Measured concern about something unfamiliar, or with elements contrary to one's beliefs is certainly reasonable, as long as it's proportionate. My parents are devout Christians and were a little concerned about D&D and were aware of the controversy, but we had a few short conversations on the subject and that was that. Fair enough.

I did have a really good laugh at some of the Jack Chick comics. That was the extreme end of the ant-D&D looney fringe, but it was so infantile in it's extreme depictions and outrageous in it's claims that I saw it as a valuable tool. I'm sure he did do a lot of damage and caused some harm, but for me being able to point to something so clearly absurd seemed helpful. I was confident that anyone in my circle of family or acquaintances would be able to see the absurd side of the claims by Chick and his kind. That meant anyone agitating against D&D or roleplaying games in general could be put on the defensive because they would need to show that their objections weren't absurd in the same way.

> as long as it's proportionate

Serious question: what's proportionate, if you believe that your children are engaged in a 'game' that will literally cost them their souls?

It would mean if you do have such serious concerns, actualy investigating and determining if those concerns were founded on anything, rather than assuming the worst and making a fool of yourself by accusing the game of containing and encoraging things it plainly doesn't.

It would mean asking people who play the game what their actual experiences of it were and honestly and directly discussing with them any aspects of that you found troubling.

It would mean actualy addressing the problem in a way that has a realistic chance of working, rather than being completely counterproductive.

D&D isn't the only roleplaying game. You could encourage them to play science fiction, modern or historical games with little or no religious content, or a game like Pendragon so they can play Christian knights in the age of Chivalry. There are lots of options

That reminds me of one of the most unintentionally hilarious things I've ever heard on a news program.

One year when Halloween rolled around on a Sunday, a local woman was interviewed who said she'd send her daughter out on Saturday instead because Sunday was the Lord's day and Halloween was a day for the devil.

A: Why are you allowing your daughter to participate at all, if that's how you feel?

B: Saturday is the Sabbath!

A significant part of the genre of satan-fearing or whatever you call it, is the devil is quite lazy, but its still worth banning.

For the standard HN car analogy, driving while drunk is perhaps only 10 times more dangerous than driving sober. So ten times practically nothing is still close to zero. So when the ball game lets out and 40K fans drive home and at least half are legally drunk, there are no bodies stacked like cordwood, because its just not that dangerous. However, virtually everyone agrees the cost/benefit ratio, especially in the long term, is such that drunk driving should be illegal. A standard HN golf analogy would be holding up your golf club during a lightning storm, where the odds of getting lit up are extremely low because a spark that jumped 10 kft isn't going to care about a primate waving a stick, yet only an idiot would intentionally do it.

You are saying that DUI is not a meaningful danger?

Yeah, obviously. The rate isn't that much higher than sober drivers, and the odds of being caught are extremely low. Its problem is the cost/benefit ratio is extremely low. There's nothing to gain by permitting it (maybe more booze sales, not really worth it) and plenty to gain by making it illegal (because every death due to it is pointless).

Paradoxically most of our legal system is based on risk/reward ratios, not level of risk. For example speeding is illegal although the odds of an accident are extremely low. On the other hand climbing Mt Everest isn't illegal at all, even though the death rate is about 50% or whatever it is now. Smoking is not illegal although the odds of smoking killing a smoker are pretty good, yet psychedelics are illegal despite the actual death rates and counts being pretty close to zero.

Almost one third of all traffic related deaths in the US are caused by drunk drivers. That's a very big slice of a pie that's way too big already.

See, you're agreeing with me. I pulled the actual numbers from Google and 40K total traffic deaths out of 2.6M total deaths for the USA last year is about one percent. So drinking related is a third of one percent. Its about a hundred times more likely than getting hit by lightning, its hardly zero, but its basically a rounding error in list of risks to worry about.

Lets say 100 times per year the local pro baseball stadium fills all 40K seats and a mere 1/4 (probably more) drive home after some beers. So right there, the odds of someone being killed in any individual baseball game related drunk driving incident are under 1%, likely far, far lower, given that's hardly the only pro sport, there are more baseball stadiums in the country than the one nearby me, more than half the people sitting the stands have had a beer, and almost all drinking happens outside baseball stadiums anyway.

However, I agree with you completely, its only banned because its a completely senseless and avoidable risk to take, not because its highly risky. Its measurably an extremely low risk, but the key is its a dumb risk to take, which is the only reason why its illegal. Tobacco smoking on the other hand is extremely high risk, but its not illegal, because most people don't see it as senseless or dumb.

Very similar to what my parents (actually just my mom) did initially. Mom's complaints later faded as she encouraged me to befriend some neighbor kids who were being ostracized because of general nerdiness & neediness. In fact at that point she was asking me if I wanted to go play games at their house, not to convert them but rather to ease their social pain a bit. To this day I am glad she raised me. And I play RPGs with my kids and find alternate non-satan-involving scenarios just by default :D

My experience was similar. This was the early 90s and I was 11 or 12. I told my mom that I wanted to play D&D with my friends, and she looked a little nervous for a moment (for which I blame daytime tv, all the talkshows went on about D&D and satanism back then), then said, Alright, as long as you can still tell the difference between fantasy and reality, you can play.

Then not too long after that we wound up playing at my house a few times and she saw it was really just us being silly and playing a very fancy form of pretend and she came all the way around to approving, since it kept me social and imaginative, and it was pretty hard to get in actual trouble when me and my friend group spent all our time sitting around the dining room table at one or another's house.

D&D does actually deal with remarkably clear lines between Good and Evil. Demons, devils and undead are all clearly in the evil category, as are most of the monsters you need to kill.

Of course you can play it with a lot more moral ambiguity than that, but out of the box, D&D is very suitable for a black & white world view.

I once worked for some people with a similar belief system to that above. A big part of it was that there were only two powers in the world - Christ & God vs. Satan. ANY power that was not explicitly that of Christ was implicitly the devil, regardless of how good it sounded. Harry Potter for example, was clearly an agent of Satan.

The moral ambiguity was the best part!

Put the party into a situation where they could ally with a profoundly evil power to achieve a great good. Or maybe give them a powerful magical item that they discover is slowly corrupting them as they start wielding it for the right reasons...

I wish more of our current crop of politicians had played RPGs that way...