Sandy Petersen was there at the beginning. The designer of Call of Cthulhu and co-author of RuneQuest has been playing tabletop RPGs since 1974, and he pushed back this week against a claim spreading on social media: that Dungeons & Dragons was always the domain of what critics now call “theater kids.”
The exchange began after game developer Mark Kern, known online as Grummz, declared that “D&D is long gone.” A user responded by arguing the hobby had always attracted “theatre kid types.” Petersen rejected that framing:
