D&D 5E If you've ever left D&D, what made you come back?

[Olaf the Stout]

I left D&D around 1998. I was in my final year of high school, so took a break (at my parent's request) to concentrate on school. After that I didn't have a group to play with for a couple of years and then joined a group where the DM loved to mess with different systems, so we played a number of games besides D&D.

That group ended when the DM moved interstate for a new job and it wasn't until about 2005 that I really got the itch to game again. No-one else wanted to DM, so I took up the mantle and decided to run 3.5E since D&D was the game that myself and all the players new best.

Since then I've run or played in a D&D pretty much fortnightly, other than 3 breaks after the births of each of my children. We played 3.5E up until about a year ago, when we switched to 5E.

 

[Campbell]

I never really come back to it. I visit it for brief periods of time in between the other games I would rather be playing or running. I ran quite a bit of 4e, but it was fairly nontraditional - no dungeons and maybe one combat encounter every couple sessions.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

While I've played all kinds of other RPGs, I've never "left" D&D.

Until 5th.

 

[GMMichael]

So I guess I'm wondering for those who left D&D for a time and came back, what was the impetus? What was it about D&D specifically that made you come back to it?

The GM was running it. Plus the art's pretty good.

 

[practicalm]

I played 1st edition and then played other RPGs (GURPS, Champions, CoC, other) and then after college I didn't have a regular group to play in and I don't usually care for online groups.

I found a 3rd ed group but they were mostly combat optimizers and I didn't fit in with them.

When my kids got older, they wanted me to run a game and we started in 3rd ed but when the 5th ed playtest showed up we switched and I've been running a game for my kids and others (at church), a game at work, and for a while I was playing in a few AL games.

I dropped the AL games.

In general I stopped playing RPGs because I didn't have a group but also because I was doing more board game playing and didn't have as much time.

 

[Olive]

I leave D&D and always come back. I left D&D after a long running 3/3.5 campaign petered out for WFRP and came back (to PF) because we had a new player who was keen. Then I left it for CoC and Savage Worlds and a brief dip into Runequest and now back to 5e for the last few months. For my group (and most of my group are people I've been playing with and non-game friends with for between 10 and 20 years) D&D works - we grok the setting and system pretty easily, it doesn't require too much brain power or work to get and 5e exemplifies this. I can run D&D off the cuff, make house rulings and generally make it all work with a minimum of effort.

Basically I can drive a car easily and take everyone I need to with me on the trip. To ride a motorbike I need to learn how to do it from scratch and it's harder to take my friends.

Also:

First, I figured out that when you drop hit points, classes, Vancian spellcasting, and various things of that sort, it's not pure win. You gain some things but you lose some things as well. And the things you lose were more important to me as a DM than the things that are gained.

This is pretty much it in a nut shell. I like complex combat rules and more creative casting systems and the like but my players don't have the attention span to learn these things and D&D allows us to do what we want without too much fuss. Plus my players (2 in aprtcualr) are very focused on character development and classes really give you that in a big way.

That said, I'm not likely to ever want to play 3e/PF again and 4e never appealed. If 5edidn't exist I suspect we would have done a retroclone.

 

[Xeviat]

I left D&D about halfway through 4E. The active members of my gaming group hated it, and I as a DM, couldn't run a game without players. I hung my DM hat up for a while and played in a friend's Mutants and Masterminds group. I got pushed out of that community, but then the D&D Next playtest was starting up.


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[LexStarwalker]

I left for Pathfinder and Numenera during the 4th edition days. I came back for 5th edition. I see a lot of what I loved about 1st and 2nd, the things I liked from 3.x. Good times.

 

[Sloblock]

Hmmmmm....

1983 - got Red Box
1984 - got 1E AD&D
1990 - school friends scatter to universities all over the country, discovered beer, clubs, women and illegal substances.
1993 - dabbled again due to money shortages at University, but one guy spoiled it for everyone else, books got put away, graduated, Uni friends scattered finding work, chasing women, etc
1999-2000 - books got thrown in the bin when I bought a house with fiancee - "never needing these again", but continued to have a little yearning, played some Baldurs Gate and Icewind Dale
2003 - played Neverwinter Nights - "But this said D&D on the box? Nice game, but the rules are all wrong. It's not D&D as I know it and I couldn't imagine playing this game with dice and real people!". Continue to drift in and out, replaying various Baldurs Gates, NWN, etc, reminisce a lot.
2010 - browse a pdf of some 4E rules, "And what the hell is this???? Who are these 'Wizards' of the Coast, and what have they done to my game?"
2013 - find some old 1e/2e stuff that survived my 2000 purge, play a few games with my daughter. Find local group playing old school games. Make point of avoiding 3e and 4e.
2015 - find more local gamers, embrace 5E, play/DM several campaigns at levels 1-10, love it
late 2016 - get annoyed with 5E at higher levels, introduce people to 1E, play some BECMI too

Life has come full circle

This sounds very similar to me, after Uni purged most of gaming books.

We played D&D 2e but left it to play Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay as it felt more British and allowed more felixibility.

2009 after discussions at work with like minded folks started back up.

We we got into 5e as we were looking for a new system and it was getting good reviews

 

[MagicSN]

Moved to the german RPG System Midgard years ago. Then, when the system broke for the powergaming of one player (and also the age of the system showed and we had to use tons of houserules eventually), one had the idea to move to D&D 4e "where everything is in strict rules/balancing". Little did we know. It made the problem worse. That player stopped playing with us eventually. We moved to 5e when it came out and are happy with this system.