[Cerek the Barbaric]

Many of you are - fortunately - too young to remember the very bad reputation AD&D suffered in it's early years. Gary Gygax (primarily) invented the game in the early 1970's. Because of the imagination and creativity necessary to play, it was originally embraced by several schools as a great learning tool for their "gifted students". However, it didn't take long before the praise turned to harsh criticism and unrealistic stereotyping.

There was an incident in which a group of kids apparantly began robbing houses in their neighborhood and eventually attacked (or killed) the residents in one house (I believe the people killed were parents of one of the boys - which led to the Made-For-TV movie that was mentioned earlier). Suddenly, AD&D was dangerous and satanic (because it had demons in the Monster Manual and certain player classes could "summons" these demons to do their bidding). :rollseyes:

Then, the movie mentioned by Attalus came out. It is noteworthy for only two reasons:

1) It promoted the growing image of AD&D as a "dangerous" game in which the players begin to blur the lines between fantasy and reality and eventually begin to believe they ARE the characters they pretend to be. That was happened to the main character, he basically ended up believing he was living in the AD&D world and was the character he had been playing.

2) The main character was played by an unkown actor named Tom Hanks. It was his first ever starring role.

There really is no comparison between Mazes and Monsters and the more recent Dungeons and Dragons. The first perpetuated the myth of how "evil and dangerous" AD&D is while the second was just a really lame attempt to make a movie adaptation promoting the game. Personally, I thought the AD&D movie was OK, but nowhere near as great as it could have been. It had good points and bad points. I don't dislike the movie as strongly as some people, but I was very disappointed with how they wasted such a good opportunity.

The bottom line is that PnP players ARE stereotyped, and that the stereotype isn't completely false (for example, how many members here were at the local Wal-Mart or movie store last night at midnight to get their copy of The Two Towers? If you weren't, I would be willing to bet you'll be going by the store later today. . I don't completely fit the stereotype, since I'm a born-again Christian that actually enjoys PnP, but I have to admit that some of the stereotype does fit me.

The best thing to do (as was mentioned earlier) is just to simply ignore it. People will always stereotype things they don't enjoy, understand, or participate in. Everyone does it (to a certain degree). So you change the things you can and accept those you can't.