Dungeons & Dragons

Someone left me a note in my (now-long-gone) guest book about not having said something about Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Obviously, this person knows me very well. Indeed it is curious how I could have written so much about myself on this site, and yet not once have mentioned the subject. As anyone connected with me between my 6th grade and senior year of high school can attest, I was a true devotee of the game.

Okay, I was obsessed.

If you want a truly good story, sit back nice and easy in your chair, and get ready to read. I’m not going to describe the game. That’s not the point of this story. I don’t have any links to game materials, info, or resources, for reasons that will soon be apparent. There’s much more to it than that. See, it’s a spiritual thing.

Ah, but I am jumping ahead…

The story starts with my cousin, Stacy. I have lost track of her in the intervening years, but she started me thinking about it. She was several years older than myself, and she lived on the east coast, but the death of my grandfather had brought us together. She got to telling me about the game and how it was so cool. Well, it just so happened that, while I was in Elkhart visiting my grandmother, another friend down the street told me that he played. So I went and played with him and his friend. I had enough fun that I asked for a boxed copy of the Basic edition of Dungeons and Dragons. I took that to my best friend back home, and we played and played and played. Then I met a quiet guy on the junior high bus that had the Advanced books. I started looking through those and quickly wanted nothing more to do with the Basic and Intermediate sets. I talked Dad into picking up the Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide and Monster Manual for me in the big town of Columbus. (Remember I was growing up in North Vernon.) I read and read and read. I studied those books so much that I can almost still see the pictures and tables and feel their weight in my hands. I didn’t do anything but play with AD&D (and build things with Legos.)

In 7th grade, we had some kind of hobby day where, once a week, we would go to another room for an hour and listen to someone talk about fishing or sewing or something. It was designed to broaden our perspective. Not a bad idea I guess. In 8th grade, a friend and I got together and petitioned the Vice Principal to let us have a “D&D” class in addition to the rest of the “clubs.” We had a blow-out. There must have been 3 times as many kids in our group as any other, probably over a hundred. I’ll never forget the day. Everyone crowded around a table in the library as I DM’ed a small group of players (including the librarian and teacher of my Telecom class, who played my alter ego, Dunkirk the paladin) through attacking an old, orc-infested castle. The class eventually split into two good sized groups, many others just did their own thing, having given it a good look, but having no further interest, and we had a lot of fun. But it was actually the start of something sinister.

High school approached and we continued to play.

Then “Eric” came along. See, Eric was from Chicago, which was supposed to be impressive to us backwater hicks, I guess. He told everyone that his dad and Gary Gygax were buddies back in Nam. That’s right, the then-late 50-ish creator of the game supposedly served in Nam. (That would have put him in his late 30′s while “in country,” and I knew he wasn’t a career military man.) But, being the incredibly gullible person I had always been, I let it slide. I had doubts, but…

He introduced us to a radically different way to play. One where all the old rules didn’t apply. The way Gary played. And, being as D&D is nothing but a game where everyone plays by the same rules, it worked. Our group swallowed the things he was dishing out, and we all played by the same book. The only problem was that the “book” was that anything went. He was just making it up as he went along. And his girlfriend was in on the joke. I can still see her smirking as I took notes while he made up his rules on the fly.

Eric’s rules made our characters as powerful as gods in the game. Since none of the other things in the game posed any more challenge, being as our characters were so powerful, we did the next best thing: we turned on each other. I don’t know if that had been Eric’s intent from the start, but I’m sure he was pleased with the results. Every day, someone would come to school, announce that we’d killed someone else forever and ever, and the next day, they’d come back, say that according to this or that rule, or one of Gary’s friends, he was back from the dead and that he had killed the killer, again beyond any hope of resurrection. It was like some sort of insane version of survivor.

Oh yeah, and we — a bunch of redneck kids from North Vernon — supposedly held about 35% of the land mass of Greyhawk, according to Gary’s “official” campaign.

All this infighting and backstabbing came at a time when the game was getting truly popular and, therefore, getting press. There were a lot of reports that the game was detrimental to kids, with all of it’s hack and slash violence and occult-like overtones. I was the first person in my high school to come to the game’s defense. I wrote a term paper entitled “Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, Benevolent or Benign?” not even realizing the self-delusional irony of the statement. Being fairly religious at the time, I asked God what He thought about the game. To get my answer, I just flipped open the Bible beside my bed, which I was making an effort to read at the time. I found the following:

Matthew 15:11, “Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man.”

I took this to mean that D&D couldn’t bring out of a person anything that wasn’t already there, but I was wrong. That scripture is talking about physical things, food and water, not spiritual things like attitudes and personal relationships. Those don’t go in via a person’s mouth, and they do, indeed, pollute what’s inside. Despite inventing an interpretation that ignored the very answer I had sought, I began to see the effects of the game in my friends.

