2020 - The Year of Blackmoor - 50th Anniversary - Day Fifty-Two

Celebrating 2020 - The Year of Blackmoor - 50th Anniversary of Blackmoor and of  Role-Playing!

Today while I am still going to look at DM DAVID's blog, I am going to pivot and look at a very good post of his titled 4 Pop-Culture Assumptions That Dungeons & Dragons Destroyed.

He starts out saying:

The media keeps telling us how we, the geeks, have won popular culture...   ... Fan culture is everywhere. So we forget that in the early days, when D&D burgeoned by word-of-mouth, no one had seen anything like it.

Let us stop right here for a moment. Geeks, Nerds, Dorks, and etc. What do these words mean? I am 63 soon to be 64. Geek to me is never a compliment, because the first definition that I go to for geek is "a performer at a carnival or circus whose show consists of bizarre or grotesque acts." Biting the heads off chickens is one of those acts. I realize it is different for most of you, but that is my default. How about Nerd? Nerd also for me is never a compliment, because the first definition that I go to for geek is "a foolish or contemptible person who lacks social skills or is boringly studious." Similarly for Dork  which is "a  contemptible, socially inept person." This is all a product of where and when I grew up.

Further I was born in extreme rural West Virginia, my parents farmed with horses until early fall of the year I turned three when we moved to rural Ohio. I grew up on a farm. I had outdoor chores from the age of four. We had dogs, cats, chickens, cows, sheep, horses, a pony, a mule, some goats, some guineas, turkeys and geese. Some only for a while and others all the time. I fed animals, milked cows, helped butcher our meat instead of buying it at the store (and yes grass fed beef is better than factory farmed). I worked in the gardens, helped can hundreds of quarts of food, I mowed and raked hay, and many, many other things.

My dad only went to the 8th grade in a one room school and my grandparents ended school between 3rd and 5th grade. But in my under educated family every one read, the library had to install a revolving door for us. Used books stores loved us. And not just my immediate family, all of my family. We were always told, as long as you can read, you can learn anything.

In my family we were read to constantly, told stories from the last hundred years or more of our families and the people they knew, hundreds and hundreds of stories. We were both read and told fairy tales and all kinds of stories. My father made up stories to tell us. I soaked that in growing up.

I love the outdoors, I love animals, especially dogs and horses, I love hiking and sports. So I have always rejected these labels, I do not accept that I fit into some little box and further I do not believe that most of you do either.

I started reading and read every waking moment that I could, but I also spent a lot of time exploring the woods on our farm with one of the dogs. I built dams in the creek. My cousins and I built a tree house, we went fishing, we made our own bows and arrows, our own swords and spears and tons of other things, we road bicycles for hours around the country roads. On a free day when there was no farm work we were involved in we might leave on those bicycles and our parents might not see us for 8-9 hours. We did not have restrictions on hardly anything, I never had a curfew.

So as I said, I do not accept geek or nerd or dork as a label, never have and never will. You can make your own choice about labels.

He goes on to say:

Of course, little in D&D stands as completely new, but in the 70s, unless you joined a tiny cult of miniature gamers interested in fantasy, the game defied understanding. Unless you followed a few, obscure genre authors, you would never have seen anything like it. You shared popular assumptions that D&D would explode.

OD&D came out in January of 1974, I discovered it in Sept of 1975 in college. The group of us that was always at a minimum a referee and 12 players and at times had up to 30 players in one game and we always had a audience that grew or shrank depending on who was watching or playing in any given game.

This group of about 40 total college kids (all  of whom played OD&D at least a few times) did a lot of things together, we hung out for D&D, we went rappelling in a state park down a 100 foot cliff (men and women), most of us went skydiving together(not me, I could work through my fear of heights enough to rappel, but not enough to jump out of a perfectly good airplane). We had intramural flag football, basketball, water polo and softball  teams during college, all  of them men and women together. We went to all night Halloween movies together, ate together as group and a whole slew of other things. We all had a wide variety of shared interests.

As a group I do not think that we fit any pop culture assumptions with or without OD&D in our lives. This view of a "few, obscure genre authors" is nonsense for me personally, everyone I knew read those authors. I never had a sense that we were a tiny cult, I never felt the need to hide that I played OD&D and I never experienced anything negative. For those that suffered through the "Satanic Panic," I am really sorry that happened to you, but I never knew anything about that until around 2007 or so.

