Book Reviews

SOMETHING I have seen come up from time to time over the years before (and even since) games like Dungeons & Dragons have entered the mainstream is the question of whether it is “appropriate” or “good” for a person to get themselves involved in that sort of entertainment. Usually this is asked in connection with a particular demographic or faith tradition, such as, “Should a Christian allow their kids to play D&D?”

This isn’t an unreasonable question, though. People should be aware of what things they are getting involved in or letting their kids choose for entertainment, but it’s also important to be sure that you get accurate answers to that question upon which to base your decisions.

I think this question, in all its variations, essentially boils down to three fundamental areas of concern:

1. Is D&D¹ something inappropriate for someone of my religious persuasion to consume, if it has dragons, or magic, or demons, or whatever, in it?
2. I heard kids who got involved with D&D back in the 80s came to psychological harm, got confused between fantasy and reality, committed suicide, murder, or other crimes as a result of what they learned by playing the game and its tendency to make people antisocial and prone to join Satanic cults.
3. Should I be concerned about the sort of content I’d encounter in the game, such as explicit scenes of sex or violence, or even just the sort of people I’d be associating with and how well they’d be compatible with my own sense of ethics, morals, and sensibilities?

Valid concerns, and I have what I think are valid answers that I hope will be of help to anyone still asking any of them. While I’ll elaborate on them individually, I’ll give a little spoiler up front and say the answers to them are, respectively, “maybe,” “no,” and “yes,” but let’s talk about them in more detail.

Magic and Monsters

Question 1: Should I play D&D as a member of my religion?
I think this is, in essence, the same question as, “Should I let my kids read the Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings books?” And it has the same answer for the same reason. D&D is, at its core, a game about storytelling, and the kinds of stories we tell through the game are fantasy adventure stories like those I just named, or classics like the King Arthur legends, fairy tales, Olympic myths, the voyages of Sinbad, and so forth. It’s just that rather than passively reading a novel that someone else wrote for you, in this case, you get to actively experience the story from the point of view of the protagonists themselves, and control the outcome of the story through the choices you make.

These classic and modern tales do include mythical creatures, including some scary ones such as dragons, minotaurs, gorgons, and even demons, which our heroes confront and battle as these stories—which we have been entertaining each other with since the dawn of human history—use them to describe the epic struggle between the forces of good and evil. The heroes often have supernatural gifts or powers such as magic swords or wands or the ability to cast magic spells that make the stories larger than life and exciting to tell, since those things, like the fantastic creatures the heroes battle, don’t show up in our more mundane real lives.

If you are someone for whom a story that merely contains mention of such creatures of legend, or heroes who use magic to accomplish their goals, is offensive and would cause you to reject the book as a candidate for your summertime reading list, then it’s safe to say D&D is likewise not a game you will want to play. Conversely, if you read The Chronicles of Narnia or A Wizard of Earthsea and thought they were wonderful stories and thought it would be even better to actually “step into” a story like that and get to experience an adventure in such a world (or at least pretend to in a game), then D&D is probably going to be just fine.

Satanic Panic

Question 2: Isn’t D&D a gateway to Satanism, cults, mental and social problems, and crime?
I’ll try to be brief here since this one can be an enormous rabbit hole to fall into but I think it deserves mentioning since it had been so controversial in its time. If you’ve ever considered the Salem witch trials of 1692–1693 and wondered how any rational society could become gripped in that kind of hysteria, look no further than the United States circa 1980–1990. It was a tragic case that swept up many people and organizations in its wake, from day care centers and schools to religious organizations. Everyday citizens, law enforcement, television news anchors, and fired-up preachers were just certain that Satanic cults were lurking behind every corner and hiding under every bush. While this wasn’t specifically about D&D, as a relatively unknown game which sounded suspiciously strange and exotic to those who never heard of it before, it naturally got caught up in the furor along with everyone else and before long was accused of… well… all of the things I mentioned already in the introduction at the start of this entry above.

While unfortunate for those wrongfully accused of wrongdoing during this furor, there was a silver lining in all of this. Since the accusations of actual crime were so prominent and the concerns of severe psychological harm were so rampant, this caused the game to get a lot of actual scrutiny by professionals across all the relevant fields, where propaganda spread from pulpits and mimeographed pamphlets by (understandably) concerned (but unfortunately ill-informed) parents gave way to methodically gathered hard data and peer-reviewed scientific studies.

And what they found after a bright, hard light was shone on the reality of the effects of playing D&D was quite the stark contrast to what the headlines and pearl-clutching of the 80s led folks to expect. It turned out that, compared to their peers, teens who regularly played D&D were far less likely to succumb to suicide or suffer from social isolation and other issues, including involvement in criminal activities. One of the things that playing this game does do to you if you play it a lot, what it practically forces upon you as a consequence of playing it, in fact, is that it requires you to develop effective teamwork and social problem-solving skills. And it turns out those are actually rather applicable to helping you navigate your way in the real world as well.

