From Jonnydigital.com, the only reliable source
Around 1990, William Schnoebelen wrote Straight Talk on Dungeons and Dragons, an article claiming to prove that D&D is a ploy to attract young people into Satanism and the occult. The author backs up these claims by citing himself as an expert in Satanism, but there's a simple logical flaw in his argument - he's not an expert in D&D, not by a long shot.
Take this quote as an example:
"Now, the question becomes--if a person "innocently" works an authentic ritual that conjures up a demon, or curses someone; thinking that they are only playing a game-might not the ritual still have efficacy?"
Schnoebelen fails to realise the difference between "actual" satanic demon-summoning rituals, and fictional creature-summoning in a game. For those of you not familiar with D&D, let me explain how a player might go about "summoning a demon".
Player: "I cast summon monster v, to summon a quasit."
DM: "A small, horned creature appears in a flash of fire,
and charges at your enemy with his claws flailing."
Maybe it's just me, but I fail to see how merely stating that a fictional game character takes a certain action, can make it true in the real world. (If it was, we would see huge red-skinned trident-wielding monsters rampaging through our cities.) Nobody who knew D&D could fail to make this distinction. The result? Schnoebelen quite literally doesn't know what he's talking about.
He goes on to state that the D&D rules give Adolf Hitler as an example of a person with high Charisma. This is true, if I recall correctly, at least for earlier versions of the D&D rules. However, fuzzy logic creeps in when Schnoebelen uses the Hitler reference to prove that D&D promotes evil values. In reality, the game does not actually suggest that players take Hitler as a role-model - it merely states that Hitler was persuasive and a natural leader, which is what D&D Charisma represents.
One of the most vicious rumors about D&D is that it has caused players to go nuts and kill themself. The article perpetuates this rumour, giving a list of D&D players who reportedly killed themself or others because of the game. This evidence might hold water, except that there's often little or nothing actually connecting the deaths to D&D. (After all, Adolf Hitler was a Christian - does this prove that he was a good person, or that all Christians are murderers?) There is of course, a more logical reason.
It's an unfortunate fact that each year, thousands of depressed, misunderstood teenagers take their own lives. Often, these people are social outcasts - the ones who get picked on at school by the popular kids for being different. Coincidentally, this same demographic of social outcasts make up much of D&D's teenage playerbase (the "cool kids" play sports, not roleplaying games). Statistically, therefore, teenage D&D players are slightly more likely to commit suicide than their well-adjusted popular counterparts - and it's got nothing to do with the game itself.
Schnoebelen is looking at D&D from the point of view of someone well-versed in the occult, and so he's taking the game out of context. Magic, curses and demon-summoning all mean different things to a true occultist than they do to a gamer - where an occultist performs actual rituals which he believes to be magical, a game player merely rolls some dice, knowing clearly that the game is fictional. An interviewer could ask an occultist to explain how a certain magical ritual is performed in great detail, but at a D&D game the player has no such nowledge, able only to say "My character casts a maximized fireball, dealing 60 points of damage".
In his enthusiasm, Schnoebelen seems to have glossed over the distinction between player and character, the most basic concept of any role-playing game. Sounds to me like he was too busy freaking out after finding all those "demons" in the Monstrous Manual.
For more on this topic, read Disputed Dungeons: Fighting anti-D&D falsehoods.
Page created: 25th October 2008