I used to have some comments here about some bizarre and depressing things I saw going on in the lives of my friends, things I attribute to effects of D&D. Now, this article has been up on my web site for almost as long as I’ve had a web site. It was one of the first things I wrote, because it was one of the biggest things I needed to process and get past as I made the transition from living for myself to living for God. Yet, after almost 7 years of being available online, one of the people I commented about contacted me through an attorney to ask me to “refrain from any and all use of” this person’s name “in any future articles that (I) may feel compelled to write.” I suppose that if I wanted to get technical, I could point out that I hadn’t, actually, been asked to remove anything that had been currently on my site, but I got the idea, and it was a perfectly fair request. I went past pure fact and had inferred some things here that could indeed have been construed as libelous. I had just never thought about it in that light. So I removed those comments, not just about the one person who complained, but about all of them. In fact, I’m removing all the last names from my site anyway. After all, not even “Eric” needs to have this stuff tied to his name after 20 years. Personal attacks were never the point. In fact, my point has been made for me. I commented on what I saw, and it cast someone in a light bad enough to think it legally actionable. The bottom line is that it was some distressing stuff.

You may say the game had nothing to do with any of this. But the culture, the atmosphere, the spirit of it bred the pain that I saw. And I had seen enough. So I started making calls. I called another old friend, Keith, who had left our high school after 9th grade to go to Culver Academy. He put me in touch with a guy who put me in touch with another guy who was friends with a guy who was friends with Gygax. Or something. I was a step away from getting this whole thing straightened out. I was going to get to Gary, the source, tell him about it, and get his reaction. By this time, I knew Eric was lying, and I just wanted to confront him about it conclusively. Well, before I could actually make the call, my best friend, Kevin, told one of the others in the group what I was up to, and guess what? Gary Gygax suddenly “told” someone else (that only one of us “knew”) that we couldn’t play by his rules anymore. Hmm, imagine that. After that, Eric left us alone, and things settled down. Kevin and I still played, but it was mostly bitter between members of the larger group.

Parenthetically, Kevin and I went to a tiny D&D convention in Elkhart not long after, and the last guy I tried to reach on my way to Gygax was actually our DM! Small world, huh? By that time, the dust had settled, and we were starting to move past the whole mess, so I didn’t use the opportunity to follow through on my quest.

“They” say that D&D leads to the occult, that it’s a doorway to larger and more ominous things. “They” are right. Let me ask those of you familiar with the game and it’s players: they have friends that are involved in the occult, don’t they? It always happens that way. I have never seen an otherwise clean-nosed group play the game. They are always on the fringe of the occult. I was too. You get friends in it. Soon, you find yourself investigating it. D&D does teach you about it. I, myself, have played with Tarot cards and have actually read some of the Necromonicon and the Satanic bible. That ain’t kid stuff, folks. That’s full-fledged satanism. The game steps you through a lot of the ground work. Not intentionally. Of course not. You can’t convince me that Mr. Gygax’s intent was to create a training class for witchcraft. He started out making it a rules-based metal miniatures game for Civil War-era battles. But a training ground it is. There’s a bible tract by Chick Publishing that details how a real witch used the game to cull promising witches from the untalented. At the time, I scoffed loudly at the tract. I have seen it cast in derision around the net. I have seen a lengthy article by Tracy Hickman, of Dragonlance fame, decry the very thought, but I’ve seen it myself. And so have they, even if they ignore it. And so has anyone else who has known someone who played the game more than once.

Deut 18:10-12, “There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch, or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer. For all that do these things are an abomination unto the Lord: and because of these abominations the Lord thy God doth drive them out from before thee.”

In case you are still unclear, my Webster’s dictionary defines “abomination” as “extreme dislike or abhorrence.”

Lev 20:27, “A man also or woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death: they shall stone them with stones; the blood shall be upond them.”

Not only does God hate witchcraft, but the penalty for it was death. These are but two of many, many scriptures in the Bible that deal with how God feels about witchcraft. Feel free to read more if you are still unsure of His opinion of it.

1 Thes 5:22, “Abstain from all appearance of evil.”

Most people understand that God is a god of mercy. That’s true. But they misunderstand what happened with Christ. God was merciful to those who repented in the times before Christ… if they managed to do so and pay the sacrifice for their sin before being caught. Since Christ, immediate penalty for sin has been put off until the “white throne judgment” seen in the Revelation. Don’t confuse delaying the judgment of sin with acceptance. God still hates witchcraft. It’s just that Christ paid the price for such sins, and gave us time to get our lives lined up to God’s Word. But in addition to the leniency we’re now given, we’re expected to live to a higher standard. “Whoseover looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.” Now, in addition to not practicing witchcraft, we’re expected to not play like we’re practicing it.

