Age: 43
First DM: Me, actually. I was 11 years old, got the books, and ran a game for some other kids in summer camp.
First Edition: BECMI D&D (red box)
Started Playing: 1990. Played off and on Mage: the Ascension and Call of Cthulhu through the end of high school in 1997 (as well as the goldbox and eye of beholder series), then didn't play until 2020 and the pandemic, when I started playing 5e remotely with friends of a friend.
Current Controversies: PC death--whatever your group wants to do. It's a game. You want to have a funnel and kill most of your PCs, have a good time. You want to avoid PC death so you can run a 'theater of the mind' tiefling--aasimar romance, have a good time. Connection to personal experiences: I played Mage: the Ascension and enjoyed that, and I had the same character throughout the whole thing. I played Call of Cthulhu, enjoyed that, and we all know what happens to characters there.
Orcs and drow are evil: I don't have a strong opinion either way. Inventing both evil and non-evil cultures for humans, orcs, drow, and everything else seems like a nice way to keep everyone happy. It doesn't entirely make sense every orc is evil--I just figured humans are fighting the orcs all the time so they say that about them. Just learn Orcish and you can hear all the propaganda about 'small-teeth' who invade their underground cities, kill baby orcs in their cradles, and interbreed with (yuck) elves. They used to call condoms 'French letters'. You know what the French used to call them? 'Capot anglaise'--English hat. Connection to personal experiences: Dunno. I've read a lot of the books and it's interesting to watch them change the art, writing, etc. over the years. I'm not terribly surprised they would adjust that stuff.
Political stuff: Wizards is a for-profit entity and has an increasingly left-leaning customer base. You would expect any company that wants to survive to cater to their customer base. The fact that I don't like it doesn't mean much, because I'm not the target audience anymore. The game used to be aimed at me, now it's not, so I lose, but there are more people who felt excluded who now don't, and you want their money, so what do I expect? You run your game, I'll run mine. Moral relativism works here because in a D&D game, there's
no 'real' world to fight over. Everyone decides what they want their universe to look like. Connection to my personal experiences: I've swung back and forth a few times and generally find everyone lies about something. that and, having been out for so long, I just can't see having flamewars, let alone threatening people (really? people do that? apparently they do) over a game any group of people can play how they want. We have enough misery fighting over the real world, we don't need to add to it with the fantasy one. (I've also had negative personal experiences with the left, though my general ideology is closer to theirs.)
Alignment: You can get rid of it if you want. I would probably keep it around if you're running older stuff, ditch it for the newer stuff that doesn't use it. Connection to personal experiences: There was at least one case back in my preadolescent gaming years when one guy did something nasty to a new player in-game and I docked him a level ('your alignment is now Chaotic, you lose one level'). Didn't seem to faze him much.