TheRPGSite

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'. :p

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

In other words, not at all.

My parents threw out our D&D collection --they said they were going to burn it but decided the trash would do-- in '83.  This was after they'd heard from their friends how bad and Satanic D&D was, and as they weren't sure about that, they decided to contact the in-law of my aunt's.  After a long discussion one afternoon, they decided that I was trying to learn real magic, so they firmly believed from that point onward that anything with the name "role playing" was Satanic.

Given that Cincinnati is just across the river from the Creation Museum (yes, it actually exists), I'd say we're on the Northern edge of the Bible Belt.  Still, there were quite a lot of people in Catholic Cincinnati who truly believed in the whole Pat Robertson thing, hook, line, and sinker.  I had to really fast talk my parents into letting me keep my Rush cassette collection, because they blew a gasket when they saw the covers to 2112 and Hemispheres.  And while they were fine with reading Lord of the Rings, MERP was out of the question because "it was role playing".  Never mind that actors role play for a living, to their mind it was different than "role playing".

That mindset is indicative of a lot of the crap that I and some of my friends got for playing RPGs.  That actors do the same thing, only without dice, is completely ignored.  The people involved have a very narrow view of things, and their reaction to being challenged with things such as logic are a covering of the ears and yelling "go away!"

The one big takeaway from my time in Satan's Hell was that I became very distrustful of any organized religion.  "Tipper Gore" is still a dirty word to me, particularly when people who have no interest in either listening to the music or playing the games try to "save" me by banning them.

I believe my mom's opinion was that if the fundies hated it, it had to be a good idea.

I first learned about D&D at JewCamp, here in Southern California.  It was a 1 week camp, and the kids in my cabin were playing it, and I was entranced.  Lots of Jewish kids played it, and parents encouraged it as a game involving math, history, reading, and imagination.  They probably thought it was good for honing our future SAT-taking skills.

I did have a friend who wrote a paper on the benefits of D&D for educational purposes, for his Catholic School.  He both got a decent grade, and his mother got a talking-to about the undesirability of said game.

And finally, though this is not related in any way to the Satanic Panic, I had an Asian friend whose mother assigned playing D&D as homework for him.  Seriously, she heard on the radio, or read in a paper, or something like that, that Asian kids had a hard time adapting to life in America, and that lack of imagination was the greatest source of this discomfort.  And then she heard or read somewhere else that D&D was a game that fostered imagination.  So she insisted her kid go find a group to play the game with, bought him the books, and he then sought me out for a game because he saw me with the books at school.

I was pretty incredulous about this, that his mother assigned D&D as homework.  I went home and asked why my mother didn't count my playing D&D as doing homework, and I think she told me to go wash the dishes as a response.

That's about it.

In grade 8, my friend's mom handed him a cassette tape her minister had given her about the dangers of Dungeons and Dragons. We all listened to it together before one of our sessions and had a good laugh. I don't think we played at that guy's house again, but that was the extent of the backlash.

Not at all. Actually got my first set of dice from my grandma at Easter.

Quote from: daniel_ream;649545Over 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 have to admit I was a bit surprised by the reaction as well. It seems like an overeaction to me. I think perhaps people could be lumping in other childhood traumas with the satanic panic. It is also possible they are thinking of a seperate satanic panic that wasnt about D&D but did actually traumatize people. A little foggy on it, but seem to rememebr there was a wierd craze in the states when I was a kid where people were getting prosecuted for being in satanic cults that practiced child abuse and sacrifice-----but the evidence was all pulled from "supressed memories" of victims who were likely being manipulated by sketchy counselors.

I lived in a very religious area of the country during the Satanic panic and had just started gaming. Basically for me it meant I wasnt allowed to buy D&D books or play D&D. But this was pretty easy to work around. I just played at my friend's house. I also had a bunch of my heavy metal tapes taken away by my parents. It honestly wasnt that terrible. No worse than not being allowed to eat sweets or snacks. And it isnt like my parents were mean or evil about it, they just bought into rumors that D&D was linked to satanism, drugs, and suicide. At my church there was a crusade by some members against movies like willow (which my parents didnt buy into). We were a religious household and in that context, I understand the concern. Basically it was viewed as an unwholesome activity. They were good parents and it was one questionable judgement they made in a period swimming ith misinformation about the hobby. So I cant imagine allowing something that minor to carry over to this day, or to claim it traumatized me.

When we moved back to the east coast I eventually convinced my mother D&D wasn't satanic.

My mom got it worse than I did. She had to deal with the church ladies panicking about how I was worshiping Satan. The nosy bitches targeted several moms and claimed some success in getting books destroyed. My mom was a choice target because at the Catholic school, I was a vocal D&Der, metal fan and horror movie junkie.

My mom just figured I was like her father. My grandfather was a crazy Mary worshiper and collected images of "Mary vs. Satan", he loved Wagner and loved old horror movies. Apparently, Jesus' mom had a thing for long, hard snakes.

Of course, I did everything I could to make things more difficult for my mom so when one of the Moral Majority Moms would ask me about Satan, I would proudly profess all sorts of Chick tract nonsense and then see how long it took for Mom to ask me if I said some crazy stuff yet again.

I fully admit that I got off on the fear that D&D produced in these people.

So it never affected my gaming, but we had several kids in our gaming club who could not keep their books at home. They needed their friends to cover for them and keep their books and dice. It was odd, it was okay for them to be "at the mall" for 6 hours on a Friday night, so that was our cover.

This was in the Bay Area.

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?

Note to self: never anger KenHR. (Not without checking my brakes afterwards, at any rate.)

For my part: I was 7 when the 80s finished so I was a wee bit too young to have been impacted. I had friends who had very Christian parents who didn't give much of a fuck about their RPG habit. For my part, I had a secular upbringing in a family which had given up religion some generations back so it was never a factor. I know one guy who wasn't allowed to get D&D books because his mother was upset about D&D... so he got the Advanced Fighting Fantasy RPG instead. (I guess that's a happy side effect of most anti-D&D protesters having no clue that D&D was one example of a whole class of game - my friend's mother thought D&D specifically was bad but was unconcerned about RPGs ad a category.)

Quote from: CerilianSeeming;649554Let'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.

I gotta say, after the first time (let alone the second) I'd have just hidden the books/left them at a friend's place. Burn me once, shame on you...?

Quote from: taustin;649561Here 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).


.

I lived in Vista, which is south of you I believe, and this was very much my experience. You hear california and you think liberal, but our community was quite conservative and deeply religious. Even the local episcopal church was right wing. There was also a lot of racism and anti-semitism in that area at the time (don't know if it has gotten better since i left).

The whole rumor about people taking PCP and fighting in the sewers when they played D&D was relayed to me by my mother, who heard it from a church friend (the priest's daughter) who swore her sister's son died because of the game. It was just in the air or something.

I had three or four friend problems over it. One was my best friend, but once his parents found out about the RPGs, he was forbidden to speak to me.

Not a huge impact, but certainly not nonexistent.

It could have been worse, folks (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/real_story/4602302.stm).

QuoteIn 1990, families on a council estate in north Manchester woke up to every parent's worst nightmare. With no warning, police and social workers had come to take their children.

Sixteen youngsters from the Langley estate near Rochdale were taken in to care - for what was to be a total of 34 years and four months. It was alleged they had been forced into devil worship and sexually abused.

At the time, there was a steady stream of newspaper stories based on rumours of secret satanic abuse taking place in Britain. But, after a year long investigation, the Rochdale parents were proved to be completely innocent.

I'm not going to point a quivering finger at religion here, fucked up people will do fucked up things. Such is life.

My folks were 50s rock'n'roll fans, they knew what a crock of shit Satanic Panic is. I grew up in the town next to the OP's, religion played no part in my upbringing.

I had two friends who had to quit our gaming club because their parents believed we were all going to sacrifice to Lucifer or commit mass suicide or something.  (One of them was the son of a baptist minister; I remember his dad also Invoking the Wrath of The Lord on the movie, "Footloose.")

Another friend's parents made him cut the magic circle, pentagram, and thaumaturgic triangle pictures out of his Dungeon Masters Guide.  There were three holes in that page.  Cracked me up every time I saw it.

I also recall attending a showing of a movie called "Revival of Evil" during school (this was a private school).  I remember it because it mentioned D&D and multiple rock groups that I listened to (and still do, for that matter).

My mom exhibited some concern ("This is just a big game, right?" kind of questions), but it was offset by my dad, who thought the panic was ridiculous.  

That was about the extent of my exposure to the panic.

