Quote from: FingerRod on October 06, 2022, 08:09:52 AM
Back on topic. I don't think for a second WotC is building a VTT hoping it is anything but successful at unseating Roll20. That should be their goal. Competition and innovation in the VTT space is good for all who use those tools (I don't and I hate them). But the lines drawn from dominance in the VTT market to wanting to eliminate house rules (evidence I already asked for from another poster and received nothing back on), while not lacking emotion, are lacking in evidence. The same thing can be said to the claim they want the VTT experience to remove agency at the table or even carry over to home games.

Every product I have ever seen attempts to increase flexibility—start with core rules and add from there. D&D Beyond allows you to create from scratch or edit official monsters, treasure, and magic items. Over the years it has become more flexible, not less. Those are my very real world experiences. The 'OneDnD Agenda' would be a complete departure.

Flexibility & power brings a cost in complexity.

During lockdown I DM'd using Owlbear.Rodeo, which ... gave me a way to share map and tokens, and do some manual visibility-management during play.

For our online 2022 game, one of the people convinced us to try Foundry. It's really powerful - if you have a full implementation of the standard 5e rules (which may require piracy), and are playing by exactly those rules. But for some of my players it's more like playing a video game than playing a tabletop RPG, and for me it more than doubles the amount of work necessary for each week's play, even though we're mostly playing through a WotC-published book rules-as-written.

When I'm planning to use some non-WotC adventures, a number of non-standard monsters & treasures, and just a few variant rules for the next campaign, the burden of campaign prep looks unbearably heavy. So I'm going back to face-to-face or a lightweight VTT like owlbear.rodeo, where I get more flexibility even if there are lower production values.

Quote from: blackstone on October 06, 2022, 11:23:09 AM
Jaeger,

I disagree with your assessment of AD&D back in the 80s. Have lived through that era of the "Satanic Panic", I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that quite a few people saw the game a dangerous, or at least weird.

...and I was ok with that.

because who wants a bunch of mundane types screw up the game and the greater culture that was built around it?

Not me.

For a kid who wasn't the best at sports, who had a knack for history, English lit, and some science-y stuff. A kid who gravitated towards Tolkien, HPL, etc. and enjoyed everything sci-fi like Star Trek, Star Wars, Space 1999, Dr. Who. When I found out there was a GAME that allowed me to create a character and play out exactly those sorts of things, I was hooked.

And when I went to my first convention, I finally saw there was a larger group, a culture, that didn't care what color you were, your religion, or your political beliefs. It was all about geek culture and everything about it, and it was GOOD.

Now? They have it BACKWARDS. They're putting the politics and the political correctness FIRST and saying if you're not they're side of the aisle politically, you are not a gamer.

That is wrong. 100% wrong.

This is why there has to be gatekeepers, and this gate has some easy to follow rules:

1. if you're into geek culture, you're in.
2. keep your politics, religion, and all other real world stuff OUT.
3. have fun.

but we can't have this now. not anymore. so, we have to create a sub-set of a sub-set: the OSR.

and if that's how it going to be, then fine.

Sorry for the rant.

Great assessment of the larger Geek culture, and D&D specifically (but it also applies to the Star Trek conventions and other fandoms of the 80s).  I lived through that era as well.  Geek culture was a "safe space" (I hate that term, but it did feel safe to those of us bullied by the "cool kids" in Junior High and High School), ironically enough, to be yourself and have fun without your religion or politics or sexuality or kink to be an issue.  We just didn't bring up those things, it was considered bad taste to do so and I frankly don't want to hear about it.  I just want to play games, watch SciFi, and have fun.

Now?  The toxic turning everything into the political has made only *ONE* view allowable, all other views verboten.  It both disgusts me and saddens me to have within Geek Culture the near complete takeover (at the corporate level, the holders of the "high ground"...I don't think it's even a majority view) and enforced orthodoxy that zealously punishes the heretics.  It's like an effing cult.

I'd feel this way even if it was a political/philosophical/religious view with which I agreed.  I'm a religious minority where I live, and it would be stupid to have such a ham-fisted smackdown of others with which I disagree, especially if they're in the majority.  But the Woke gate-keepers don't care, aren't smart, and would gladly burn the hobby to the ground and sow it with salt if they deemed it necessary for "justice" (as they see it).  Their battle cry is "We want nothing more than the respect and admiration of people whom we utterly despise."

