Then I got into Vampire: the Masquerade. My dad found the rulebook and read the section about Tremere blood magic. After that, he was happy to see me playing D&D again.

The first was my down the street neighbour. his son had joined our group (we were actually playing gamma world and boot hill at the time) and he asked my mom if he could drop off some anti-D&D literature. She was a typically, “well he IS a respected member of our church so let’s see what he has to say…” kind of mom and after reading some of the more concerning elements of the pamphlet, she asked him to sit on a game. He asked us questions about casting spells and weirdly enough, a recipe for a potion that had baby’s blood in it. he had misquotes from the DM’s Guide and tons of out and out fabrications in his literature. My mom saw this and with a frown , asked him to leave. His only response was to burn his son’s books and ban him from playing with our group. i admit to a bit of schadenfreud (sic) a few years later when i heard the son had been sent on a religious retreat in africa and was arrested trying to smuggle a kilo of cocaine back with him. my gaming group was still drug & arrest free

The second was my new GF’s aunt. She had a bit of the wiggy religious nut about her but i indulged her with a conversation of “this evil game i was introducing to her niece.” She had no backing material, just years of conjecture, and at the end of the conversation she was at least satisfied i wasn’t a nutjob trying to get her beloved niece into baby sacrificing.

I have always been good at describing the positive elements of the game. my math scores got better, my english scores increased as i wrote up adventures and fiction for character backgrounds. also, if not for having to describe scenes in games, i would have never been prepared for any public speaking i did in school. Post school, i am pretty dismissive of ANY person who sees the game with the satan worshipping nonsense. Remember, dancing and holding hands was once seen through the same hate coloured glasses.

But if I hear one more jock coworker shout “magic missile magic missile” at me with gales of laughter, I will kick them. i am NOT a LARPer. Those guys are FREAKS >;)

(There was one college relationship that went down the tubes fast when he said, “You get no XP this game. It’ll send a bad message to the other players if I’m nice on you.” I think we were playing Wraith, and the poor guy had never run a game with his girlfriend in the party before. I don’t know if he ever did again, actually.)

I accidentally let it slip at work that I game, and I take some crap over it. It’s died down, actually, but my current beau says, “I practice the masquer-fuckin’-rade at work.” My parents have never given me problems over it, even when I was a teen (I’m in my mid-20′s now). I didn’t play during high school, of course; we had one group of gamers and they didn’t allow girls.

We went to a Catholic school, but the only person there who had a problem with D&D was a protestant art teacher. (Who incidentally had one of the cool old TSR book racks in her room for years.)
Of course, our religion teacher used to play the D&D player who killed his parents movie each year, but then I think that was only our class, and her son played with us (and we played at his house frequently) and I suspect she was tweaking our noses.

Michael Phillipss last blog post..musings on the sandwich nature

I’ve been an avid RPG Computer Game player for almost twenty years now, from the first time I laid eyes on Bard’s Tale. Planescape, Baldur’s, Diablo, Wizardry, KOTOR .. the list goes on. But I’ve never played table-top RPG’s. Risk, Settlers of Catan, Monopoly (heh) sure, but nothing with a DM.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been getting back into the whole blog/social media fracas. Especially I’ve been reading some quality computer game blogs. I stumbled across ChattyDM along with a few more.

I then friended ChattyDM on Twitter.

One day, we got to talking.

A week later I’ve already used Chatty’s awesome “kid’s stories at nighttime” method for my kids, and he’s introduced me to the Basic Fantasy site. I’ve always been into telling stories and playing games in a big way, just never gone with the established ways .. But now I have no excuse With my kids getting of an age, I’m excited.

Thanks Chatty!

It’s difficult to counter this anti-D&D idea. There are few Christian authorities who will openly defend the game, and few D&D authorities whose views are well-respected among fundamentalist Christians. It’s much more popular to panic when your children are involved.

Jonathan Drains last blog post..Ioun Stone Complete Guide

However as thing often happen when you do take the bait, you absolutely floored me with high quality, heartfelt testimonials.

I have read each and everyone of these comments with rapt attention.

I agree with Mad Brew, this thread has been one of the best here in a long time. After talking about dice, food and this, I will definitively revisit other themes that are close to our gamer hearts.

You rule, one and all.

In those years, we used to play wargames in the high school library, too. The fellow students just disregarded us as incomprehensible high-brows. (The librarian once looked at a game of SPI’s extremely complex Air War and walked away with a low grunt. She never bothered us again.)

Fortuntely I have married a woman who accepts the RPG hobby with no complaints. When we started dating I quickly introduced to the hobby, saying that it was important to me. She loved to play Space 1889 before we got our first child, but then she dropped out of the game group. But she has several times sent me off to play with my friends, claming that “a gaming session will put you in a better mood”. When the gang meets in our apartment, she supplies us with coffee, ginger cake fresh from the oven and a concluding evening meal when the dice have come to rest at the end of a scenario. I am a fortunate chap, am I not?

My first games involved my Dad, two brothers, and cousin, with me as DM. It didn’t go well. My dad was, to put it mildly, a backseat DM. He made a list of creatures I couldn’t use- undead and demons at first but it finally got to be everything but mythical, non sentient beasts were banned. He decided how things should go and got very upset if I deviated. When the group slew a minotaur, he decided that he would sell the minotaur’s head to a barkeep who would hang it over the bar. But when he presented it to the barkeep, I instead had him lean skeptically on the bar and say, “Let me get this straight- you cut the head off of a bull and now you’re trying to sell it to me as the head of a minotaur?”. My dad got very angry. He blew up.