Quote from: CerilianSeeming;649563Well, 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'. :p

I went to high school in rural Missouri. My whole county was drunk. And inbred.

At middle school, we had a young lady whose father was a Baptist Minister come over to us every time we played and told us we were going to burn in Hell.

At home, my Dad thought that my interest in RPGs was equal to his boyhood interest in pulp stories of WW1 fighter aces. Mom, however, was a different story, she insisted that I was going to Meet A Bad End In Life by playing RPGs and wished I would get rid of them. The only time she relented was when I would show her equations from Traveller and tell her it was helping me with my math and science. It still didn't stop her because when I joined the Navy and was away at Basic Training, she tossed out all my RPGs - which I didn't find out about until I came home on leave.

It is kind of funny, because when Mom died and we were cleaning up the house afterward, I found out that she was such a packrat that she saved all of my homework from school. Mixed in with that were some of my old notes from D&D and Traveller during middle school. Like a time capsule.

Today, mainly because I live in the "Buckle of the Bible Belt", I still hear from Babtist fanatics that RPGs are evil and will ruin my life.

Quote from: The Traveller;649601It could have been worse, folks (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/real_story/4602302.stm).

I'm not going to point a quivering finger at religion here, fucked up people will do fucked up things. Such is life.

I hope the council and workers responsible for this get their socks sued off them.

Quote from: Rincewind1;649614I hope the council and workers responsible for this get their socks sued off them.

QuoteRochdale Council said it did apologise at the time of these cases and has criticised the making of the television programme.

Social workers Jill France and Susan Hammersley both continue to work in child protection.

There was a court gagging order on the victims too. Not to downplay anyone else's problems of course.

Quote from: Philotomy Jurament;649610I also recall attending a showing of a movie called "Revival of Evil" during school (this was a private school).  I remember it because it mentioned D&D and multiple rock groups that I listened to (and still do, for that matter).

Haha -- found it on youtube:
http://youtu.be/__nMG8CuOe8

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;649589I lived in Vista, which is south of you I believe,

Little bit.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;649589and this was very much my experience. You hear california and you think liberal, but our community was quite conservative and deeply religious. Even the local episcopal church was right wing. There was also a lot of racism and anti-semitism in that area at the time (don't know if it has gotten better since i left).

Some of the less densely packed part of San Diego county are positively wingnutty these days. The more urban parts are so jaded by ComicCon that geeky is viewed more as a cash cow than anything else. A study a couple of years ago indicated that ComicCon brought over $120 million in to the local economy (and only coverd people who had hotel rooms), so it's pretty geek friendly for the most part.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;649589The whole rumor about people taking PCP and fighting in the sewers when they played D&D was relayed to me by my mother, who heard it from a church friend (the priest's daughter) who swore her sister's son died because of the game. It was just in the air or something.

So it was your mom's priests'daughter's sister's son, eh? Yeah, that's a reliable source.

I had the advantage of being a legal adult when that really started (just finishing high school when the kid from Wisconson(?) disappeared). Plus, of course, my father was so batshit crazy that I looked normal by comparison anyway.

Quote from: The Traveller;649601It could have been worse, folks (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/real_story/4602302.stm).

I'm not going to point a quivering finger at religion here, fucked up people will do fucked up things. Such is life.

That's not fucked up religion so much as fucked up people getting hysterical of "protect the children." Go look up McMartin Preschool some time. There were people looking for the "secret tunnels" when they torn the building down a decade later. (And there was the woman in South Carolina who had her kid taken away for "firing babies into outer space" - I shit you not, though that was overturned on appeal.) Far as I know, there was no religious zealotry involved in McMartin at all. Only stupid, malicious prosecutors.

Quote from: taustin;649619Some of the less densely packed part of San Diego county are positively wingnutty these days. The more urban parts are so jaded by ComicCon that geeky is viewed more as a cash cow than anything else. A study a couple of years ago indicated that ComicCon brought over $120 million in to the local economy (and only coverd people who had hotel rooms), so it's pretty geek friendly for the most part.

That's how Indy views GenCon:  less of a bunch of weirdos and more of a cash cow.

Quote from: flyerfan1991;649621That's how Indy views GenCon:  less of a bunch of weirdos and more of a cash cow.

And as with ComicCon, they do so rightly. Jocks grow up to be midlevel managers, with a decent income because they know the right people. Geeks grow up to be Bill Gates and Larry Page.

Quote from: taustin;649620That's not fucked up religion so much as fucked up people getting hysterical of "protect the children."

Yes, that's what I said. Any excuse will do for some people. Maybe strength in numbers is the lesson here, those kids hadn't justice till the BBC took up their cause.

Quote from: taustin;649623And as with ComicCon, they do so rightly. Jocks grow up to be midlevel managers, with a decent income because they know the right people. Geeks grow up to be Bill Gates and Larry Page.

Or worse, jocks grow up to be in sales, the bane of other departments.

Quote from: taustin;649623And as with ComicCon, they do so rightly. Jocks grow up to be midlevel managers, with a decent income because they know the right people. Geeks grow up to be Bill Gates and Larry Page.

Not really.  One in a million geeks grow up to be Bill Gates.  Most grow up in dead end jobs bitching about how "the man" is holding them down on forums like RPG.net  ;)

Quote from: flyerfan1991;649627Or worse, jocks grow up to be in sales, the bane of other departments.

But, ultimately, working for geeks who make orders of magnitude more money.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;649631Not really.  One in a million geeks grow up to be Bill Gates.  Most grow up in dead end jobs bitching about how "the man" is holding them down on forums like RPG.net  ;)

Heh. And most jocks grow up to be alcholic womanizers with shrewish wives until they become family anihilators. I've seen movies, too.

I suppose circumstance favored me. I grew up and played during the "Satanic Panic". My friends I played with parents were not religious at all. My family was but we are presbyterians which I like to describe as the relaxed christians. (I know accepting people that dont care about your faith, race, or (other thing inserted here) weird I know.:) There was some hub-bub around me (As I lived just south west of MSU, where the whole would be steam tunnel thing should have went down.)  But it never effected me. My family has always been smart and understanding. I suppose I've been fortunate

Well-meaning parishioners would try to warn my mother about my D&D habit, saying: "Don't you know what he might be up to?"

My mother would reply: "Apparently D&D is all about sitting at your parents' dining room table and drawing lots of maps on graph paper. So we're fine with it."

Note that said dining room table was in the church manse: my father was a Presbyterian minister. The only thing I was ever asked to do with all my gaming and fantasy stuff was hide my Gor covers and my copy of Eldritch Wizardry when my grandmother was around.

My mom once asked about if the stuff she heard in the '80s about D&D was true when she found out I was interested in gaming. She literally knew nothing about it and didn't jump to any conclusions. I said no, and she never brought it up again. The fact that I actually became more devout and more conservative over the following years may have put any nagging doubts(assuming she even had any) to rest.

And one time in school I remember a fellow student claiming that any kind of playing pretend was wrong when the subject of RPGs came up. Not satanic or demonic or anything. Just wrong. He didn't even think it was okay to act or play video games. That was just weird.

Other than that, I've lived in the Bible belt most of my life, gone to a Christian private school for a number of years, attended Baptist, Lutheran, and Presbyterian churches, and I never heard anything negative about role playing. Other than that one weird anti-any-and-all-pretend thing above, that is. To this day, I wouldn't even have known this was a thing if it wasn't for The Big Purple.

It affected us very slightly.

One set of my grandparents were very religious & didn't like the game so we weren't supposed to play it at her house when there on holidays.

My parents heard "the panic" off her probably and just asked us about the game (we strongly defended it as educational with all the math, reading & history), they flipped through the rulebooks and said, "cool, carry on".

That was about the extent of my contact with it down in my corner of Oz. Religion in general is not as pervasive a part of society in Oz as America generally so there was less "hysteria" )if you can even call it that).

Quote from: Sacrosanct;649631Not really.  One in a million geeks grow up to be Bill Gates.  Most grow up in dead end jobs bitching about how "the man" is holding them down on forums like RPG.net  ;)

I don't believe in bitching about work in a public forum.  That's just an invitation to problems back at the office.

Quote from: taustin;649646But, ultimately, working for geeks who make orders of magnitude more money.

Unfortunately, the geeks who "make it" are a lot fewer in number than the rest of us.

Wait, I'm a geek who makes money in sales.  Ah, shit, I knew I was doing this thing all fucking wrong.

Quote from: KenHR;649668Wait, I'm a geek who makes money in sales.  Ah, shit, I knew I was doing this thing all fucking wrong.