Quote from: FingerRod on October 06, 2022, 08:09:52 AM
...
In almost all cases when I see you post, my first thought is, oh shit, Jaeger is about to take somebody to school. Your arguments are always well thought out, and I sincerely enjoy reading them. You are one of my favorite posters around here for that very reason. In this case, I simply believe the wording was awkward or just missing clarification. However, if you want to pretend that me and others are dumb or being intentionally obtuse, go ahead.
...

I have purposefully not gone back and edited the post because like I said - I have broken opinions out like that before, and it has not been an issue until now. I make no judgement on why people didn't make the distinction in this case. I fully recognize that written forum posts are an imperfect medium for communication. I certainly have had to read what some have posted twice to get what they were saying.

In 20/20 hindsight would an: "I agree with these sentiments about OneVTT:" preface have made things clearer? Given the responses; evidently yes.

Quote from: Ruprecht on October 06, 2022, 11:27:39 AM
The Satanic Panic influence depended mostly on where you were. In Northern California it was mostly a joke and there were some teachers using role playing games in classrooms. If you were in a more religious area I imagine it was much different.

This was my experience during the "Satanic Panic" as well. And I belong to what is considered to be a very conservative Christian faith. What did the Church have to say about D&D? Absolutely nothing. D&D is the devil literally never came up!

I fully understand that for those who were subject to preachers that got their pastor certificates out of a cereal box, and their sheeple, that things got stupid.

Quote from: blackstone on October 06, 2022, 11:23:09 AM
...
And when I went to my first convention, I finally saw there was a larger group, a culture, that didn't care what color you were, your religion, or your political beliefs. It was all about geek culture and everything about it, and it was GOOD.

Now? They have it BACKWARDS. They're putting the politics and the political correctness FIRST and saying if you're not they're side of the aisle politically, you are not a gamer.
...

That is why that while at first serving to consolidate things under WotC; the OneVTT will ultimately be one of the things that starts to chafe the normie fanbase of D&D.

I believe that come 2024 D&D will get a boost in sales that will be heralded with much fanfare. And that will be the beginning of its entrance into a Dr. WHO situation where there will start to be a measurable decline from its peak.

It is worth noting two things however...

1: It took Dr. WHO Ten Years from its ratings peak to 'go woke go broke', and get to the point that nobody cares about the show anymore.

2: There are aspects of the RPG hobby that make people extremely loyal to particular gaming IP beyond all reason. And as the first RPG, and market leader; D&D will benefit enormously from that effect.

As we saw with 4e, even when WotC basically rogered over half of the fanbase and the Pathfinder RPG started to outsell D&D Tactics. Baizuo still got dumped like a fat chick on prom night the second the 5e Hot chick walked into the room. Everyone just went running back to Daddy WotC begging for more...

Even after 2024 when DnDone enters its post-op stage, it will be very tough for a competitor to break through the D&D juggernaut of the hobby.

Quote from: PulpHerb on October 06, 2022, 12:03:18 PM

Quote from: blackstone on October 06, 2022, 11:23:09 AM
This is why there has to be gatekeepers, and this gate has some easy to follow rules:

1. if you're into geek culture, you're in.
2. keep your politics, religion, and all other real world stuff OUT.
3. have fun.

This...I can't tell you the politics except with one possible exception of anyone I played with prior to the 90s. Part of that was being a "kid" (graduated HS in 1985), but in the 80s I played with mostly adults. Once, exactly one, one made a political comment I remember and that was complaining about someone wanting a book out of schools for being communist for supposedly a kid wearing a red shirt being communist.

Quote from: PulpHerb on October 06, 2022, 12:03:18 PM
While gatekeeping can help, until the poison of "the personal is the political" is replaced with "don't discuss politics or religion" we won't be completely rid of it.

I graduated HS in 1987. I couldn't tell about the politics of fellow players in HS, but I knew the politics of most people I played with in undergrad (1987-1991). That was partly because I hung out with them outside of gaming, but there were signals in gaming as well. In undergrad I played a lot of superhero, modern-day, and near-future games, which had more real-world themes than medieval fantasy.