So he says pop culture assumption One:

Fantasy is for children and a few oddballs.

I did not grow up around that attitude out on that rural farm.

He talks about a lot of things including the huge amount of money they gave Marlon Brando for the 1978 Superman movie:

For 15 minutes of screen time, Brando received $3.7 million up front, plus 11.75% of the film’s take, right off the top. The film’s marketing rested heavily on the actor’s performance.

FWIW I thought Brando was terrible in the movie, I thought it was bad casting and bad writing for his part of the movie and I have always thought the Fortress of Solitude was very poorly designed and completely at odds with the character of Superman. I do not know anyone that went to the movie because of Brando I think they just wasted their money.

I loved Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder in the movie, even though Reeve was not quite muscular enough for the part. I felt it was shame that the script for that movie and all Superman movies are so poor, you had good actors with good chemistry in the lead parts, if only they had given them a good script. I would just once like to see a great script for a Superman movie with some imagination. From a writer that does not suffer from thinking this is impossible to write, of course if you think that it is.

He says:

The public’s unfamiliarity with fantasy contributed to the panic that surrounded D&D in the 80s. God fearing adults saw their teenagers obsessed with spells and children’s fairy tale nonsense, but darker and more violent. They settled on the only logical explanation, demon worship, because the culprit could not possibly be a really fun game.

I of course was in college, but when I went home I taught my two brothers to play who were 7 and 10 years younger than me. Mom and Dad never batted an eye. They were sitting within 10 feet of where we were playing and they just thought it was great that I came home and spent time with my younger brothers, and we played at winter breaks and all summer while I was in college and on the odd weekend I would be home. But my parents trusted me and they never told me there was anything I could not read. And yes you would have called my parents God fearing, but contrary to some peoples thinking God does not ask you to check your brains at the door, it is the complete opposite in fact.

Then he says pop culture assumption Two:

Games are terrible.

In the 70s, games sold as toys and they were all terrible. They suffered from stupid, and random mechanics: Roll a die and move that many spaces.

Growing up we played every board game in existence that we could get our hands on, we played at least two dozen different card games from an early age, a whole slew of things. We loved all of them, after all it was about having fun together, it was not about some rigorous evaluation of the "quality" of the game.

In college we played a number of different card games and board games, we played tons of Eucher and Risk, in addition to OD&;D and with a lot of friends that did not play OD&D. In Risk we took a piece of poster board and added the Pacific Ocean and all the major islands and drew in more connections to the continents. It completely changed the game dynamics and greatly increased the complexity. Hasbro should try it.

But when I discovered OD&D, I was hooked instantly, it was the next level above everything that had gone before.

Then he says pop culture assumption Three:

Only young children should roleplay.

People sometimes say that D&D did not invent the roleplaying game. Kids have always roleplayed; we just called it make believe. By spreading roleplaying beyond the playground, D&D alarmed parents, ministers, and other responsible adults.

I think one reason that my parents were cool with it was because my whole family and beyond my parents also played games, lots of games from board games to intense card games. When the adults told stories, they did voices and posture and took on the persona of the person talking in the story.

He says:

When D&D first reached mainstream attention, reporters painted the game as a “bizarre” activity enjoyed by “secretive” and “cultish” players.  Parents feared that playing a role in D&D would lead their children to confuse fantasy with reality.

My family never went with the herd on anything, they had their ways and were confident about their choices. Advertising was pretty wasted on them as were propaganda campaigns.

Then he says pop culture assumption Four:

Dungeons are just medieval jails.

Zombies and vampires appear everywhere in popular culture. Both archetypes seem medieval, but the popular conception of zombies only dates back to George Romero’s 1968 movie Night of the Living Dead.

The concept of a dungeon as an underground sprawl with monsters and treasures, is even newer.

Go back and read the Iliad and the Odyssey, go read Greek, Roman and Norse mythology, go read fairy tales from around the world. Go read Jules Verne and HG Wells and those that preceded them.

Watch the old monster movies starting in the early part of the 20th Century. Of course the B movies from the '50s and '60s.

Yes, OD&D turned the world upside down, but the pop culture assumptions, they are in my mind bad assumptions that were always at their foundation very flawed. The people who made those assumptions for the rest of us, were always out of touch with real people and they always will be. Now that I have thought about this, I have come to the conclusion that there is really very little that you could change in my life that would have made me better prepared to be an OD&D Referee.

DM DAVID hit this one out of the park!