As long as you don't overpromise and then go back to the development staff and say "Can we do this?", you're okay.

Quote from: taustin;649647Heh. And most jocks grow up to be alcholic womanizers with shrewish wives until they become family anihilators. I've seen movies, too.

?  I'm not sure what the movies is in reference to.


I know this is just anecdotal, but most management (both upper and lower) peeps I work with (either of people or of projects) are people who have had some sort of athletic background.  Either sports growing up (jocks) or military.  If I were to guess why, it's because the work force is pretty fucking competitive, so those people used to working in a competitive environment with good communication skills do better.  And it's a harsh reality that the better you look attractively, it works in your favor.  That's just basic human biases at work there.  People with an athletic background tend to be in better shape than your average nerd.

Again, just anecdotal, but I've worked in corporate management myself for over a decade and it seems pretty clear to me.

I made the reference to TBP because soooo many posters over there bitch and moan about not getting a fair shake, but at the same time not doing the things to give you a better shot.  It's like they feel entitled to a job, when the reality is that you're not.  You have to earn it and show why you're better than the dozens of other people wanting it.

Basically it reminds me of my old friend Robert.  We were all geeks, and he decided as a kid to grow his hair out really long and never wear anything more fancy than stained jeans and t-shirts.  And he would bitch incessantly about how it wasn't fair that he couldn't get a good job.

I am not sure how much my input counts as I was not alive during the actual Satanic Panic but in my neck of the wood I don't know that it ever actually ended. My mother remembered a lot of the bullshit that was going around at that time and adding that to the fact that it involved magic which was a dirty word in my house growing up and I was never allowed any where near D&D.

I got caught playing it one time when I was 15 with a few close friends and got a serious talking to about the dangers of demonic influences in our lives. The funny thing is that she worked at a facility for troubled youth and saw the worst shape kids could end up in and heard horror stories of what teens can get up to. I always found that odd as we were well supervised and having good clean fun but it was really an issue for her.

When other kids were sneaking around smoking pot, drinking, and what have you, I had to sneak around to play in a D&D campaign. I got into all kinds of dumb shit later on in my teens but never felt like she was half as mad at me for that as she was when she caught me playing D&D.

Now not that I have felt that this had any lasting impact on me as I always did what I wanted anyway I just got slick about it, and now that I am grown and long since out of the house I play regularly. Growing up in the bible belt though this whole "role-playing is one of the many tools of the Devil" attitude is very much alive and well.

Quote from: flyerfan1991;649667Unfortunately, the geeks who "make it" are a lot fewer in number than the rest of us.

In all seriousness, the geekier ones generally do have higher incomes. And since the subject that started this was ComicCon and cash cows, they certainly do spend it when they're treated right.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;649686?  I'm not sure what the movies is in reference to.

I thought we were talking about movie stereotypes.

It affected me not at all, since I live in a country which is stupid, but not crazy.

Well, except about fucking sport.

The 'Satanic Panic' (this really should be the name of an Alice Cooper cover band) didn't really effect me much. I was already such an outsider in school that my involvement in RPGs was kind of shrugged off as just one more oddity. I had a couple of friends who had to stash their gaming gear at my house, along with their metal albums or they would get burned by their baptist or pentecostal parents. My school was surprisingly low key about the whole thing and even allowed us to form a D&D club which met regularly and was in the annual.

I'm sure the people who were jackasses to me in school would have been jackasses to me no matter what and that's okay, it's not like I've seen any of them since I graduated anyway.

Quote from: taustin;649561miniatures that scream as they melt if you throw them in a fire[2]

That is pretty damn cool.

Quote from: flyerfan1991;649678As long as you don't overpromise and then go back to the development staff and say "Can we do this?", you're okay.

Nah, I work in a pretty tightly regulated industry (business insurance) and have to do a lot of support and account management after a sale, so I'd only be making it hard on myself if I did that.

Didn't affect the D&D stuff at all.  But I think it's because mom was feeling guilty about throwing away all my comic books 6 years earlier.

My father bought into the panic thing enough that for the first few years I played, I had to leave my rpg materials at a friends house. I also once loaned a couple of modules to a guy from school, whose mother then proceeded to find them and throw them away.

My uncle was into supers rpg's, but thought D&D was of the devil. Because, his preacher told him so, or something.

That's it. I never even heard of anyone else who met with any difficulties, whatsoever. I grew up in Mobile, Alabama and AD&D was popular as all hell! There were gaming groups all over the place and the mainstream bookstores were full of TSR & Iron Crown product. You had to go to a local hobby shop to get Chaosium stuff, though.

It always mildly terrifies me how many Americans think that magic and demons are a real actual thing which you have to protect yourself from through rigid, unyielding thought control and that the whole world is a conspiracy to break that thought control and destroy your children.

I mean, we have people over here who believe in that stuff but they don't seem quite as widespread.

Quote from: Warthur;649782It always mildly terrifies me how many Americans think that magic and demons are a real actual thing which you have to protect yourself from through rigid, unyielding thought control and that the whole world is a conspiracy to break that thought control and destroy your children.

I mean, we have people over here who believe in that stuff but they don't seem quite as widespread.

Always worthwhile to point out where that is, if it isn't obvious from your avatar.

I wish I could say I lived somewhere that this kind of thinking is rare. Unfortunately I am surrounded by people who think the Devil is around every corner yet are perfectly ok sleeping around, drinking constantly, and ranting about the evils of minorities. I live in a rural area at the moment though, things are not near as bad near the capital and the college towns.

Quote from: zarathustra;649785Always worthwhile to point out where that is, if it isn't obvious from your avatar.

It's pretty obvious that he's in Brutal country, near the vortex. You know, over there.

On the topic, in about '85 a straight laced classmate approached me at the FLGS near the D&D boxed sets, and asked me "Do you really have to worship the devil to win this game?"  I gave him an earnest adolescent explanation.  The last time I saw this guy, a few years later, he was into 40k Rogue Trader, and looked like a glue-sniffing gutter punk.

Quote from: TAFMSV;649797It's pretty obvious that he's in Brutal country, near the vortex. You know, over there.

On the topic, in about '85 a straight laced classmate approached me at the FLGS near the D&D boxed sets, and asked me "Do you really have to worship the devil to win this game?"  I gave him an earnest adolescent explanation.  The last time I saw this guy, a few years later, he was into 40k Rogue Trader, and looked like a glue-sniffing gutter punk.

So... you think he maybe won...

Quote from: Warthur;649782It always mildly terrifies me how many Americans think that magic and demons are a real actual thing which you have to protect yourself from through rigid, unyielding thought control and that the whole world is a conspiracy to break that thought control and destroy your children.

I mean, we have people over here who believe in that stuff but they don't seem quite as widespread.

It's clear that people on here pretty much agree that any connection between roleplaying and "satanism" is rather far-fetched, but I'm curious, does anyone here think that anything *can* be "of the devil" and "dabbling with the occult" *is* dangerous?

Quote from: zarathustra;649798So... you think he maybe won...

Hehehehe.

Quote from: HombreLoboDomesticado;649827It's clear that people on here pretty much agree that any connection between roleplaying and "satanism" is rather far-fetched, but I'm curious, does anyone here think that anything *can* be "of the devil" and "dabbling with the occult" *is* dangerous?

Televangelist: These children are playing with dark and dangerous powers!
Deadlock: Of course they're playing with them, what else are they meant to do with them?
(throws beer can at TV)

Quote from: Warthur;649782It always mildly terrifies me how many Americans think that magic and demons are a real actual thing which you have to protect yourself from through rigid, unyielding thought control and that the whole world is a conspiracy to break that thought control and destroy your children.

I mean, we have people over here who believe in that stuff but they don't seem quite as widespread.

America is incredibly vast, diverse, and populated.  You hear about the extremes, not the norms.  This thread for example is asking people to relate their experiences with a specific extreme, which happened for a specific short time frame, around 27 years ago.  Don't forget there is boundless boring normality shaping the forest surrounding these few unusual trees.  Like, for example, this is also the same era in which D&D was flourishing in the U.S., and was seen being played in the movie E.T., one of the largest movies ever.

Quote from: HombreLoboDomesticado;649827It's clear that people on here pretty much agree that any connection between roleplaying and "satanism" is rather far-fetched, but I'm curious, does anyone here think that anything *can* be "of the devil" and "dabbling with the occult" *is* dangerous?

Stupidity is always dangerous to somebody. Usually the idiot.