Overall, I don't feel my gaming today is significantly more or less political than it was for me in undergrad - but society in general and especially online discussion is *much* more political. This forum especially has tons of politics in discussion.

In undergrad, I would discuss politics with my friends, and we could have civil and sometimes interesting debates. I could game with some very conservative players like my friend Robert, and even if our opposed politics were clear, it wasn't game-breaking (though it could cause some tension). These days, I think increased partisanship makes gaming or other socializing with opposed politics much harder.

Quote from: Ruprecht on October 06, 2022, 11:27:39 AM
The Satanic Panic influence depended mostly on where you were. In Northern California it was mostly a joke and there were some teachers using role playing games in classrooms. If you were in a more religious area I imagine it was much different.

Except the areas were not that broad.  In fact, the Satanic Panic very much became--Did you have someone that wanted to go off the deep end, in a position of local power in your immediate vicinity?  Could be a minister.  Could be a school teacher.  Could be some local busybody.  In most areas, it didn't happen.  Now, we'll never know the full extent, because in most places it never came up.  There weren't that many people playing D&D for it to become an issue in the first place. 

I was in the heart of the Bible Belt for the whole span of the panic, and the extent of the push we got was "We heard this thing was a little strange.  But you kids seem alright. What's the deal?"  And we explained it, and that was that.  In the next town over, which was even more prone to straight-laced things than we were, they got the D&D books in the school library--because all the volunteers in the library were into SciFi and Fantasy as well as literature in general.  The next town north of us was too cool to play D&D.  And so it went.

The only real push I ever got was later, after the panic was done (late 90s), from a so called "mainstream" congregation where the minister went off on D&D enough to prompt a friend that went there to ask me about it.  I think this was a guy trying really hard to distract from bigger problem in that congregation. 

The panic was always localized, and anyone that tells you different has an agenda or is deluded.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on October 06, 2022, 03:59:50 PM

Quote from: Ruprecht on October 06, 2022, 11:27:39 AM
The Satanic Panic influence depended mostly on where you were. In Northern California it was mostly a joke and there were some teachers using role playing games in classrooms. If you were in a more religious area I imagine it was much different.

Except the areas were not that broad.  In fact, the Satanic Panic very much became--Did you have someone that wanted to go off the deep end, in a position of local power in your immediate vicinity?  Could be a minister.  Could be a school teacher.  Could be some local busybody.  In most areas, it didn't happen.  Now, we'll never know the full extent, because in most places it never came up.  There weren't that many people playing D&D for it to become an issue in the first place. 

I was in the heart of the Bible Belt for the whole span of the panic, and the extent of the push we got was "We heard this thing was a little strange.  But you kids seem alright. What's the deal?"  And we explained it, and that was that.  In the next town over, which was even more prone to straight-laced things than we were, they got the D&D books in the school library--because all the volunteers in the library were into SciFi and Fantasy as well as literature in general.  The next town north of us was too cool to play D&D.  And so it went.

The only real push I ever got was later, after the panic was done (late 90s), from a so called "mainstream" congregation where the minister went off on D&D enough to prompt a friend that went there to ask me about it.  I think this was a guy trying really hard to distract from bigger problem in that congregation. 

The panic was always localized, and anyone that tells you different has an agenda or is deluded.

There was always a fringe element in the Evangelical/Fundamentalist Churches that tuned into conspiracy theories.  In the 80s and early 90s there was a much larger "Satanic Panic" that encompassed far more than just D&D--there was the sad case of the McMartin Preschool being accused of all sorts of bizarre ritual child abuse.  The Geraldo special in 1988 that seemed to kick off a madness in this subsector of the Church.  It eventually cooled down, though periodically different conspiracy theories arise that take a riff off of this one.  There was a fairly lucrative market in selling books about how pagan culture was "corrupting our youth", with some priceless Jack Chick tracts that focused specifically on D&D as a gateway to the Occult.  And even before Geraldo's special, fraudsters like Mike Warnke made a tidy sum off of selling his supposed satanic background until he was exposed by others in the Church.

But D&D itself was not the main driver of this panic, at least from my memory.  The focus was more on how evil "New Age" teaching was, Neopaganism, and supposed Satanists in high places in Hollywood and the Government (and of course, the Catholic Church in the view of Jack Chick and others on the more Fundy wing of Evangelicalism).  D&D was a mere sideshow in all of this.