He later apologized, but the next time we played, I decided to rebel and had them encounter- a skeleton. Big mistake. He blew up twice as bad as before. He stormed from the room, swearing to never play “that game” with me again. And he didn’t either. I will always regret that. I realize now that he was trying to consolidate his religious convictions with his desire to play a fantasy game with me. In spite of everything, we did have fun and i wish I had been more tolerant of his behavior.

After that, my parents soured on D&D big time. First I wasn’t allowed to play with my brothers anymore. Then they told me I had to get it out of the house. I balked. It became a huge fight. The next day, I came home from school to find all my gaming stuff gone from my room. I was told that it had been thrown away and that i should forget about it. I was extremely upset. My brother told me, when I’d calmed down and was outside sulking, that my stuff wasn’t gone, just in the basement. That night I got my stuff and ran away from home.

It’s funny when i look back on it now. I didn’t take any clothes or food or anything else. Just my gaming stuff. I spent the night in the woods behind my house, clutching my bag of books. The next day, around noon, I got so hungry I went home, but refused to let go of my stuff for fear they would take it from me again.

It must have really shook my parents up because they decided i could keep my stuff. I still wasn’t allowed to play with my brothers anymore, but they let me answer a newspaper ad and begin playing on Saturdays with a group of adult players, which really surprised me. I continued to game through high school and college until i was on my own. My parents continued to tolerate it and rarely talked about it.

My wife supports my gaming but doesn’t play. I’m currently playing a 4th edition D&D game with my youngest brother and two nephews. I’m not sure what my parents would say if they were still around. Probably just shake their heads.

Yes. I play D&D. No, I’m not evil. I don’t cast spells in real life. I don’t retreat to my underground lair, don a black cloak, and chant to the god of Hades on Thursday nights.
I do that on Fridays. (<– JOKE!!)
The Chat…

at work….it’s been up & down. Generally I’ve not mentioned it at school or work after seeing the reaction that reading science-fiction/fantasy got, but there’s a couple of gamers at my current job

The RPG had been in Spain since the mid-80′s and by 1994 D&D, Vampire and Magic were the more successful and played games (if I remember correctly). Suddenly, the great public knew about this “killing games” and newspapers and TV programs alike were flooded by people speaking about these “evil games”.

I was then in the last year of High School and suddenly lots of people began to ask me about these RPG games I played. I’ve usually played as GM and had always encouraged other people outside my core group to join the party and had a taste for the game. There was some bad-taste jokes about “You party tonight? Who are you going to kill this time?” coming from classmates, but answering something like “Your fu***ng mother, of course” (while smiling) was usually enough to end the discussion in a good mood (typical Spanish exhibition of bravado… we are a very “never-lose-face” kind of people here).

What came as a surprise to me was my strongest advocate was my mother. Until then she has had the idea I spent too much time playing RPG games and not enough time studying (and she was right, of course; my mother is a very clever woman). But suddenly my hobby was seen as a bad influence by many people, and she began a campaign to explain what we did at house while playing and what RPG were about. An aunt of mine (my god-mother, indeed) was the most oppossed to RPGs and her son was away from my games for a while.

Time passed, other news came and go, and the “RPG Case” was partly forgotten. For a while RPGs had a bad name in Spain, but people still play. Right now, we young gamers of the 90′s had become not-so-young workers and fathers and some of us still play RPG games. Right now RPGs, tabletop and other “geek-related” games are seeing as a somewhat silly but mostly harmless hobby.

And to end with a happy note, yesterday a co-worker approached me saying – “Hi, Carlos. You play tabletop games, isn’t it?”
- “Yeah. Why?”
- “I’be bought the Starcraft tabletop game but I can’t understand the rules. Do you care if I brought the game next week and you try to explain it to me?”

Sometimes It’s a good thing to be the Official “RPG/Tabletop/Geek-Related-Stuff” Expert at the office

Best regards,
Carlos

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My mom was the only one I could remember as being against rpgs, refusing to let me go over to my cousins to play devils games so I told her we were just gonna play with GI joes and legos hahaha! Still I couldnt find people to game with most the time, so I just stuck to what everyone else did haha!

I did manage to scrounge a group of friends together to play 3.5, which lasted a whole three hours before a total party kill! Good times, good times… The adventure is still fondly remembered by said group of friends.

Anyways recently I got married, had a kid got a good paying job involving hard labor… Also in the last few years, gamers started popping out of the woodworks, so now I actually get to play semi regularly. DnD is pretty much our family fun night!

I’m lucky in the sense that I grew up among science fiction/fantasy fandom, where D&D and other such games were completely accepted, and even the norm. Through D&D, I was able to meet many close friends who I hang out with to this day. Of course, playing D&D didn’t really help me find acceptance in day to day school, but I’m such a nerd anyway I don’t think it mattered much

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Then I met a guy a couple of years my senior who, out of the blue, came to me and loaned me a copy of The Hobbit. Apparently he had heard me say that my current favorite Nintendo game was Shadowgate, and decided to “test” me (the guy was weird, I’ll grant you that).

I finished the book in two nights and gave it back, gushing about the story and the characters. He just smiled and invited me over for a game.

…the rest is history, as they say.

Nowadays, I play with my best friend (not the one in the story), her wife, my wife, my brother in law and a new guy we met a few months ago.

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TETSUBOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!…

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