Quote from: Warthur;649782It always mildly terrifies me how many Americans think that magic and demons are a real actual thing which you have to protect yourself from through rigid, unyielding thought control and that the whole world is a conspiracy to break that thought control and destroy your children.

I mean, we have people over here who believe in that stuff but they don't seem quite as widespread.

Try living here, its heartbreaking at times.

Quote from: Warthur;649782It always mildly terrifies me how many Americans think that magic and demons are a real actual thing which you have to protect yourself from through rigid, unyielding thought control and that the whole world is a conspiracy to break that thought control and destroy your children.

I mean, we have people over here who believe in that stuff but they don't seem quite as widespread.

It doesn't surprise me at all, really.  Then again, I've been surrounded by it as long as I can remember.

It's kind of a weird combination of factors:  distrust of people smarter than you and not like you, the desire for a "simple" explanation of things ("Here's a book, go read it, everything you need to know about life is in there"), and the need to blame someone if something goes wrong.

My parents, for example, long for the 50's back when "things were so nice", to which I've been known to reply "Tell that one to African Americans."  They are both college educated, but tend to believe all of the "this is true--honest!" bullshit e-mails that they come across.  My mom in particular believes to this day that Apollo 13 got back home safe "because everybody was praying for them."  Never mind all that training and all of the engineers/astronauts working their asses off, it was because everybody prayed.  ("And why can't people do that today?" she often finishes.)

It's like listening to a Pro-lifer talk about eliminating abortions, and then in the next breath talk about "how we need to kill every last one of those towel heads".

That a game like D&D were to come along, encourage kids' critical thinking skills, and have pictures of dragons and demons on the covers (trying to tell people "It's an Efreet!" on the DMG cover simply didn't cut it -- they thought an efreet was another name for a demon)....  Well, it was a combustive mix.

Quote from: zarathustra;649785Always worthwhile to point out where that is, if it isn't obvious from your avatar.

The UK.

For me it wasn't the "satanic panic", it was a bunch of pop psychologists from the early 80s who claimed that D&D caused teens to have low self-esteem, have a hard time making friends, and act rebellious. Because my mom was addicted to those trashy pop psych self-help books (and fad diets, but thats a whole 'nother complaint), she became convinced that rpgs were going to cause me serious emotional and mental damage. This was a decision she reached after I'd been playing warhammer with my friends for two years, based solely upon what this author said rather than any actual behavioural changes on my part. But then again, if you look at those list of "symptoms" you'll notice they are pretty much the same as Dr. Wertham's symptoms of a kid who read comic books in the 50s (minus Dr. W's "Where's Waldo"-like ability to read fruedian perversions in ink blotches).

So, for the remainder of my years at home I couldn't keep my rpg books at home, but had to hide them in my school locker. Of course, I ran away from home at 13, so this situation didnt last very long.

I was definitely affected by it, but I think the "Satanism" aspect was secondary. My Mom bought into the idea of it leading to suicide. My Dad, macho man that he was, just thought it was keeping me from going out to get drunk and laid like a "real man" and that I needed to "get my head out of the clouds". They desperately tried to force me into "healthier" hobbies like trading baseball cards. Never mind the fact that I had no interest in such things whatsoever. (And when I say "force", I mean it. They'd actually order me to go to my friend's house and trade baseball cards with him. And he didn't give a damn about baseball cards either.) The fact that RPGs were "Satanic" was just icing on the cake for them.

They ended up throwing my entire collection away when I was 13-14 -- I don't remember exactly. Years later, after they divorced, my Mom became much, much more open-minded and helped me buy back what she'd help throw away. She now reads my reviews, and even bought the RPG in which I'm an NPC (Boomtown Planet).

My Dad is... well, still my Dad. Except that losing his influence over me when I moved out hit him like a thunderclap, and he's been desperate for my approval ever since. Hell, he "Likes" my Facebook announcements of #rpgnet Q&As, even though I know he either has no f'ing idea what I'm talking about or else is "Liking" something he's always despised just to suck up.

Quote from: Warthur;649782It always mildly terrifies me how many Americans think that magic and demons are a real actual thing

Only mildy?

Fortunately, the atheism is on the rise, agnosticism is on the rise and Christian fundamentalism is slowly, but surely, dying away with the old people. In the next 20 years, most of the Religious Right and the Moral Majority will be dead and buried. Even now, they are slipping quickly toward irrelevance in nursing homes.

Quote from: HombreLoboDomesticado;649827does anyone here think that anything *can* be "of the devil" and "dabbling with the occult" *is* dangerous?

Believing any mythology is dangerous.

Quote from: Mistwell;649830Like, for example, this is also the same era in which D&D was flourishing in the U.S., and was seen being played in the movie E.T., one of the largest movies ever.

True dat.

Quote from: Spinachcat;649922Fortunately, the atheism is on the rise, agnosticism is on the rise and Christian fundamentalism is slowly, but surely, dying away with the old people. In the next 20 years, most of the Religious Right and the Moral Majority will be dead and buried. Even now, they are slipping quickly toward irrelevance in nursing homes.

Haven't watched Jesus Camp, have you?

Quote from: CRKrueger;649928Haven't watched Jesus Camp, have you?

You find a movie to be a credible account of reality?

Quote from: CRKrueger;649928Haven't watched Jesus Camp, have you?

I did!

Virtually every boy in Germany 1940 was part of Hitler Youth, but how many still professed to nazism in 1960? Beliefs change once you leave mom's house.

I am heartened by the 2012 election where the Born Agains got behind a Mormon. Imagine that sentence in 1980 or 1992 or even 2000? And more importantly, the rest of the country said NO to "morality" disguised as intolerance for women, gays and minorities.

Gay marriage and marijuana are mainstream. Homophobia and racism are not.

Their version of Jesus has lost the war.

Quote from: Spinachcat;649935I did!

Virtually every boy in Germany 1940 was part of Hitler Youth, but how many still professed to nazism in 1960? Beliefs change once you leave mom's house.

I am heartened by the 2012 election where the Born Agains got behind a Mormon. Imagine that sentence in 1980 or 1992 or even 2000? And more importantly, the rest of the country said NO to "morality" disguised as intolerance for women, gays and minorities.

Gay marriage and marijuana are mainstream. Homophobia and racism are not.

Their version of Jesus has lost the war.

I seriously doubt that the Christian Moral Majority types are going away.  The assumption that these people will merely become irrelevant as time goes on due to demographics is a very dangerous one.  Perhaps this won't be very important in other parts of the country, but fundamentalist Christianity is very much a driving force regionally --particularly in the Plains and Southern states.  The simplicity of their argument --God said so because it's in the Bible-- is what keeps them going.

Just because they got behind a Mormon candidate doesn't mean that they approved of him.  It was more a matter of their desire to defeat Obama that drove them into Romney's camp.

Could we please not let this devolve into a "hurrah for atheism!" thread? I can get enough of that in Tang.

Quote from: Dan Davenport;649938Could we please not let this devolve into a "hurrah for atheism!" thread? I can get enough of that in Tang.

Let's hope the cloud of smug from Clooney's speech does not roll over RPGsite, or we're done.

Quote from: Spinachcat;649935I did!

Virtually every boy in Germany 1940 was part of Hitler Youth, but how many still professed to nazism in 1960? Beliefs change once you leave mom's house.

That was an epically crappy analogy you just made there, mate.  Cause, you know, there might have been an intervening cause there between 1940 and 1960 that might have persuaded folks to not profess nazism.  Yah think?

Sometime around Halloween in 1988 the epic scumdouche, yellow journalist, and general bad human being Geralo Rivera did a prime-time TV special called Exposing Satan's Underground. There were only three TV networks for most rural people back then (Actually, we only got two). It was a big ratings hit.

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMSf4CAEVLU

Pretty hard to take seriously, right? No sane adult could actually swallow this shit, right?

The next day, I went to high school in my very small, mean, and angry little town in a conservative rural area of an otherwise blue state. I would have been 16 or 17. There was a weird silence that morning. A tension to everything. Something had changed, overnight. Imagine being a Muslim in an airport on September 12, 2001 (Yeah, I know all U.S. Airports were closed then, but you get the idea).