As far as the alleged occult connections, they were found to be as non-existent as the accusations levelled against everyone else during the Satanic Panic. This was the time when everyone was whispering that evil rituals were secretly being conducted in every Jewish synagogue, every Mormon Temple and Stake Center, every neighborhood daycare center, Catholic church, basically anywhere, anyone, anything you could imagine. The D&D game takes place in fantasy worlds which include magical creatures and wizards who can cast spells. In the fictional stories we read out of books for fun, and the games we play, a demon may show up to be the villain to be defeated by the heroes. Nothing in the game remotely pretends any of it is real, purports to teach you how to actually cast spells, summon real demons, or any nonsense of the sort.

Know Before You Go

Question 3: If I play, will I be comfortable with the subject matter, themes, people I’m associating with, etc.?
Now this, I think, is not only an excellent question, but the one I think you must absolutely take seriously. Not, I emphasize, that this is a problem with the game, but rather this is something important to be aware of, and to manage properly. Your experience, and whether playing D&D is a rewarding and fun hobby that you enjoy, or a negative experience you don’t care to repeat again, hinges on this one issue more than any other. As I mentioned earlier, D&D is a game where you sit down with your friends to collectively tell a story together. Each of you takes on the role of one of the heroes of the adventure story, actively directing how the story will turn out as you decide what your character will do as he or she faces each challenge in each of the scenes as the story’s plot unfolds.

But what sort of story will it be, exactly? If you walk into a bookstore, there are all kinds of novels you could choose to read. The store will be happy to sell you whichever one catches your interest and aligns with your personal tastes without judging you. Another patron might not have the same interests and in fact you and the next person in line might be shocked and appalled at each other’s tastes in literature. But that doesn’t mean bookstores are bad or that reading novels is wrong to enjoy. It means books of all kinds offer something for everyone and everyone can choose the books they personally want to read.

We can say the same about what films we watch. And, as it turns out, the same applies to the adventures we play in D&D games.

Nothing in the game will encourage or constrain how you tell your particular story or what kind of elements you choose to include in it. Maybe yours will be light-hearted and comedic. Or perhaps you prefer a gritty, grim-dark tale where the characters face danger and violent confrontations or crime and injustice more directly. Maybe yours will include steamy romantic scenes, or alternatively you may want to just suggest such things happen “off camera” or perhaps never bother to refer to them at all because you’re too busy rescuing the captive villager from an ogre.

That is all entirely up to the people you play with at your particular game table and will be different than anyone else playing their own games at their tables. And that means it is vitally important to know who you are playing with and how they want to experience their story when you all start your adventure together. You’ll want to establish some common ground rules together. What is the tone you want to set? What elements are out of bounds? What would you enjoy most to be part of in terms of story, setting, and plot?

A good GM² will start out with some kind of “session zero” before launching the campaign proper, giving the group a chance to settle in and give all the players time to get comfortable with each other and come to agreement about what everyone’s expectations are.

Personally, even though I play with a group of friends I’ve known for a long time, I still start off by sending everyone an online survey which asks some very specific questions about sensitive topics and how comfortable they feel having them included or referenced in our story. You never know where someone’s real-life discomforts are and the whole point of playing a game together is for everyone to have fun. If you throw something into a game where anyone at the table ends up feeling like it’s suddenly not fun for them anymore, then as a GM you just failed somewhere.

I’ll illustrate with a few actual examples. I know one person who was so arachnophobic that they would have panic attacks even at the sight of plastic spider decorations at Halloween. If they played D&D at my table, knowing that, I would make sure not to have any giant spiders (a common monster in D&D adventures—and by “giant spider” I mean a spider as big as you are) in that particular game because that would just be cruel to do that to them. In another case, we played a game where a coup was staged against a usurper who had illegitimately taken over the throne of the kingdom (we were there to put the rightful heir back on the throne). One complication was that one of the members of his court, a top advisor who would likely end up being in the final battle, was also pregnant with the usurper’s child. That opens all kinds of ethical and moral quandries for the players to struggle with. In my group, they found a creative way to take the expectant mother safely out of the fight so there was no danger to her or her unborn child and she was held in custody while the rest of the battle took place. However, I heard of another group who played the same adventure where the GM knew that one of their players had just suffered a miscarriage in her own life, and even having that scene in their telling of the story at all would just hit too close to home for that player, so they thought it best just to remove that from the story entirely.

In whatever ways you need to, your table will arrange to be telling a story that is comfortable to you for your personal moral framework and interesting to what you enjoy in an adventure story. And if it isn’t, you need to go find another table that will do that. There’s no reason to put up with one that won’t. It’s certainly not the case by any means that all D&D tables are the same. In fact, every one is virtually as unique as each person playing it.

I fell in love with Dungeons & Dragons, and the storytelling of it, and the weird dice, and the fact that it didn’t use a traditional board. It felt like I was a part of something special and almost kind of like a secret club because a lot of people didn’t know what it was and didn’t understand it.
—Wil Wheaton