In another context altogether, I mentioned that I played role-playing games as a teen, and I did become Pagan in college, and indeed I was introduced to Paganism (specifically an idiosyncratic form of NeoDruidry and Eclectic Wicca) by two friends in my college gaming group. While I would argue with anyone from the anti-gamer end of Christian fundamentalism that there was no cause-and-effect relationship between my being a gamer and my leaving Christianity, I am compelled to consider, given the appearance of a correlation, whether there might have been a common cause. Certainly they were both part of throwing off the "good girl" identity given me by my parents, but I doubt simple rebellion would have lasted this long, and not only am I still quite Pagan, but I'm also still a gamer, although not as frequently as I might like. A skeptic might suggest that both require a vivid imagination, and to some extent that's probably true. There is a certain amount of role-playing, in the theatrical/LARP sense at least, to doing good ritual. In my case, I think there's an inherent love of symbolism going on in both cases - in gaming, representing a complete character in a collection of numbers and descriptors; in ritual, representing meaning in forms both improvised and archaic.
Elsewhere in that conversation, I pointed out that some young men of my acquaintance in high school were permitted by their parents to play the Marvel Super Heroes FASERIP system, but not AD&D, because of the "Satanic" stigma attached to AD&D in those days of the Satanic Panic and in our notch of the Bible Belt. Another interlocutor mentioned something similar regarding his gaming group and other non-D&D-based RPGs; both the Call of Cthulhu games and the various White Wolf World of Darkness games were mentioned. While it could be argued that, in those days when Watchmen was still new, that the Marvel RPG really was somehow more innocent than AD&D, the same was certainly not true for the others. I suspect that if the particular wingnut fundies who has their knickers in a twist over AD&D had read either the CoC rulebook or the Vampire: the Masquerade basic sourcebook, they'd have burst a blood vessel.
Speaking of the World of Darkness, I realized quite recently that my current pan-Near-Eastern trio of matron goddesses make a fairly good Weaver-Wyld-Wyrm set. Of course, I don't have the same negative associations that the WoD lycanthropes do with those archetypes. And my oldest matron, the one I knew was at the core of my deepest self well before I steeled myself to walk away from the church, I recognized first in the Monster Manual, twisted and oversimplified as the depiction of Her mythology was. So perhaps the gamer connection goes deeper than I'd like to admit.
Of course, I don't play AD&D anymore, and haven't since 2nd edition. My system of choice has been GURPS for a long time, and when I GM (which is most of the time), I usually prefer modern or futuristic settings to pseudo-medieval or Tolkienesque ones. Two of my Yule gifts this year were a set of electronic six-sided dice and a set of wooden ones. The first are a bit silly, but they were from the Spouse - part of his recent soldering kick - so I appreciate the thought and the effort that went into them. The wooden ones, though - I've toyed with the idea of creating a divination method using dice for quite a while. The ancient Near Eastern cultures cast lots to determine the divine will; d6 should do just fine.
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