The bomb that had dropped was Geraldo's special. It had hit the adult population (or at least a significant minority of them) like a ton a bricks, and a large number of them, apparently, had become convinced by it that there was a Satanic cult right here in Nowheresville, and that it had to be ferreted out and smashed. For the next week there was a period of hysteria where kids were constantly being pulled out of class to the principal's office to be grilled by administration and police about The Cult. "Where does it meet? Do you know anybody in it? etc, etc. Weirdly, even though I was known as a D&D player and horror/gore/metal freak, I was never caught up in the witch-hunt: They only went after "Bad" kids, the ones who smoked, came from broken homes, had been in fights, girls smeared as "Sluts", etc. Adults talked about The Cult as if it was a very real thing that they just needed just a little more evidence to prove. A friend of mine was arrested for underage drinking when a party he was at was raided... because neighbors reported hearing "Chanting". I remember one mean redneck kid (The last person in the world you would ever expect to be a Satanist, although as an adult he was active in the local KKK) talking about how his dad had warned him that if he ever found out that he was involved in The Cult he would beat him into the hospital.

And then after about a week it was over. Thankfully the madness burned itself out before we got a West Memphis Three-like situation or something similar.

So yeah, the 80's "Satanic Panic" was a very real thing. As far as it's actual effect on my role-playing experience, it was a mixed bag: I knew some very religious people that had no problem with D&D, some very religious people who took the weird compromise position that "Some people turn evil/kill themselves from D&D but our group/rules system/club isn't like that", some barely-religious people who were anti-RPGs simply because a popular youth pastor had spoken against them, and even some secular people who were against it because they saw a TV "Expose" where an "Expert" said it made kids kill themselves and they just accepted as gospel whatever they saw on TV (It wasn't just Right-Wing fundies railing against role-playing, I remember the liberal talk show host Phil Donahue having a particularly unfair hatchet-job episode on D&D, which he bashed mainly on the grounds that it was creepy for adults to still be playing games. Apparently if you are over 18, your life should be a joyless slog of unending labor or else you are mentally sick.). My mom had some very conservative Mormon friends who objected on religious grounds but mainly seemed freaked out on political grounds by the fact that the game had no winner (A game without a winner struck them as vaguely hippy-socialist-pinko).

Quote from: Dan Davenport;649938Could we please not let this devolve into a "hurrah for atheism!" thread? I can get enough of that in Tang.

Seconded.

Quote from: Dan Davenport;649938Could we please not let this devolve into a "hurrah for atheism!" thread? I can get enough of that in Tang.

I prefer a "hurrah for Judaism!" thing, we don't have Satanic panics.

Buddhists don't have any sort of panics, even when we should probably be panicking.

Quote from: taustin;649708In all seriousness, the geekier ones generally do have higher incomes.

Have you seen different household income stats from rpg.net than the ones I see? Far better educated and lower paid than the average American. Granted, that's big purple so they're not "real" geeks, but...

Quote from: Just Another Snake Cult;649968Sometime around Halloween in 1988 the epic scumdouche, yellow journalist, and general bad human being Geralo Rivera did a prime-time TV special called Exposing Satan's Underground. There were only three TV networks for most rural people back then (Actually, we only got two). It was a big ratings hit.

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMSf4CAEVLU

Pretty hard to take seriously, right? No sane adult could actually swallow this shit, right?

I remember that show; it came out when I was in college.  I still want to kick Ozzy's ass for being on that damn thing.

Thankfully, I was already away from my parents when that came out, otherwise I'd imagine I'd have woken up the next morning to find a priest in our house ready to perform an exorcism.  

On the college campus I was at, the show was met with either a collective shrug or outright ridicule.  But there were plenty of people outside of college who descended upon it to rail against the "evil in our midst".  The fact that "The Last Temptation of Christ" came out at roughly the same time didn't exactly help, because it stirred up the religiously conservative masses to an extreme degree.

Quote from: econobus;650018Have you seen different household income stats from rpg.net than the ones I see? Far better educated and lower paid than the average American. Granted, that's big purple so they're not "real" geeks, but...

Yeah, I was gonna say.  There are some geeks that make good money, but the large majority I hang out with and meet at various stores and cons don't when compared to other groups I hang out with (I'm also a sports nut).  Especially gamer geeks.  Maybe it's because geeks tend to do liberal arts type of education?  And we all know the job market out there for people with English and Art degrees...

The Panic was real and just provided another quiver in the bow of nutty fundamentalists. With the DnD panic, now they could browbeat and shame not only conventionally rebellious kids for drinking, early sexual activity or the like, but geeky bookish kids as well.

Quote from: flyerfan1991;650022On the college campus I was at, the show was met with either a collective shrug or outright ridicule.  But there were plenty of people outside of college who descended upon it to rail against the "evil in our midst".  The fact that "The Last Temptation of Christ" came out at roughly the same time didn't exactly help, because it stirred up the religiously conservative masses to an extreme degree.

Yes.

For those of you too young to have lived through this, or who were lucky enough to be in liberal, secular parts of the country, there was a vocal minority of the Religious Right in the late 80's who actually fucking believed that : 1) There were entire small towns in the Heartland that had been taken over by Satanic cults, 2) The fact that there was no evidence was evidence in itself, as that just proved that the Satanists were very organized and good at getting rid of evidence (I was told by an adult that most small-town undertakers were Satanists and that they used the crematorium to disposed of sacrificed children), and 3) that lots of troubled people were actually victims of "Satanic Ritual Abuse" and just needed "Recovered Memory Therapy" to help them "remember" it.  The whole thing was often tied in with the then-growing awareness of pedophilia and sexual abuse in really weird ways that probably did a lot to hurt efforts to help real abuse victims.

We had a teacher-led discussion in my high-school Social Studies class about how the First Amendment was outdated and needed to be tossed out because it allowed people to be Satanists. We had a motivational speaker come to our school (A pretty, chipper girl with batshit crazy eyes) to explain how babies made the best sacrifices because they hadn't committed any sins yet and how girls who were babysitting needed to be on guard for the Satanists who are snatching babies ALL THE TIME (Black kittens and white puppies, by the way, were the second-best sacrifices. This was part of a unit on avoiding cults that didn't even mention Scientology, the Moonies, or any other real cult  but rather focused on Satanic cults that didn't even exist). The crusade against gaming was just one part of a larger madness.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;650030Maybe it's because geeks tend to do liberal arts type of education?

I think liberal arts geeks are called 'hipsters', and yes they would correlate with a highly educated low income demographic. Is this what rpgnet is full of?

Quote from: Sacrosanct;650030Yeah, I was gonna say.  There are some geeks that make good money, but the large majority I hang out with and meet at various stores and cons don't when compared to other groups I hang out with (I'm also a sports nut).  Especially gamer geeks.  Maybe it's because geeks tend to do liberal arts type of education?  And we all know the job market out there for people with English and Art degrees...

Yeah. It was gnawing on me so I looked around alexa and the big "geek" sites skew:

1. Younger across the board.
2. Mostly better educated. Dragonsfoot and our own barbarous RPGsite are exceptions.
3. Male, duh. Only Tor.com skews a little female.
4. Childless.
5. White, duh. Remarkably RPGsite has a huge population that identifies "African American" and Tor also skews a little. Dragonsfoot skews hugely "African," perhaps because those wacky tricksters didn't actually understand the question.
6. Poor. Dragonsfoot is practically off the map on households claiming under $30k and even "upper middle class" ($60k+) is almost nonexistent. RPG.net is almost as bad and wizards (which skews youngest) is also looking a li'l malnourished. Other geek sites skew comfortably middle-class but high-income households are still surprisingly rare across the board. We're talking rarer than normal.

People can check it out for themselves by getting an alexa login and (temporarily) installing their toolbar to run the advanced demographics comparisons. I ran Tor.com, io9.com, dragonsfoot.org, rpg.net, enworld.org, wizards.com and of course therpgsite.com.

What does this tell us? Maybe successful geeks grow out of it and stop slamming the sales guys who know how to build relationships and ultimately buy you yachts and samurai swords or whatever.

If I were a fighting man I would speculate that this shows us that the "old school" community (dragonsfoot) is the most alienated from modern upwardly mobile society -- the geekiest and most damaged of all. Whatever they are at big purple is still benighted but not so bad. The 3E brigade (enworld) is pure middle class and that's probably where you find the low-end programmer types who haven't really found $$$ careers yet. And io9 is where all the actually beautiful rich people are.

Quote from: The Traveller;650039I think liberal arts geeks are called 'hipsters', and yes they would correlate with a highly educated low income demographic. Is this what rpgnet is full of?

Spitballing the stats, I'd say rpgnet is full of college students and slackers taking a year (or a decade) off. They are poorer than any of the communities I looked at except for Dragonsfoot, which only skews a tiny bit older than big purple and a lot of its people never seem to go to college at all.

