Shinju

I started playing Role Playing Games in 1979, which was the summer before my Senior year in high school. In summer school I had overheard a couple of guys talking about an Avalon Hill game they had been playing. That caught my attention because I had picked up a few games by a competitor and had nobody to play them with. I joined into their conversation and quickly made friends with them. We would play the Lord of the Rings board game most of the time, but after a few weeks, one guy named Barry suggested we try out this new game called Dungeons & Dragons. He had picked up the blue starter box that was available at that time. After that we played D&D quite a bit, and I invested in the new AD&D Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide. I started running games for some other friends of mine, though I still played with that other group as well.

After I joined the Navy, I encountered others who either played AD&D, or were interested in playing. I had picked up the rest of the books what were available at the time and so I started dungeon mastering a campaign set in The World of Greyhawk. That campaign ran from September of 1980 until January of 1981, and the characters had reached 16th level. After that, I would find the D&D group at each duty station I was assigned to and both play and referee. This lasted until August of 1986, when I transferred back to shore duty. The base I was assigned to was small and I could not find any players. For a short time in 1989 I found a small group to play second edition with, but the interest was not there on any side.

I had no more involvement with RPGs until 2004 when I refereed d20 Modern for a group of people. I had sold off my first and second edition AD&D books about six years earlier. Wanting to get back into D&D, I picked up the 3.5 edition in 2005. unfortunately, I no longer knew anyone interested in playing. I also thought that online multiplayer games had killed interest in paper and pen games.

The a couple of years ago, my seventeen year old daughter came to me and asked me to teach her, her boyfriend, and a couple of their friends how to play D&D. This seemed like a nice opportunity to get back into the hobby. Now I DM my daughter's group every Saturday. While we have shuffled from 3.5 to 4 to Pathfinder, we have finally settled on 5th edition.