From the Satanic Panic Dungeons & Dragons Files

A brief look at some misrepresentations and untruths about Dungeons & Dragons from the past.

by R. Nelson Bailey

While perusing a book titled Sports & Recreation Fads, by Frank W. Hoffman and William G. Bailey, published in the early 1990s, I was surprised to find a section on Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). This struck me as strange — that a book featuring topics such as bowling, dance marathons, and baseball card collecting would include anything on a role-playing game. As a lifelong gamer, I never considered D&D a “fad.” (Apparently, some people did, though not so much these days.) What stood out, however, was the contradiction: on the one hand, the book treated D&D as a shallow pastime destined to fade away; on the other, it echoed the exaggerated fears of its critics, who saw the game as a dangerous cultural threat. The authors even devoted one-third of the D&D section to its controversies.

That a book on the ideologically neutral subject of fads would delve into these accusations shows us what the general dialogue about D&D was like at the time. I find these claims about D&D to be endlessly fascinating, with their bizarre misrepresentations and illogical conclusions. This article provides a brief overview of some specific controversies mentioned in Sports & Recreation Fads, many of which persist to this day.

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Included in this conspiratorial cauldron was the game of Dungeons & Dragons.

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To put the criticisms in context, let’s first examine a brief summary of their origins. The early 1980s saw the rise of a new form of moral panic, one later dubbed the “Satanic Panic.” Leaders of morality in the United States and abroad claimed that shadowy groups of Satanists were hard at work undermining the cultural and moral landscape of society. These evildoers participated in ritual murder and abuse, most notably in day cares; they sent out messages to their followers in rock music with backmasking; they promoted their evil cause through heavy metal music; and they indoctrinated new converts with New Age and Wiccan practices. Included in this conspiratorial cauldron was the game of Dungeons & Dragons.

The role-playing game was first brought to public attention in 1979 due to the death and disappearance of James Dallas Egbert. This story was sensationalized by William Dear’s book The Dungeon Master. More importantly, it falsely linked a death to D&D, thereby birthing a new offshoot of the Satanic Panic. The fears over D&D reached a crescendo in 1985 with the airing of a 60 Minutes segment and a Newsweek article on the game’s purported ill effects on its players.

The authors of Sports & Recreation Fads mention the following criticisms of Dungeons & Dragons:

Reality vs. Play

One issue the authors bring up is that players become so obsessed with the game that they cannot differentiate between reality and fantasy. They quote the 1^st Edition Players Handbook, saying that the game is “so mind-unleashing that it comes near reality.” This insinuates that players enter a hallucinatory trance that causes them to lose hold of even basic reality. This accusation would have you believe that your average D&D player is a moron of the highest caliber.

Encourages Violence

The book quotes a physician and gamer who claims that, “The level of violence in this make-believe world runs high. There is hardly a game in which the players do not indulge in murder, arson, torture, rape, or highway robbery.” We all joke about characters being murder hobos, but this quote fails to provide any context for the game situations in which these actions occur. Are villainous NPCs committing these acts? Sure, some players might have their characters commit these crimes in the course of a game session, but to claim that it occurs in most games is a stretch. Furthermore, this quote gives the reader the impression that the D&D rulebooks endorse these actions. Finally, most people playing D&D have enough sense to differentiate between make-believe violence and real violence. The authors, however, seem unable to separate the two.

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The average player’s mind is an empty vessel waiting to be filled.

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Occult Connection

Some moral leaders claim that the use of spells and the supernatural in the game encourages its players to dabble with demonic spirits and to “promote the influence of the occult.” This fallacious belief concerning D&D persists to this day, as well as books and movies such as the Harry Potter series. This accusation would have you believe that the average player’s mind is an empty vessel waiting to be filled with all sorts of evil influences.

Worshipping Gods

The authors of Sports & Recreation Fads find it “disconcerting” that the Deities & Demigods rulebook encourages characters to worship the gods listed therein. Once again, the authors believe that a player character following Arioch equates to the player worshipping the god in real life. Once again, we all know the difference; the authors do not.

Conclusion

While it is clear that Hoffman and Bailey did their homework on Gary Gygax, TSR, and how D&D is played (to an extent), they accepted the accusations of its critics at face value. They do quote a TSR spokesman who dismissed the claims and added that the game “has more benefits than dangers.” To those who are familiar with role-playing games, the points listed above are laughably absurd distortions of reality. However, a large segment of the population did, and to a degree still do, believe disinformation about D&D without question.

What makes these old criticisms important is not just that they were wrong, but that they helped shape the way gaming was perceived for years. D&D became a convenient scapegoat for broader cultural anxieties about youth, imagination, and the unknown. The same fears later resurfaced in debates over video games, music, and even fantasy literature. Looking back, the controversies around D&D remind us how easily panic can overwhelm reason — and how important it is to separate myth from reality when judging any cultural phenomenon.