Car News

Lately, I've been doing some research for the next Escapist video,
"How Roleplaying Games Got a Bad Reputation," and going through some
old anti-gaming books and videos. My oldest daughter Aylish caught me
doing this, and told me how frustrated it made her to see people
trying to feed others their own paranoid ignorance.

I gave her the good news - that for the most part, you don't see these
sorts of things happening as often these days, and when someone does
write a book or get on television trying to warn everyone away from
the imagined evils of RPGs, they're usually dismissed as raving kooks.

Then, just yesterday, I received an email from an Escapist reader who
sent me a link to a post on the roleplaying forum RPGnet (http://
forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?574737-So-my-mom-took-away-my-D-amp-D-
books-today-because-of-Heroes-of-Shadow ), with a story that could
have easily come from the mid eighties:

"So my mom took away my D&D books today because of Heroes of Shadow.

I'd bought both Heroes of Shadow and Paizo's Inner Sea Guide and had
both of them on my desk (well I was flipping through the ISG) and my
mom came in and asked how my day went. I told her it went great I
finally got the two books I'd been waiting for.

So she starts flipping through my Heroes of Shadow and suddenly sees
stuff like Soul Sacrifice and Shadow Sponsorship and things like that
in big scary letters and she just freaks out. She starts yelling at me
about how D&D is satanic and that I've been lying to her all along
about it.

She took all of my d&d books and put them in a cardboard box out front
for anyone to take =( It was gone this morning. That was over a 1000
dollars gone. I know WotC has no interest in turning our souls over to
Satan (afterall they wouldn't see any profit in it, so why bother?)
but couldn't they have hidden the darker themes of the book deeper
inside it or something? I'm sorry. I know it's not WotC's fault. I'm
just mad and looking for a target."

It's just another reminder of why this site and the CAR-PGa are here.
Sadly, this is one of those situations that is hard to reconcile. I
used to get emails about it so frequently that I addressed it in the
Basic Gaming FAQ (http://www.theescapist.com/
basic_gaming_faq.htm#soul ), with the best advice I could possibly
offer in cases like these. In a nutshell: respect the wishes of your
parents, arm yourself with the facts, try to explain your case as
rationally and calmly as possible, and accept their decision no matter
what it is.

It feels sort of strange to still be handing out this advice, because
it's so hard to imagine too many remnants of the Satanic Panic era
still lingering around 30 years later. But that's not the only reason
it feels strange. As I write this, I'm preparing a Vampire: The
Masquerade session for Aylish and her friends Miranda and Jerry, and
looking forward to spending some quality time with intelligent,
creative kids, telling stories and exercising our imaginations.

It's strange to think of that as something that I should be so afraid
of.

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