[Cerek]

I began attending my current home church several years ago on a Wednesday night. The very first night I attended service, one of the deacon's wives got up and talked about the "evils of Dungeons and Dragons". I was very active in PnP at the time (gamed every Saturday night and sometimes on Friday), so I went up to her after the service and basically said "That was an interesting talk. Tell me how much you actually know firsthand about Dungeons and Dragons." The answer was "Not much". She sidestepped that issue, though, by claiming her husband was the one that was knowledgeable about the dangers of Dungeons and Dragons. He wasn't. He didn't have any firsthand knowledge or experience...just based his opinion on info distributed by Christian groups.

Now, there is nothing wrong with these groups being concerned about the game and distributing information...except that even these groups have very little real knowledge of the game. Instead, they seem to rely on the types of "urban legends" mentioned in the links provided by Lucern.

I did finally manage to have several good discussions about AD&D with a high school classmate of mine that was also a deacon of the church. He provided me with a more "neutral" tract presenting church arguments against AD&D. I read the material and discussed it with him at length.

These are the main arguments I've seen leveled against AD&D and my response to them.

1) AD&D teaches kids to worship false gods. This argument is based on the fact that the AD&D game encompassed dieties from several different cultural pantheons. Norse, Roman, Chinese, Aztec and even Native American pantheons were represented with details listed for each diety in every pantheon. The one "glaring omission" from this group was the inclusion of God and Jesus from Christianity. While it is true that players create an imaginary character and usually pick a diety for that character to worship, I never met a single player that actually believed in the same diety there character supposedly worshipped. So the accusation that it taught children to worship false gods was completely false.

2) AD&D teaches kids that God and Jesus are "false gods" also. This argument was a circular response made against the defense offered for argument#1. Some gaming groups - in response to the accusation they were worshipping "false gods" said "We don't actually worship these gods because we don't believe they are actually real. However, if it bothers you that bad, we will include Christianity as an optional religion for our players to choose from." The response was "You think these gods are false. By including Christianity, you are saying you also believe Christianity is false." In other words, they tried to have it both ways. They complained that players actually believed the "false gods" were real but then said that including God and Jesus meant the gamers were saying the Christian God wasn't real. Proof positive that there just wasn't any way to please some of the critics.

3) AD&D promotes devil worship. This argument was based on the fact that there are spells in the game that can be used to summon demons to help your character. The argument was that this taught kids to "call on Satan and/or demons" to help solve their problems. The fact that players created characters that sometimes cast spells did NOT mean that the players themselves actually believed THEY could also learn to cast spells and summon demons in real life to help them. Still, tThe game designers tried to accomodate this argument. In the 2nd and 3rd editions of AD&D, the demons and daemons described in the original Monster Manuals were noticeably absent.

4) AD&D teaches kids to cast spells. Same response as above. Just because there are certain character classes in the game that are considered spellcasters does NOT mean that the players themselves are actually going to want to learn to cast spells in real life.

5) At the very least, AD&D introduces kids to the basic terminology of the occult. This could lead to a curiousity and desire to learn more about occultic practices. This was the one bona-fide argument I found against AD&D. The original Dungeon Masters Guide DID give a rather comprehensive list of several occultic terms...some of which I had never even encountered before. Pentagrams and thaumaturgic circles were clearly diagramed in the DMG and a lot of the basic terminology of the occult was interjected into several different aspects of the game. At least this argument recognized that AD&D itself was not necessarily "occultic" - but that it did include the terminology and practices that could encourage gamers to explore these aspects more deeply. An honost assessment of the game cannot deny this argument.