Sadly demographics has not yet caught up to the ever-popular cocktail party icebreaker of wondering what people majored in.

Quote from: econobus;650040Yeah. It was gnawing on me so I looked around alexa and the big "geek" sites skew:

1. Younger across the board.
2. Mostly better educated. Dragonsfoot and our own barbarous RPGsite are exceptions.
3. Male, duh. Only Tor.com skews a little female.
4. Childless.
5. White, duh. Remarkably RPGsite has a huge population that identifies "African American" and Tor also skews a little. Dragonsfoot skews hugely "African," perhaps because those wacky tricksters didn't actually understand the question.
6. Poor. Dragonsfoot is practically off the map on households claiming under $30k and even "upper middle class" ($60k+) is almost nonexistent. RPG.net is almost as bad and wizards (which skews youngest) is also looking a li'l malnourished. Other geek sites skew comfortably middle-class but high-income households are still surprisingly rare across the board. We're talking rarer than normal.

People can check it out for themselves by getting an alexa login and (temporarily) installing their toolbar to run the advanced demographics comparisons. I ran Tor.com, io9.com, dragonsfoot.org, rpg.net, enworld.org, wizards.com and of course therpgsite.com.

What does this tell us? Maybe successful geeks grow out of it and stop slamming the sales guys who know how to build relationships and ultimately buy you yachts and samurai swords or whatever.

I think it depends on the geek.

A lot of geeks I knew in college went on to have respectable IT/science/engineering jobs and move into (eventually) low-middle management.  Other areas they went into were medical, clergy (!), and university professorships.

I didn't know very many geeks in high school --nature of my high school, I believe-- and I never kept up with them afterwards.

One thing I have noticed is that the geeks who have moved into IT and engineering fields --IT especially-- have been slowly crowded out by jocks and more traditional MBA types in those fields.  This has gone on at a steady pace ever since the business majors realized they could make a boatload of cash during the dot-com boom by starting a company and having it bought out.

The flip side of that is that IT departments nowadays are often ruled by MBA penny pinchers who really don't understand the guts of IT but know how to move numbers.

Quote from: Just Another Snake Cult;650037Yes.

For those of you too young to have lived through this, or who were lucky enough to be in liberal, secular parts of the country, there was a vocal minority of the Religious Right in the late 80's who actually fucking believed that : 1) There were entire small towns in the Heartland that had been taken over by Satanic cults, 2) The fact that there was no evidence was evidence in itself, as that just proved that the Satanists were very organized and good at getting rid of evidence (I was told by an adult that most small-town undertakers were Satanists and that they used the crematorium to disposed of sacrificed children), and 3) that lots of troubled people were actually victims of "Satanic Ritual Abuse" and just needed "Recovered Memory Therapy" to help them "remember" it.  The whole thing was often tied in with the then-growing awareness of pedophilia and sexual abuse in really weird ways that probably did a lot to hurt efforts to help real abuse victims.

We had a teacher-led discussion in my high-school Social Studies class about how the First Amendment was outdated and needed to be tossed out because it allowed people to be Satanists. We had a motivational speaker come to our school (A pretty, chipper girl with batshit crazy eyes) to explain how babies made the best sacrifices because they hadn't committed any sins yet and how girls who were babysitting needed to be on guard for the Satanists who are snatching babies ALL THE TIME (Black kittens and white puppies, by the way, were the second-best sacrifices. This was part of a unit on avoiding cults that didn't even mention Scientology, the Moonies, or any other real cult  but rather focused on Satanic cults that didn't even exist). The crusade against gaming was just one part of a larger madness.

This wasn't just limited to the Religious Right, as Catholics had their own conservative groups that believed this stuff as well.  Of course, as JP2's counter movement to Vatican II went on, those people found themselves more and more in positions of power in the Church.

Quote from: flyerfan1991;650043I think it depends on the geek.

Sure. All I know here is how people who click into these sites identify themselves. Larry Ellison or that frat boy running a start-up may be hugely into anime, but most people clicking anime sites seem to be topping out middle class.

Anyway, OP, sure I had my books taken away a few times. Taught me the games come and go, life goes on.

Quote from: econobus;650046Anyway, OP, sure I had my books taken away a few times. Taught me the games come and go, life goes on.

It taught me that "Normal" people can lose all rationality with a change in the cultural breeze, and that a disturbing number of American think that you can't say something on TV unless it's true.

First off I grew up in the UK so this is really outside my experience.

I went to a geekl school, exams top 15% get in, all boys.

We, the gamers, were still the geeks slightly above the aspergers maths kids and the extreme end of the church choir types.
As for work. Obviously being smart is an advantage in work. However, in a population of smart people the ones with social skills float to the top and the ones with social skills that are also athletic win.
Gates, Jobs etc aren't just geeks they are geeks with great social skills.

As for the Santanic panic don't be daft. There was a bit of fuss when we sacrificed those skinny first year kids (7th grade to you fellas) trying to summon Asmodeus but once they worked out it was probably gypsies we were golden (only joking it was Baphomet).

Quote from: econobus;650041Sadly demographics has not yet caught up to the ever-popular cocktail party icebreaker of wondering what people majored in.

Well it would explain a lot of the feckless lit-rage and tribalism you see going on there, being poor is often connected to low self esteem and leads to a desire to identify with a larger group as a replacement.

Quote from: The Traveller;650073Well it would explain a lot of the feckless lit-rage and tribalism you see going on there, being poor is often connected to low self esteem and leads to a desire to identify with a larger group as a replacement.

Sure. One of my "aha" moments was when I realized Myers-Briggs and other personality profile tools skew unusually "introverted" when you only look at a population of self-selected volunteers. Suddenly a "rare" typology that only expresses in 1% of the overall population is coming up 5%, 10% of the time . . . because "introverts" are online and like to take personality tests while the "extroverts" are elsewhere.

Geeks like to dissect and construct tribes. You have more time to dissect and construct when you're not in the scrum of producing and consuming. Class-based systems FTW.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;649997I prefer a "hurrah for Judaism!" thing, we don't have Satanic panics.

No. You have Islamic panics.



(Kidding!! Kidding!! :D )

It was not until years later that I personally encountered representatives of the "Satanic D&D" view.

One reason it was hard to take them at all seriously was that they also thought C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were agents of the Devil.

Another was their belief that sorcery actually works, which I have never encountered in an actual player -- never mind their going to the extent of thinking that if sorcery did work, one could conjure a cup of tea by chanting, "casting time 2 segments, range touch, duration 3 turns...!"

By the time the Satanic panic hit, my parents had already decided that D&D was harmless and I'd already exceeded their highest educational & career expectations.

No big deal.

The far bigger battle (fought a decade earlier) was protecting my comic book collection from mom's need for more storage space. Fortunately, I prevailed, but that was a close one.

Quote from: econobus;650018Have you seen different household income stats from rpg.net than the ones I see? Far better educated and lower paid than the average American. Granted, that's big purple so they're not "real" geeks, but...

Do you really think rpg.net is representative of geeks?

Quote from: Sacrosanct;650030Yeah, I was gonna say.  There are some geeks that make good money, but the large majority I hang out with and meet at various stores and cons don't when compared to other groups I hang out with (I'm also a sports nut).  Especially gamer geeks.  Maybe it's because geeks tend to do liberal arts type of education?  And we all know the job market out there for people with English and Art degrees...

The ones who have time to "hang out" are pretty much going to be the lower income ones. That does not make them representative of geeks in general.

And the stereotypical geek would be after a technical education of some king, not liberal arts.

Your experience does not impress me as at all representative.

Quote from: taustin;650101Do you really think rpg.net is representative of geeks?

Hence the disclaimer. My move. Where are all the high-functioning "real" geeks who bring down mad bank and make those mean old football players work for them? I'll give you Gates and weird old Larry Ellison. I'll even throw in Bill Gross, noted stamp nerd. But who else?

Quote from: econobus;650115Hence the disclaimer. My move. Where are all the high-functioning "real" geeks who bring down mad bank and make those mean old football players work for them? I'll give you Gates and weird old Larry Ellison. I'll even throw in Bill Gross, noted stamp nerd. But who else?

I used to employ a decent sized goup of sales reps before I sold that business, the majority of them were former athletes, the rest were willowy types. Something for everyone. I don't know if I'd be called a geek despite some technical chops and enjoying RPGs though, it's sort of a pejorative term for a fatbeard who sits indoors and I just bought an inflatable kayak to row some distance into the Atlantic and visit misty islands. Gonna be a good summer!

Quote from: The Traveller;650144I used to employ a decent sized goup of sales reps before I sold that business, the majority of them were former athletes, the rest were willowy types. Something for everyone. I don't know if I'd be called a geek despite some technical chops and enjoying RPGs though, it's sort of a pejorative term for a fatbeard who sits indoors and I just bought an inflatable kayak to row some distance into the Atlantic and visit misty islands. Gonna be a good summer!

*sighs*

Guess I need to grow a beard.

Quote from: econobus;650115Hence the disclaimer. My move. Where are all the high-functioning "real" geeks who bring down mad bank and make those mean old football players work for them? I'll give you Gates and weird old Larry Ellison. I'll even throw in Bill Gross, noted stamp nerd. But who else?

Internet forums are representative & important when they fit my views, but unrepresentative and completely dislodged from reality (hah, that foolish Internet!) when they don't, you see.

Quote from: The Traveller;650144I used to employ a decent sized goup of sales reps before I sold that business, the majority of them were former athletes, the rest were willowy types. Something for everyone. I don't know if I'd be called a geek despite some technical chops and enjoying RPGs though, it's sort of a pejorative term for a fatbeard who sits indoors and I just bought an inflatable kayak to row some distance into the Atlantic and visit misty islands. Gonna be a good summer!

Yeah, I feel like I missed a secret memo about which ones are awesome high-tech geeks and which ones are sluggo basement gamers.

But omg, which kayak? This might be the summer we drag our dusty old feathercrafts out of storage.

Quote from: Rincewind1;650148Internet forums are representative & important when they fit my views, but unrepresentative and completely dislodged from reality (hah, that foolish Internet!) when they don't, you see.

I *knew* I missed a memo!

I feel like I'm being bitchy about this but I do simply think the "underwhelming" rpg.net numbers are bittersweet -- if this is a smart boy's hobby, I guess the well-compensated smart boys are not hanging at the big purple, even though the big purple is, like, the biggest game site.

(Weirdly, televisionwithoutpity.com shows up as a lot of young, well-educated, highly compensated *women.* Maybe I should be mouthing off over there instead!)

Quote from: econobus;650154But omg, which kayak? This might be the summer we drag our dusty old feathercrafts out of storage.

The biggest sea eagle explorer (http://www.seaeagle.com/ExplorerKayaks.aspx), I had a squee moment when I came across it since a lot of places around here (https://maps.google.ie/?ll=53.384557,-9.604111&spn=0.353846,1.056747&t=m&z=11) are inaccessable unless you have invested some serious money in marine hardware, and even then you can only get to the oceanic ones. There are lakes up in the mountains that you just cannot get to as well. Unless you have an inflatable kayak you can haul over a few miles with the rest of your kit! I didn't even know they made those until recently.

Quote from: econobus;650157I *knew* I missed a memo!

I feel like I'm being bitchy about this but I do simply think the "underwhelming" rpg.net numbers are bittersweet -- if this is a smart boy's hobby, I guess the well-compensated smart boys are not hanging at the big purple.

(Weirdly, televisionwithoutpity.com shows up as a lot of young, well-educated, highly compensated *women.* Maybe I should be mouthing off over there instead!)

Where are you getting all these stats from anyway?

Quote from: Rincewind1;650160Where are you getting all these stats from anyway?

I got frustrated with the complete absence of good game industry data beyond what Sandy touts in the big purple advertiser kit so I signed up for a free alexa.com account to get access to their "advanced demographics."

Shows how a site's audience compares to the overall Web: more high incomes, more low incomes, more college grads, more women, whatever it happens to be.

All self-reported but good fun. If you find a geek site with a greater-than-normal high-earning population please let me know!

Quote from: The Traveller;650159The biggest sea eagle explorer (http://www.seaeagle.com/ExplorerKayaks.aspx)

WANT!

Quote from: econobus;650163I got frustrated with the complete absence of good game industry data beyond what Sandy touts in the big purple advertiser kit so I signed up for a free alexa.com account to get access to their "advanced demographics."

Shows how a site's audience compares to the overall Web: more high incomes, more low incomes, more college grads, more women, whatever it happens to be.

All self-reported but good fun. If you find a geek site with a greater-than-normal high-earning population please let me know!

Thanks - I didn't know that site existed, and it looks like a useful tool.

Quote from: econobus;650115Hence the disclaimer. My move. Where are all the high-functioning "real" geeks who bring down mad bank and make those mean old football players work for them? I'll give you Gates and weird old Larry Ellison. I'll even throw in Bill Gross, noted stamp nerd. But who else?

What, seriously? There's thousands of very successful geeks.

Quote from: TristramEvans;650167What, seriously? There's thousands of very successful geeks.

Yeah, seriously. When I see claims like

Quote from: taustin;649623And as with ComicCon, they do so rightly. Jocks grow up to be midlevel managers, with a decent income because they know the right people. Geeks grow up to be Bill Gates and Larry Page.

and

Quote from: taustin;649646But, ultimately, working for geeks who make orders of magnitude more money.

and all the data I can find indicate that geek gathering places online have *worse* income demographics than the mundane population at large, I got to ask where the rich geeks are hiding. Maybe the rich ones stop obsessively looking for Star Trek spoilers or bitching about wizards or something. Maybe they only go to places like Forbes.com. Maybe they're too busy with sports and charity mixers and whatever to go online any more.

But in that event, how can I tell them apart from the jocks??

What exactly do we mean by "Geek"? Lately I've heard the word used to describe everyone from Obama to the Columbine killers.

The first time I ever heard the word (late 1970's) was from my grandpa talking about the Depression and it meant:

1) A retarded or mentally ill person used as a sideshow act in a carnival freakshow performing disgusting acts for a crowd in exchange for alcohol or heroin. Gramps saw this in St. Louis once, and decades later it still disturbed him.

When I was in high school (80's) I heard it used to mean:

2) A really messed-up kid, the truly wretchedly ugly or disabled, lower than a "Nerd" in the cruel and rigid teen-age hierarchy.

Then it kinda got toned down into:

3) Any socially-awkward person.

In the past ten years it has been used for:

4) Any fan of science-fiction and/or fantasy.

5) Any academic or scholarly person.  

6) Any expert, on anything ("Politics geek", "Statistics geek"). .

7) Anyone into computers or electronics.

So in three decades we went from "Naked guy smeared with shit and biting the heads off rats in a cage" to Zooey Deschanel.

Quote from: Just Another Snake Cult;650176So in three decades we went from "Naked guy smeared with shit and biting the heads off rats in a cage" to Zooey Deschanel.

We have overcome, gabba gabba!

Quote from: Just Another Snake Cult;650176What So in three decades we went from "Naked guy smeared with shit and biting the heads off rats in a cage" to Zooey Deschanel.

You don't know what she does in her private life.

Quote from: econobus;650172Yeah, seriously. When I see claims like



and



and all the data I can find indicate that geek gathering places online have *worse* income demographics than the mundane population at large, I got to ask where the rich geeks are hiding. Maybe the rich ones stop obsessively looking for Star Trek spoilers or bitching about wizards or something. Maybe they only go to places like Forbes.com. Maybe they're too busy with sports and charity mixers and whatever to go online any more.

But in that event, how can I tell them apart from the jocks??

Well, I think those claims are hyperbolic, but just as much as the claim that geeks tend to have *worse* incomes. Online gathering spots are for the most part, largely populated by teenagers and college kids, and don't represent any real-world demographic. MOST geeks will never set foot on an online rpg forum in their lives. And its easy as pie to find financially successful geeks. Heck, just off the top of my head: Guillermo Del Toro, Joss Wheden, Mila Kunis, Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, Stan Lee, Vin Diesel, Stephen Colbert, Dan Ackroyd, Mila Jojovich, Dolph Lungren, etc etc

Quote from: TristramEvans;650181Well, I think those claims are hyperbolic

You win my Internet right there.

Quote from: TristramEvans;650181MOST geeks will never set foot on an online rpg forum in their lives.

I will accept that not all geeks are gamers.

If I were actually a fighting man (and not some kind of messed-up cleric), I would keep pricking at why online gamer geeks score so demographically badly. Are there higher-class forms of geekery? Io9 does actually skew a tiny bit more "upper middle class" than average. Are all the rich game geeks for some reason off in some 1960s diplomacy zine bubble and not wasting time on big purple? EDIT And despite any list of famous exceptions (you forgot robin williams' warhammer obsession), why can I name forty "jock" CEOs who make more and never touched a dragonbone in their lives?