Quote from: Osman Gazi on October 06, 2022, 04:17:51 PM

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on October 06, 2022, 03:59:50 PM

Quote from: Ruprecht on October 06, 2022, 11:27:39 AM
The Satanic Panic influence depended mostly on where you were. In Northern California it was mostly a joke and there were some teachers using role playing games in classrooms. If you were in a more religious area I imagine it was much different.

Except the areas were not that broad.  In fact, the Satanic Panic very much became--Did you have someone that wanted to go off the deep end, in a position of local power in your immediate vicinity?  Could be a minister.  Could be a school teacher.  Could be some local busybody.  In most areas, it didn't happen.  Now, we'll never know the full extent, because in most places it never came up.  There weren't that many people playing D&D for it to become an issue in the first place. 

I was in the heart of the Bible Belt for the whole span of the panic, and the extent of the push we got was "We heard this thing was a little strange.  But you kids seem alright. What's the deal?"  And we explained it, and that was that.  In the next town over, which was even more prone to straight-laced things than we were, they got the D&D books in the school library--because all the volunteers in the library were into SciFi and Fantasy as well as literature in general.  The next town north of us was too cool to play D&D.  And so it went.

The only real push I ever got was later, after the panic was done (late 90s), from a so called "mainstream" congregation where the minister went off on D&D enough to prompt a friend that went there to ask me about it.  I think this was a guy trying really hard to distract from bigger problem in that congregation. 

The panic was always localized, and anyone that tells you different has an agenda or is deluded.

There was always a fringe element in the Evangelical/Fundamentalist Churches that tuned into conspiracy theories.  In the 80s and early 90s there was a much larger "Satanic Panic" that encompassed far more than just D&D--there was the sad case of the McMartin Preschool being accused of all sorts of bizarre ritual child abuse.  The Geraldo special in 1988 that seemed to kick off a madness in this subsector of the Church.  It eventually cooled down, though periodically different conspiracy theories arise that take a riff off of this one.  There was a fairly lucrative market in selling books about how pagan culture was "corrupting our youth", with some priceless Jack Chick tracts that focused specifically on D&D as a gateway to the Occult.  And even before Geraldo's special, fraudsters like Mike Warnke made a tidy sum off of selling his supposed satanic background until he was exposed by others in the Church.

But D&D itself was not the main driver of this panic, at least from my memory.  The focus was more on how evil "New Age" teaching was, Neopaganism, and supposed Satanists in high places in Hollywood and the Government (and of course, the Catholic Church in the view of Jack Chick and others on the more Fundy wing of Evangelicalism).  D&D was a mere sideshow in all of this.

And like the Wokism we face today, the Satanic Panic wasn't grassroots; it was astroturfed before that term was coined.

OneD&D will be used as a vehicle for pushing Wokeness in whatever forms Wokeness takes as time goes on, until Wokeness as a whole burns itself out. And like a forest fire, Wokeness will continue to flare in various places even after the main fire is exhausted. RPGs as a whole are likely to be one of those flare points.

Quote from: RandyB on October 06, 2022, 04:28:16 PM

Quote from: Osman Gazi on October 06, 2022, 04:17:51 PM

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on October 06, 2022, 03:59:50 PM

Quote from: Ruprecht on October 06, 2022, 11:27:39 AM
The Satanic Panic influence depended mostly on where you were. In Northern California it was mostly a joke and there were some teachers using role playing games in classrooms. If you were in a more religious area I imagine it was much different.

Except the areas were not that broad.  In fact, the Satanic Panic very much became--Did you have someone that wanted to go off the deep end, in a position of local power in your immediate vicinity?  Could be a minister.  Could be a school teacher.  Could be some local busybody.  In most areas, it didn't happen.  Now, we'll never know the full extent, because in most places it never came up.  There weren't that many people playing D&D for it to become an issue in the first place. 

I was in the heart of the Bible Belt for the whole span of the panic, and the extent of the push we got was "We heard this thing was a little strange.  But you kids seem alright. What's the deal?"  And we explained it, and that was that.  In the next town over, which was even more prone to straight-laced things than we were, they got the D&D books in the school library--because all the volunteers in the library were into SciFi and Fantasy as well as literature in general.  The next town north of us was too cool to play D&D.  And so it went.

