Because movies are usually half-price at most Japanese theaters on the first of every month, I was going to go see the latest Peter Jackson Hobbit movie today. Unfortunately I got sidetracked by both miserable weather and miserable tests to mark.

However, this got me thinking about evil and the things that have been the biggest, baddest most dangerous evils in my lifetime.

The devastating new drug that was unlike any other drug and so dangerous that just looking at it made an addict doomed to die in less than a year has been heroin, then cocaine, then crack cocaine, then “huffing” random substances from cans, then methamphetamine. Lots of time and money and news reports were spent on these evils but, eventually, a new evil was brought in to keep people scared and keep anti-drug money flowing to government to keep police employed and anti-drug ad money flowing to the media to keep anti-drug reporters employed.

I remember being offered meth on two different occasions back in university and was surprised to discover it had recently become the newest evilest thing. (For the record: I never tried it.) Now, however, with Breaking Bad finished and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s untimely death, it appears that heroin is destined to be cool and evil again.

However, this isn’t the evil that the Hobbit got me thinking about. When I was growing up, especially as I was raised in a fundamentalist Baptist church, the biggest evil was the game Dungeons & Dragons. Playing it, especially if we chose to be magic users/wizards, would make us yearn to commune with the Devil in order to gain special powers in our real lives.

It didn’t help that players could align their characters with different flavors of evil with Chaotic Evil being the most fun and Lawful Evil being the oxymoron. (Yes, you picky, picky geeks, I know what Lawful meant in the game. I know, so there.) If we played too much we would eventually lose touch with reality and begin to think we were our characters. A young Tom Hanks would then play us in Mazes and Monsters while Wendy Crewson played the lovestruck girl who pined for our lost sanity.

Of course, it didn’t seem very evil as Derek, Bobby, Shawn and I ate pizza and Doritos on lazy summer afternoons and pretty much figured out ways to get our characters into fights so that we could get stuff. (The more Bobby parlayed, the more likely the fight.) Magic was only useful for healing good guys and making bad guys blow up. The Magic User was usually the guy who ended up wreaking the most damage to his own party so we kept him at a distance.

In the end, I think we mostly turned out okay. At least I think I did.

Granted, in my real life I did develop the power of Resounding Voice and have learned to raise the dead. I think that has more to do with becoming a teacher than playing D&D, though.

I also still have lots of funny shaped dice hidden away somewhere. You could never have too many dice.