So, which edition rulebook states that you have to plant a bullet into your head to astral travel? Is it the same rulebook where Pat Pulling discovered that naming her son BINK was a good idea?

If Gigax would have just come out and admitted that his game was for maladjusted nerds who were going to kill themselves anyway this wouldn't have even been an issue.

devils=wolves?
So D&D was the GTA of the 1980's? They just took the 5 or 6 people who were crazy out of the 3-4 million and said "This could be happening to your children!" I wish there were news stories from the 50's showing outraged parents saying that children needed to be protected from the menace of that decade: The Three Stooges.

Also: Dungeons and Dragons: Satan's Game. Your children, like it or not, in their weaker years are drawn to the occult, and games like D&D fuel their imaginations while drawing them deeper and deeper into the bowels of El Diablo.

Wait, so threatening to kill his sister counts as not having a history of mental illness prior to his suicide? WTF is this family smoking?

nice. fathers loaded handgun.

I think watching a news report on something you are already at least moderately acquainted with is one of the most important formative experiences in dealing with television media, because it does a tremendous job of illustrating how much research is _not_ done into the subjects they cover.

Having cunts for parents couldn't have had anything to do with it.

"Well, here's some statistics and basic sense from the game's proponents, but back to our one weepy case study."

this scared the shit out of me as a kid

The fact that most of these parents didn't know what D&D was until after their kids died shows just how attentive they were while they were alive. It's pretty hard to miss a group of five-ish people constantly playing roleplaying games as much as these kids supposedly did. (48 hours straight?)

It doesn't take a Gary Gygax with a +3 ponytail holder of intellect to see that they were just absentee parents. (even though he does anyway in part 2, the stud.)

Okay...
3 million kids play this GAME, and 24 kill themselves?
Put those stats up against Monopoly players who've killed themselves, it'd probably be the same, if not more! There are kids out there that are fucked up, and no amount of taking their D&D away from them will fix that. It's a classic "chicken or the egg" argument: are kids playing D&D, then killing themselves, or are suicidal kids just as likely to be playing D&D as they would be any other GAME? I'm thinking the latter.

(I am speaking as a non-gamer. I've created a few characters who never went on a mission, and the one time I did actually play was on a scrapheap team in a tourney where this one UNBELIEVABLY annoying guy (An annoying D&D player? NOOOOOOOOO!) took 20 minutes (I wish I was exaggerating) before every move, and I left after 90 minutes, after not even taking a half dozen turns.)

Mad props and max stars to GG for sticking behind his creation!