The only real push I ever got was later, after the panic was done (late 90s), from a so called "mainstream" congregation where the minister went off on D&D enough to prompt a friend that went there to ask me about it.  I think this was a guy trying really hard to distract from bigger problem in that congregation. 

The panic was always localized, and anyone that tells you different has an agenda or is deluded.

There was always a fringe element in the Evangelical/Fundamentalist Churches that tuned into conspiracy theories.  In the 80s and early 90s there was a much larger "Satanic Panic" that encompassed far more than just D&D--there was the sad case of the McMartin Preschool being accused of all sorts of bizarre ritual child abuse.  The Geraldo special in 1988 that seemed to kick off a madness in this subsector of the Church.  It eventually cooled down, though periodically different conspiracy theories arise that take a riff off of this one.  There was a fairly lucrative market in selling books about how pagan culture was "corrupting our youth", with some priceless Jack Chick tracts that focused specifically on D&D as a gateway to the Occult.  And even before Geraldo's special, fraudsters like Mike Warnke made a tidy sum off of selling his supposed satanic background until he was exposed by others in the Church.

But D&D itself was not the main driver of this panic, at least from my memory.  The focus was more on how evil "New Age" teaching was, Neopaganism, and supposed Satanists in high places in Hollywood and the Government (and of course, the Catholic Church in the view of Jack Chick and others on the more Fundy wing of Evangelicalism).  D&D was a mere sideshow in all of this.

And like the Wokism we face today, the Satanic Panic wasn't grassroots; it was astroturfed before that term was coined.

OneD&D will be used as a vehicle for pushing Wokeness in whatever forms Wokeness takes as time goes on, until Wokeness as a whole burns itself out. And like a forest fire, Wokeness will continue to flare in various places even after the main fire is exhausted. RPGs as a whole are likely to be one of those flare points.

It was a tiny little slice of people, only some of whom were fundamentalists Christians.  And rather shady examples of that.  Yeah, the wokeness parallel is apt.  It was driven in part by news people who selectively interviewed and promoted the craziest fundamentalists that they could find.  Point being, the vast majority of fundamentalists Christians had no opinion on D&D whatsoever.  It wasn't even on their radar. The same way that the Catholic Church had the occasional priest that would get bent out of shape over D&D, but it was the exception.  You also have to remember, that unlike the Catholic Church and several other denominations, most fundamentalists faiths are not organized in a hierarchy.  Even the Southern Baptist Convention is a a relatively loose thing with very little to say on local church actions.  Which means if the Bible Belt, where you've got a Baptist church on almost every other corner, usually down the road from three different Pentecostal ones.  If one of them goes wacky, there's no bishop to slap them down hard or to tell them to stop giving interviews to the local gossip rag.

More broadly, though, and this also relates to the wokeness parallel:  Think of all the busybodies you have ever known.  What do they have in common?  They are going to find something to poke.  The cunning ones are usually pretty adept at using proto Alinsky tactics, even if they've never heard of such a thing.  It comes natural.  Which means they find something where they think they can cause maximum trouble, and go with that.  Guess what, that means if the D&D in the area is a small group of social outcasts that dress and act strange, and there are no other more convenient targets, they'll go after them.  How they go after them will also vary, from the typical jocks/popular crowd doing the usual thing to the librarian getting them ostracized to whatever.  If there is a more viable target, they won't give the D&D kids even look.  Note that "more viable" can be because the D&D kids have one kid that can push back.  Or it can be because there is another target with a more promising payoff.  No point in chasing the already ostracized kids when you can bring out a scandal on someone previously untouched.

Billy Graham preached against D&D. I remember my grandmother talking about him warning his congregation about it.

Quote from: FingerRod on October 06, 2022, 08:27:58 PM
Billy Graham preached against D&D. I remember my grandmother talking about him warning his congregation about it.

That makes sense. The whole "D&D is the devil" part of the satanic panic was a grift from the beginning.

Quote from: blackstone on October 06, 2022, 11:23:09 AM
but we can't have this now. not anymore. so, we have to create a sub-set of a sub-set: the OSR.

