(no subject)

[olivermoss]

* I was going to post a waffle on whether to get Baldur's Gate 3, but now I've already bought it. I don't really want a big game right now and fighting a dark urge doesn't sound super awesome as a plot, but current big hype RPG. I am going in very blind. I haven't played the earlier games. I don't know the Forgotten Realms world setting very well. D&D is not my system of choice, and for all I know about TTRPG culture and having gone to cons and also some LGBT+ specific cons on when I lived back east, I haven not played a ton of D&D.

* The game released tomorrow and I wonder if that will go smoothly or be a clusterfuck. They can't do pre-downloads so everyone is going to try to DL it at once! Something about how early access to the beta worked on Steam means they can't also do pre-downloads.

* I did a post about Baldur's Gate 1 for transmediaclub Man, running down some details was a pain. I know the gender swap relics in D&D did not originate in Baldur's Gate because there are jokes about them in Munchkin which came out in 2001!

At some point I'll ramble about how all the history of queerness in TTRPGs and even TTRPG history in general is really hidden and undocumented due to both the OG satanic panic case and also the satantic panic falling into a cultural memory hole for a while. But not tonight! I will write and be productive. I will also not wonder how much of SThings fandom even knows that satanic panic was a thing and who the starting point for Eddie was. Some night I will ramble, but not now.

Comments

[mistressofmuses]

I genuinely wonder how different an arc we'd have if the satanic panic shit hadn't happened. I mean, backlash stuff has always been a cyclical thing, so I can't say that nothing of the sort would EVER have happened... but so much stuff completely disappeared underground in response, and wound up with no real surviving documentation... I wonder how different specifically TTRPGs would be now, but even just more generally how fantasy stuff would have progressed. Whether there'd be a more follow-able queer thread, even if it had stayed largely subtextual outside of specific groups.

I know we'll never know, but.

It is distressing how many people out there don't know that the satanic panic happened. Worse when it's people who are in a fandom where that's a pretty important thing, actually!

[olivermoss]

Yeah, a lot of geek spaces got real weird about being openly associated with LGBT+ stuff. That's part of why really pinning anything down would likely be a massive project. Even in the 90s D&D was completely underground in areas more effected by the bigger legal cases. I used to have a documentary on late ages ago, I don't know if I can still find it.

Such a memory hole! Honestly, it wasn't until fairly recently that I even know that the one X Files ep that deals with it actually references the book that was written by the early ringleaders of the BS. Even with my interest in true crime and D&D and counterculture, I had some big pieces missing.

[mistressofmuses]

There was definitely a big "ugh, no, don't lump us in with them" vibe for a long while, despite how much crossover it seems like there always was between queer and geek subcultures. It seems like there was a sort of "we have a bad enough reputation, we don't want to be associated with other freaks!" attitude in a lot of places. (Gosh, throwing your fellow weirdos under the bus because you want people to think you're "normal"? Why does that sound familiar? :P ) These are the weird bits of subcultural history that it sucks to have very few sources for!

But yeah, D&D itself was pretty hidden away for a long while. There are old episodes of Forensic Files and other similar shows that we leave on for background noise that lean HARD on how scary and weird and dangerous these "Role Playing Games" were, and how they inspired murder because the players couldn't tell fiction from reality, etc. The episodes are old, but not THAT old - most aired in the late 90s/early 00s.

My intro to D&D was a pair of Intellivision games my parents had, lmao. (And "Treasure of Tarmin" was the best, lol.)

[olivermoss]

My early experiences was a lot of people saying 'don't lump us in with them, they is very weird of you, don't much such weird assumptions' publicly, but them privately a lot of guys played girls or ran the 'dungeons and drag queens' rules variant for a D&D board game, etc. I don't know how widespread that was, but I went to cons all over New England and not only was it the case but a lot of people acted like this is just what the TTRPG scene was like everywhere. It sucked, but also that was a lot closer to the steam tunnels thing than today, so... it was messy.

Weird that the other side's take, that D&D lead to murder, lingered on but the real stories, man it took a while for me to even know.

My main early experience with D&D was that being the game other gamers played while I was in GURPS, In Nomime and Call of Cthulhu games and also some LARPS. D&D was a painfully inflexible system and GURPS might have been a major competitor if they didn't need to shut down operations after being raided by the secret service and having a long court battle over their Cyberpunk games having hacking as a major mechanic. Also, talk about forgotten history, there's a lot there. How is this not the topic of a ton of video essays and stuff? I am still annoyed that I was broke when they auctioned off the copies of their core rules and supplements that had federal court evidence stickers on them. That happening definitely made the TTRPG space very D&D and D&D-like focused rather than more free form.

[mistressofmuses]

I recall a lot of guys who played girls, ha.

My connection to D&D stuff was almost all at a remove. It was the sort of thing that I had lots of friends-of-friends that played, but it wasn't until mid-college that I had direct friends who played, and then I started playing as occasional guest characters and such. At that point it was basically all queer weirdos at the table, lol. But it was mostly D&D as opposed to any other systems, with occasional homebrew rules thrown in.

Oh man, that's another "how different would things be now?" hypothetical. If there'd been a more viable alternative to D&D, how different would TTRPG spaces look now? I've heard of the thing with GURPS getting investigated, and how wild that whole thing sounds, but I feel like I know very little about it actually. How IS that not a popular video essay topic??

[olivermoss]

I also, for various reasons, didn't play until college. I did play some D&D back then, but in general I was just very aware of it's cultural impact in TTRPG spaces, knew the jokes, heard the stories... it was just a big part of the culture.

It's weird how if you talk about massive court cases and other stuff having a big impact on geek culture, especially parts of it, people act like you are delusional and looking to feel oppressed but uh... there was a lot.