The 1980s were prime years for accusations that the game fostered demon worship and a belief in witchcraft and magic. Some religious figures cast it as corrupting enough to steer impressionable young players toward suicide and murder. As Retro Report recalls, fears began to be stirred in 1979 with the disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III, a gifted 16-year-old student at Michigan State University and a devoted D&D player. The game warped his thinking and drove him to behave erratically — or so some insisted. In reality, the boy was already troubled. After a month’s absence, he was found. But in 1980 he ended up taking his own life.

A nationwide focus on his plight propelled interest in D&D. Sales soared, with the numbers of players leaping from the thousands into the millions. Condemnation rose as well, usually after bad things happened to D&D gamers. When Irving Lee Pulling II, a high school student in Virginia, killed himself in 1982, his mother, Patricia A. Pulling, blamed the game and formed a group called Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons. D&D was also attacked after a few murders, like the 1984 strangulation of a Missouri teenager, Mary C. Towey, by two young men, Ronald G. Adcox and Darren Lee Molitor.

A “moral panic,” as cultural critics labeled it, set in. It was not unlike 1950s fears over gory comic books and 1980s worries over sex-laced rock music. But researchers, including those with the Centers for Disease Control, established no causal link between the game and violence. Much of the finger-pointing seemed rooted in a classic fallacy in logic: Mr. Adcox and Mr. Molitor played D&D. Mr. Adcox and Mr. Molitor became killers. People who play D&D become killers.

Agitation over the game has subsided. So has general interest. D&D is classically low-tech, played with pens, paper, dice and figurines. Its influence, however, abides, notably among creative types who acknowledge that they qualified as full-blown nerds in their teens.

The game “redirected teenage miseries and energies that might have been put to more destructive uses,” Jon Michaud wrote in The New Yorker two years ago. Mr. Díaz told Retro Report that he “learned an enormous amount about what it meant to be courageous and what it meant to be compassionate, and the kind of moral — hard, moral — choices that one needs to make in real life.”