my own. Even if I had been younger though, it wouldn't have affected me. I live in Boston, not in Jeesus Country.

That may be a big factor in the different experiences. I was in my 20s in the '80s, too, and it just didn't affect me much. I think there were some weird reactions back in the '70s when I was living in Oklahoma, but I don't recall much about that, so they must have been pretty low key.

I do remember laughing pretty hard in the '80s when Pat Robertson announced on the 700 Club that some kids playing D&D pretended to summon a demon in the game, only The! Demon! Really! Appeared!

Here in beautiful, sunny southern California, I found the whole thing to be hysterically funny. (Note, southern California is, in many ways, socially liberal on the surface. But dig too deep, and it's far less so. And I live Behing The Orange Curtain, which is to say, Orange County, which is very conservative by southgern California standards).

At one point, our gaming club talked to the Orange Police Department about some kids who were appparently - we were told, but the OPD cops were idiots - breaking in to houses to play D&D. We assured them that if someone tried to talk us in to that, they would be nearly wrapped up, with a bow, by the time the cops responded to our 911 call. OPD were, as noted, idiots.

I also talked to a reporter for the Anaheim Bulletin, a local weekly fishwrap at the time. Briefly, because I wouldn't give her any salacious crap for her article. The finished article talked about gamemasters shooting fire out of their fingers[1], miniatures that scream as they melt if you throw them in a fire[2], and summoning corporeal demons in pentagrams drawn on naked women's stomachs.[3] It was not talking about the hysterica, it was presenting these as actual events recounted to the reporter. In short, deliberate fabrication for purposes of selling ads[4].

[1]I believe that was fabricated out of a comment someobdy made about .38 caliber pencil flares

[2]Thow my miniatures in a fire, and there'll be some screaming, all right, but it won't be the lead.

[3]My first though, and I think I even said it, was "If you put a bunch of gaming geeks in a room with a naked woman, nobody would be able to concentrate well enough to perform the ritual right."

[4]Not my first experience with the press, but that's a long and completely non-gaming related story. There were no surprises.

Quote from: taustin;649559I suspect that had little to do with roleplaying games, and a great deal to do with you being geeky. In other words, if you hadn't been a gamer, the same people would have made the same fun of you for something else.

Well, maybe.  There's really no way of going back now and finding out.  I was pretty darn well-liked until about '84-'85, when the local churches really began to hammer on the topic.

Of course, in hindsight its kind-of fun to listen to someone tell me maybe I was too geeky in a place where the highlight of the weekend was hitting the one arcade and the most popular high-school hangout was an empty parking lot next to a mom-and-pop grocery store that held a whole 12 cars.  My whole county was 'geeky'.

In the Eighties I played AD&D with a bunch of my friends from our church group.

In other words, not at all.