D&D second edition cleaned up the game's act, for better or worse

The AD&D Player's Handbook on a tablet sitting on a wooden table, surrounded by a dice box, other books, and a plant pot.

As wholesome an activity that playing D&D generally is, it's still a game rooted in brutal combat systems, twisted monsters, and magical spells, which all garnered a lot of negative publicity in the 1980s at the height of the Satanic Panic in the US.

These days, we know this to be nonsense, sparked by tenuous conjecture from those who'd never played the best tabletop RPGs and overblown by sensationalized storytelling by the media – and we have plenty of evidence as to how therapeutic the act of playing TTRPGs can be. But this country-wide panic had a formative influence on the direction of the next D&D edition.