I agree with everything except this. Thanks to the "One True Wayist" tendencies of many of the OSR's promoters, the OSR brand is considered rather toxic in my area (politically very conservative... many of our Democrats are to the right of most East Coast Republicans).

I, for one, have zero interest in any editions of D&D save the one despised by the entire OSR community (and late-edition 3.5e with all the WotC late game supplements allowed; core-only 3.5 sucks). I barely escaped the actual toxic old school AD&D back in the day with my interest in rpgs intact (I will forever be thankful to Kevin Seimbeda for the Robotech rpg that led me into the rest of Palladium's catalogue that kept me involved in gaming) and that association still causes me viceral dislike of TSR D&D and retroclones based on them.

So, while I agree there needs to be a subset of a subset... it needs to be BIGGER than just the toxic OSR. I needs to be broad enough to include those who prefer systems like Savage Worlds, Palladium's newer materials, people who enjoyed the Big Damned Heroes angle of 4E while being politically anti-woke, etc.

Otherwise you're just going to split the anti-woke subset into camps too small to actually be an effective counter or, worse, even cede a whole bunch of people who could have been allies but have been left effectively homeless because both the OSR and the Woke have their One True Wayist dogmas.

To put it in game terms... Woke is Evil, but OSR isn't the opposite, it's Law (One True Wayist tendencies + Tradition!)... thus there's a whole arc of the alignment pie... neutral good, chaotic good, true neutral/unaligned, and even some chaotic neutrals who would be down for fighting evil with the lawful neutral and lawful good parts of the OSR... if the OSR doesn't exclude working with them for being non-lawful.

Quote from: Osman Gazi on October 06, 2022, 04:17:51 PM

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on October 06, 2022, 03:59:50 PM

Quote from: Ruprecht on October 06, 2022, 11:27:39 AM
The Satanic Panic influence depended mostly on where you were. In Northern California it was mostly a joke and there were some teachers using role playing games in classrooms. If you were in a more religious area I imagine it was much different.

Except the areas were not that broad.  In fact, the Satanic Panic very much became--Did you have someone that wanted to go off the deep end, in a position of local power in your immediate vicinity?  Could be a minister.  Could be a school teacher.  Could be some local busybody.  In most areas, it didn't happen.  Now, we'll never know the full extent, because in most places it never came up.  There weren't that many people playing D&D for it to become an issue in the first place. 

I was in the heart of the Bible Belt for the whole span of the panic, and the extent of the push we got was "We heard this thing was a little strange.  But you kids seem alright. What's the deal?"  And we explained it, and that was that.  In the next town over, which was even more prone to straight-laced things than we were, they got the D&D books in the school library--because all the volunteers in the library were into SciFi and Fantasy as well as literature in general.  The next town north of us was too cool to play D&D.  And so it went.

The only real push I ever got was later, after the panic was done (late 90s), from a so called "mainstream" congregation where the minister went off on D&D enough to prompt a friend that went there to ask me about it.  I think this was a guy trying really hard to distract from bigger problem in that congregation. 

The panic was always localized, and anyone that tells you different has an agenda or is deluded.

There was always a fringe element in the Evangelical/Fundamentalist Churches that tuned into conspiracy theories.  In the 80s and early 90s there was a much larger "Satanic Panic" that encompassed far more than just D&D--there was the sad case of the McMartin Preschool being accused of all sorts of bizarre ritual child abuse.  The Geraldo special in 1988 that seemed to kick off a madness in this subsector of the Church.  It eventually cooled down, though periodically different conspiracy theories arise that take a riff off of this one.  There was a fairly lucrative market in selling books about how pagan culture was "corrupting our youth", with some priceless Jack Chick tracts that focused specifically on D&D as a gateway to the Occult.  And even before Geraldo's special, fraudsters like Mike Warnke made a tidy sum off of selling his supposed satanic background until he was exposed by others in the Church.

But D&D itself was not the main driver of this panic, at least from my memory.  The focus was more on how evil "New Age" teaching was, Neopaganism, and supposed Satanists in high places in Hollywood and the Government (and of course, the Catholic Church in the view of Jack Chick and others on the more Fundy wing of Evangelicalism).  D&D was a mere sideshow in all of this.

