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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tyler Do'Urden" data-source="post: 4953249" data-attributes="member: 4601">Ooh, ooh, can I be Spartacus too?I started playing when I was 10 as well... very occasionally, with a friend who lived across the highway.  This would have been around 1992.  It lasted until my parents took the game away from me later that same year; they believed that it taught me racism and violent, might-makes-right attitudes.  Contrary to popular belief, religious conservatives aren't the only people opposed to D&D.  There are liberals who think that it offers bad lessons to children as well- killing people and taking their stuff is alright, for instance.  People who look different are naturally evil.  Good and evil can be absolutely determined; etc., etc.  I do think these are valid concerns for young people, and I do think that too much time spent playing D&D has had negative impacts on my life and caused some neurotic behavior- there's always part of me that seems to think that all of my "attributes" as a person can be measured by some absolute number, that all our traits are mathematically quantifiable, etc, etc.  In any event, probably no worse than being an obsessive sports fan.Anyway, when I was about 16, I picked up the game again, this time with an enthusiastic high school group.  Wonder of wonders, we managed to keep weekly games going for three years.  Yet, there was a problem.  While we kept playing, our campaigns always seemed to peter out with a whimper, and never come to a satisfactory conclusion.  Either we'd take a break and play a different game for awhile, before wandering back to D&D, or the campaign would simply fizzle out, as one DM (usually me) would get bored and want to hand over the baton for awhile.In college, I hooked up with a new group of guys and girls (with sporadic visits from the old gang), and the same pattern repeated itself.  While campaigns would generally last longer, they'd still get stuck at times; the only campaign to fully resolve itself was one that I found rather dull and was heavily "scripted" by the DM.In the five years since college, however, my gaming life has been a vast wasteland.  I tried forming groups with people online; they didn't gel, and we rapidly gave up.  I tried RPGA, and found the local RPGA gamers to be the biggest bunch of mouth-breathing losers I'd ever met in my life. (Your local RPGA may be different; I won't tell you where I was living.)  I switched to playing tournament M:TG instead for awhile- at least then I could play AGAINST these guys, rather than with them, but even that got old.  A few years later, I moved to China.  Over the summer, I started a bilingual D&D group; it was mildly interesting, but nobody could really get into my plot, and it ended badly.  I handed DMing over to another player, but I'm overall unsatisifed with the game.So yes, D&D is a lot of obsession and heartbreak for some of us; the game just never seems to want to go your way.</blockquote>

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