But who are we fooling, God told me I shouldn't use edged weapons.

Quote from: econobus;650183I will accept that not all geeks are gamers.
QUOTE]

I mean even gamers. Of the several hundred people I've gamed with in the last ten years over several states and in a couple countries, none but 1 I met had ever even heard of the rpgnet forums, and had never posted there, and in my 30 years of gaming I've never met a single person who has been to Gencon besides a shop owner in Oregon. I would say most geeks don't socialize.


OTOH, I think that there's something to be said for the idea that if someone has more money, is financially more successful, they are far less likely to be spending free time arguing with other geeks online.

Quote from: TristramEvans;650188I would say most geeks don't socialize . . . I think that there's something to be said for the idea that if someone has more money, is financially more successful, they are far less likely to be spending free time arguing with other geeks online.

This is the stuff that fascinates me when I should be pumping my deliverables for tomorrow morning. If "the geek" lives in isolation and doesn't check the sites, what is he (?) into? If "the geek" gets rich, does he become more social, less geeky? Is there a transitional stage where the likes of thee and me bicker on?

Quote from: econobus;650192This is the stuff that fascinates me when I should be pumping my deliverables for tomorrow morning. If "the geek" lives in isolation and doesn't check the sites, what is he (?) into? If "the geek" gets rich, does he become more social, less geeky? Is there a transitional stage where the likes of thee and me bicker on?

I dunno. I've never been rich, but I know when I'm poor I spend less time online and more out looking for work. Right now, being financially comfortable, I indulge online interactions mainly because 1) I need some sort of gaming "fix" daily when I can't actually play (I'm not suggesting this is mentally healthy but its a quirk I indulge), 2) I enjoy debating and 3) it gives me something to do while downloading porn.Now, if I had the money to hire someone to provide my porn for me, and I had the freetime due to financial independence to game whenever I liked, I'm not sure how often I'd be on these forums actually. ;)

Quote from: KenHR;650179You don't know what she does in her private life.

I volunteer to find out and report my findings to the commonwealth. :D

OK, I see this discussion falling into the geeks vs jocks fallacy.

Something to remember, to succeed in life, intelligence is not enough. Social skills are very important as well. So are hundreds of other factors. You can't just distill it all down to a pair of very arbitrary definitions and hope to see any kind of clear picture.

Take a "jock" who is successful and remains so, I'd bet they made decent to good grades in school, demonstrating some "geek" habits. Someone who is dumb may fall into success, but they will not be able to hold on to that success for long.

Plus I've met some very stupid geeks. Intelligence is not really a defining factor of people who are into games, comics, toys, sci-fi, or fantasy.

Plus, I played sports. I just don't have any interest in watching other people play sports.

Quote from: Spinachcat;649935I did!

Virtually every boy in Germany 1940 was part of Hitler Youth, but how many still professed to nazism in 1960? Beliefs change once you leave mom's house.

Are you sure that didn't have anything to do with essentially being told to "stop, or else," by the rest of the planet?

If the religious right in the U.S. followed a single charismatic leader who seized power and declared war on the rest of the Earth, then was completely and utterly defeated with the entire industrial base of the U.S. left shattered and in ruins, with the preachings of said leader and his party outlawed while his advisors, lieutenants, and major supporters were publicly hanged... yeah, there probably wouldn't be too many people professing their love 20 years later.

Sure, growing up may have had something to do with it, but I'm pretty sure those other factors contributed significantly.

Quote from: TristramEvans;650201Plus I've met some very stupid geeks. Intelligence is not really a defining factor of people who are into games, comics, toys, sci-fi, or fantasy.

Is it social skills then?

Quote from: TristramEvans;650201Plus, I played sports. I just don't have any interest in watching other people play sports.

Ditto. Track and Kung Fu. Participating is fun, watching is boring as Hell.

Quote from: jeff37923;650203Is it social skills then?

Heh.

I think I would put it as "the choice to reject the pursuit of popularity"

Quote from: TristramEvans;650207Heh.

I think I would put it as "the choice to reject the pursuit of popularity"

I'd put it in a more cynical words of "Being chosen as a bystander in a race for popularity".

Quote from: Rincewind1;650208I'd put it in a more cynical words of "Being chosen as a bystander in a race for popularity".

Eh, I wouldn't want to strip my fellow geeks of the assumption of choice. Anyone can give up all their fun geeky pursuits, hit the gym, and aspire to the brain-dead hell of banal normality, assuming no emotional/mental disorders.

Quote from: jeff37923;650203Is it social skills then?



Ditto. Track and Kung Fu. Participating is fun, watching is boring as Hell.

I'm a huge NBA fan.  And a nerd/geek.  Lots of nerds/geeks watch sports.  There are even stats geeks for sports.  It's a thing.  We have fantasy sports games at EnWorld and CircvsMaximvs.  This idea that RPG players don't like watching sports is a fallacy.  Some do, some do not.

Quote from: TristramEvans;650209Eh, I wouldn't want to strip my fellow geeks of the assumption of choice. Anyone can give up all their fun geeky pursuits, hit the gym, and aspire to the brain-dead hell of banal normality, assuming no emotional/mental disorders.

?

Going to the gym is not in any way related to being a nerd/geek.  You SHOULD be exercising, at least a few times a week, no matter who you are.  Being popular, and social, and in decent shape, is not incompatible with geeky pursuits. Being a geek is pretty "normal" these days.

Quote from: Mistwell;650215?

Going to the gym is not in any way related to being a nerd/geek.

No, its related to being popular. As was the rest of that list.

Quote from: Mistwell;650215?

Going to the gym is not in any way related to being a nerd/geek.  You SHOULD be exercising, at least a few times a week, no matter who you are.  Being popular, and social, and in decent shape, is not incompatible with geeky pursuits. Being a geek is pretty "normal" these days.

It's good for the brain too. I do my best game writing and preparation when I get in plenty of socializing and exercise in a week. Most of my good adventure ideas hit me when I was out runnning.

Quote from: TristramEvans;650217No, its related to being popular. As was the rest of that list.

What?

How is going to the gym, related to being popular?

It's related to not dying early.

Quote from: Mistwell;650220What?

How is going to the gym, related to being popular?

Everyone who goes to the gym is tanned and six-packed don't you know, like everyone who is rich, and they both spend all their time snorting coke off the tits of hookers on yachts instead of posting on the internet. Or some such.

Quote from: The Traveller;650222Everyone who goes to the gym is tanned and six-packed don't you know, like everyone who is rich, and they both spend all their time snorting coke off the tits of hookers on yachts instead of posting on the internet. Or some such.

Damn dude, I gotta go renew my gym membership.  They didn't have those perks when I last went!

Quote from: Mistwell;650229Damn dude, I gotta go renew my gym membership.  They didn't have those perks when I last went!

I guess it depends on your gym.  The one I used to go to was populated with retirees who would watch Fox News while they were on the treadmill and then bitched about how the world was going to hell because the U.S. was going to socialized medicine.

I had to get out of there before my brain exploded.

Now that I hear that there are gyms like Trav's, I see I was going to the wrong gym all along.

:rotfl:
Good luck at finding a gym where people are talking about stuff that won't make your head hurt. Rather than small talk, how much they press and "I'd hit that".

Quote from: Rincewind1;650238:rotfl:
Good luck at finding a gym where people are talking about stuff that won't make your head hurt. Rather than small talk, how much they press and "I'd hit that".

My gym most people are too busy hitting punchbags or trying to work out what on earth the Thai trainer just asked us to do :)
Int eh Comdo gym most of the people are skinny indian kids who really want to get buffed before they go to the pool

Quote from: jibbajibba;650240My gym most people are too busy hitting punchbags or trying to work out what on earth the Thai trainer just asked us to do :)
Int eh Comdo gym most of the people are skinny indian kids who really want to get buffed before they go to the pool

Precisely - you hit the gym because you hate your body and want to make it something less worthy of spite, not because you hope to hear an interpretation on Manifest Destiny. That's why it's a good idea to bring a pal with you.

Meh, I hit the gym after work. There is nobody around at 3am, so I tend to have it all to myself.

This stopped being about rpgs a while ago.

Quote from: Philotomy Jurament;649610I had two friends who had to quit our gaming club because their parents believed we were all going to sacrifice to Lucifer or commit mass suicide or something.  (One of them was the son of a baptist minister; I remember his dad also Invoking the Wrath of The Lord on the movie, "Footloose.")

It seriously amazes me how these people seem to have no self-consciousness of just how absurd they make themselves look.