D&D and TTRPGs in general were virtual unknowns where I live, so they never came up, but I certainly ran into a lot of that "Devil's Music" surrounding Heavy Metal (I was a metal head as a teen), with tales of Satanic messages in metal albums if you played them backwards and such. Even outside of metal music there were people who found hidden Satanic messages everywhere, even the old Procter & Gamble logo.

There were lots of spurious lawsuits going on at the time, with people blaming bands like Judas Priest and Black Sabbath for teen suicides. And even the case of a daycare center that got accused of child molestation and Satanic sacrifices. The Satanic Panic was more widespread than people here are retelling, it just didn't affect RPGs that much, cuz it's a fringe hobby many people weren't aware it existed, or only heard about it in passing if at all.

Quote from: Chris24601 on October 07, 2022, 08:08:18 AM

Quote from: blackstone on October 06, 2022, 11:23:09 AM
but we can't have this now. not anymore. so, we have to create a sub-set of a sub-set: the OSR.

I agree with everything except this. Thanks to the "One True Wayist" tendencies of many of the OSR's promoters, the OSR brand is considered rather toxic in my area (politically very conservative... many of our Democrats are to the right of most East Coast Republicans).

I, for one, have zero interest in any editions of D&D save the one despised by the entire OSR community (and late-edition 3.5e with all the WotC late game supplements allowed; core-only 3.5 sucks). I barely escaped the actual toxic old school AD&D back in the day with my interest in rpgs intact (I will forever be thankful to Kevin Seimbeda for the Robotech rpg that led me into the rest of Palladium's catalogue that kept me involved in gaming) and that association still causes me viceral dislike of TSR D&D and retroclones based on them.

So, while I agree there needs to be a subset of a subset... it needs to be BIGGER than just the toxic OSR. I needs to be broad enough to include those who prefer systems like Savage Worlds, Palladium's newer materials, people who enjoyed the Big Damned Heroes angle of 4E while being politically anti-woke, etc.

Otherwise you're just going to split the anti-woke subset into camps too small to actually be an effective counter or, worse, even cede a whole bunch of people who could have been allies but have been left effectively homeless because both the OSR and the Woke have their One True Wayist dogmas.

To put it in game terms... Woke is Evil, but OSR isn't the opposite, it's Law (One True Wayist tendencies + Tradition!)... thus there's a whole arc of the alignment pie... neutral good, chaotic good, true neutral/unaligned, and even some chaotic neutrals who would be down for fighting evil with the lawful neutral and lawful good parts of the OSR... if the OSR doesn't exclude working with them for being non-lawful.

The OSR as the last refuge from the Woke mobs is a fantasy that exists only in the minds of regular posters here, particularly considering there are plenty of Woke idiots who are ostensibly in the OSR as well. And that's not even getting into how inconvenient and poorly defined WTF the "OSR" even is, or the fact that not everyone worships at the altar of Old D&D. It's this one-size-fits-all solution that isn't really one-sized, doesn't really fit all, and isn't really a solution.

Quote from: Chris24601 on October 07, 2022, 08:08:18 AM
I barely escaped the actual toxic old school AD&D back in the day with my interest in rpgs intact.

Good for you, I've yet to see an example of toxic AD&D that was convincing. Most examples come off as wankers trying i impress their woke friends with how bad things are by using made up things or quotes from Gary that are outside the text of the games or vastly overblown in importance (he used the word Savage!!!).

Quote from: Chris24601 on October 07, 2022, 08:08:18 AM
So, while I agree there needs to be a subset of a subset... it needs to be BIGGER than just the toxic OSR.

I also disagree the OSR is toxic. Of the few outright political members of the OSR I don't think any actually put toxic content into their publications. It is just that those that hate them don't actually play so they don't realize the distinction.

Quote from: VisionStorm on October 07, 2022, 08:44:56 AM
... particularly considering there are plenty of Woke idiots who are ostensibly in the OSR as well.

That quote goes a long way towards saying the OSR is inclusive and not Toxic at all, and I agree with that.

Quote from: FingerRod on October 06, 2022, 08:27:58 PM
Billy Graham preached against D&D. I remember my grandmother talking about him warning his congregation about it.

I don't remember Billy Graham specifically talking about it, but your grandmother might be remembering correctly.  Her memory might be better than mine.