by Brad Sylvester

Created on: May 29, 2008   Last Updated: May 30, 2008

Raising this tired old debate again is silly. Clearly Dungeons and Dragons is a godly and righteous game. Indeed it is difficult to succeed without the aid of a devout priest in your group. Drawing strength from goodness and light, he shields his fellows in the armor of God which can be of such strength that evil creatures can not even make physical contact with them. The priest also draws upon his faith to perform miraculous healings.

If one is to make the case that role-playing a bad person makes one become bad in real life, then let's see how many troubled young people have been led to seek lives of holiness by Dungeons and Dragons. I am being facetious, but the evidence is every bit as solid as that of those who argue the other side. It is just plain silliness.

As a child, I and all my friends played many, many role-playing games of all sorts. Cops and Robbers, Cowboys and Indians, Yankees versus the Red Sox, and many more too numerous to mention. Almost all of these involved a struggle that we imagined as good versus evil, the valiant underdogs fighting the evil empire. Sometimes we ended up on the good side and sometimes we had to be the Yankees. Somehow, I did not become a police officer, a criminal, a cowpoke, an Indian Chief, nor a Yankee fan. I grew up in a house that honored the traditional values of the Red Sox and those are still my values today. Good parenting determines a child's values, not his made-up games.

At it's core, Dungeons and Dragons is a game designed to foster creative thinking. Players are encouraged to find unique solutions to difficult problems, to persevere in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles, to think, to work together with their fellows as a team and lead them through difficulties. If there are those who say these goals are to be avoided and shunned as evil, perhaps we should question their values. What behaviors would they encourage n your children? Do not test assumptions, give up mighty pursuits, follow - don't lead, accept that if a thing hasn't been conceived or accomplished before it's because God doesn't want it done. Deny evidence to the contrary (like radio-carbon dating, DNA evidence of evolution, direct observations and mathematical proofs showing that the Earth revolves around the sun...Oh wait, they've given up on that last one, but, unfortunately, only after putting the chief proponent of the concept to the flame).

It is convenient to say that one's child misbehaves because he plays a certain game. Especially if it's a game that we parents never played when we were his or her age. If I believe that then I do not need to accept responsibility for my child's misdeeds. It is like buying an indulgence from the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages, or asking Christ's forgiveness each Sunday for sins that I commit again every week.

Calling make-believe games satanic is nothing but feel-good rhetoric designed to help us understand that we need someone of higher virtue to point out good and evil, right and wrong that we apparently can't recognize on our own. The instances of children playing Dungeons and Dragons and becoming Satan worshippers probably occur about as often as children playing at statues becoming completely catatonic later in life. It may happen, but the two events are not causal, nor even related.

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