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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Omak Darkleaf" data-source="post: 9518695" data-attributes="member: 7045897">I’ll be fifty-five next month. I started with Holmes’ Basic in 1980, switched to AD&D a year later, and migrated to 2e slowly.( I was in college during the transition and had scant scratch for D&D books; I agree that a huge advantage to gaming as an old dude is being able to buy the books I want when I want them.) I didn’t get into 2e until ‘95, and I only played that for a few years before I moved across the country and left my gaming group behind. I did not find another until I moved back home, and I didn’t play D&D for the twenty years in between. Learning 5e at fifty was strange—especially without the bridges of 3.x and 4e to ease the transition. I should have approached learning 5e from the ground up, as if I were learning an entirely new game. Instead, I kept falling back on the inaccurate replica of the AD&D rule books in my head and patching it piecemeal with new rules as I learned them. Knowing AD&D hampered my learning because of all of the assumptions I had about the game that had changed—and my opinions on how things ought to be. (Get off my lawn, attunement!)My attention span has decreased when it comes to studying rule books, but I spend a lot more time reading lore than I once did (because I can now afford all the splatbooks I couldn’t in the long ago times). The less said about my eyesight and my evil bifocals, the better. I misremember rules more often than I once did, but I still remember them better than the average person I game with, so it’s not as frustrating as it could be. I’m also convinced that gaming keeps the mind sharper than it would be otherwise, so there’s that.Gaming sessions don’t last as long as they once did. The guys I grew up playing with would go from evening till dawn. The games that I play now run for four hours, tops, but I now play in five campaigns per week, so I’m coming out ahead.All told, I am in my personal Golden Age of D&D. I play with cool people from all over the world; I have shelves and cabinets and a cloud drive filled with D&D books; and I have regained an outlet for creativity that was missing from my life for far too long. I also have a kid who’s just the right age to learn D&D and who is actually interested in doing so. So, yeah, my fifties have so far been great for gaming and it only looks to get better.</blockquote>

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