Yes, you can play D&D and live. You can even play and prosper. But I don’t think people who are on their way to heaven will play it for long. That sort of thing is just no congruent with a holy life, dedicated unto God. I don’t know if I can say that it is inherently evil, but the devil uses it to get into a person’s mind, and no Christian ought to have anything to do with it. I can’t state it any clearer than that. I use to look at the new stuff that they are making now, just for curiosity’s sake. I tried to play D&D-like RPG video games, but I got convicted about it. And, no matter how much everyone in the world thinks of Harry Potter, I think it’s a negative spiritual influence. In retrospect, I’ve seen many of my friends in the church try things like World of Warcraft. While I worry about that, it’s not my place to tell them they can’t. However, they usually don’t play for long, and I think it’s just their Christian sensibilities kicking in when they see what’s really involved.

Hebrews 11:15, “And truly, if they had been mindful of that country from whence they came out, they might have had opportunity to have returned.”

But no story of my involvement with the game would be complete without telling you about how I was delivered from it. It was not long after I started going to The World of Pentecost, after a good Wednesday night service. We were having such awesome revival with Brother Copple that you couldn’t tell our Wednesday services from our Sunday services, and they both were always blowouts. After one particular Wednesday, a bunch of us young singles went to Taco Bell on 25th street. We talked and laughed for an hour or more, and the younger ones had to go home. (I maintain that no one knows how to have a good time more than Apostolic Pentecostals.) We older types, myself, Donnie, and Dana, stayed and talked some more. I went on and on about how I had been so involved in Zen Buddhism in college, and how I had been writing a book about the integration of Zen and Christianity, and how I was going to have to drop all of that now, I guessed. That’s when Donnie, full of the Holy Ghost, looked me square in the eyes and said, “You’re still in it.”

I got mad and growled, “No I’m not! What do you think I’m doing?! I’m trying to get out!”

And he said, real quietly, “Dave, that’s not the Holy Ghost right there.”

And he was right; I could feel myself getting pretty upset. He said something else I don’t recall, because at that moment, the power of God came over me, convicting me and showing me that I was indeed still “in it.” I started crying, right there in Taco Bell. It was awesome, if awkward. God delivered me from the spirits that I had entertained for years from being involved in D&D. That night I resolved to set the score straight. After I got home from work the next day, I took the following scripture to heart:

Acts 19:19, “Many of them also which used curious arts brought their books together, and burned them before all men: and they counted the price of them, and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver.”

I dragged all of my D&D stuff, indeed all of my role-playing stuff, as well as all the books and notes about religion that I had been working with – probably over $600 worth of materials – and burned them on the garbage heap in my parent’s back yard. I count that day as one of the most free in my life. I can’t tell you the weight that was lifted from my shoulders in doing that. A friend asked why I burned it all, instead of making some money from it, but I just figured that, if it was bad for me, it was bad for everyone else too.

I also have to say something about my pastor in relation to all of this. It was only a couple weeks after I started going to the World of Pentecost that he suggested I set up a meeting with him. He seemed nice enough, and I certainly had questions at the time, so I did. Among the things we talked about was D&D. I knew that he would have reservations about the whole business, but when I brought it up, he merely asked, “Oh, what’s that?” As I sat there explaining the premise of the game, I obviously had to make a lot of excuses. I volunteered that there was a controversy over the game, but that there really shouldn’t be, since, after all, I wasn’t really casting magic spells, now was I? And, yeah, your characters worshiped all these gods from various pantheons, and you role played that, but you weren’t really doing it in real life, were you? It all sounded so hollow to me, even then, but Pastor Mitchell never said anything about it. We simply moved on to other things.

After I had been delivered from it and had burned my books, I talked with him again about it. I noted how remarkable it was that although he surely knew how evil the game was, he didn’t ram that knowledge down my throat. It was a shining example of how a man can “pastor” in the purest definition of the term. He knew that if I were serious about living for God, I would eventually draw close enough to Him that He could reveal it. I asked him what he would have done if the Spirit hadn’t delivered me, and he said that eventually, if things had not straightened themselves out, he would have tried to talk to me about it. However, if I hadn’t been serious, it wouldn’t have mattered if Pastor Mitchell had told me; I wouldn’t have given it up anyway. In fact, pressuring me wouldn’t probably have sent me the other way. Some things can be taught, but some things can only be revealed. For me, this was one of those things.

There. I talked about Dungeons & Dragons.