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Message: <blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 6129657" data-attributes="member: 22424">Like many, I started in high school, although I had had some limited exposure via the "Fighting Fantasy" gamebooks prior to that point.Anyway, there was a club in the school that met at lunchtimes, once a week. The first game I played was AD&D 1st Edition, run by a guy called Erik. He was actually only there for a few weeks before disappearing off to university, but by then I was hooked.After Erik left, we had a few people try to fill his shoes, mostly with Basic D&D (though there was one homebrew system). But the DMs were never terribly good. It wasn't too long before I decided I could do a better job, and I've been the GM pretty much ever since.My first efforts at DMing were actually a proto-ruleset half understood from the "What is Dungeons & Dragons" book, although I quickly got myself the BECMI D&D Red Box. I then advanced to the Expert Set and the Companion Sets. However, the owner of the FLGS advised against the Master Set, and so I jumped to AD&D 2nd Edition shortly thereafter. And that was high school.(In amongst those years, I also played a little Star Wars d6, a little Shadowrun, and a little TMNT, but none of these really 'stuck'.)It's perhaps worth noting that over the years I have run many campaigns, but there are four that have stuck in my mind as the best of the bunch - ones where the group of players, the ruleset, and the storylines have all come together to produce something special. The first of these was little more than a sub-Tolkien AD&D campaign that I ran in high school, but which was a huge amount of fun for all it's flaws.For the first year when I was at university, I didn't play at all - the high school group had long since split up, and I was focussed on my studies. However, in second year I encountered the gaming society (GUGS), where I played Vampire: the Masquerade, with side helpings of most of the other Storyteller games. During those summers, I ran a campaign "Rivers of Time", that eventually lasted 5 years realtime (2,300 years in-game), which I count as one of my "big four" campaigns.About a year before 3e was released, I decided to give AD&D another play, and ran my last 2nd Ed campaign. It was a very interesting experience - much of what we'd done in high school was... less than 100% rules-legal, and consequently this new campaign was very different. Anyway, it ended the day I got my 3e PHB.The university group stayed together for many years. We played small amounts of a lot of different games, but our favourites were D&D 3e (3.0 and then 3.5e), and Vampire. Unfortunately, as time went on the group gradually drifted apart, until finally we reached a point where there were only four of us, and we ended up cancelling almost every session. (It was with this group that I ran the "Shackled City" campaign, the third of my "big four" campaigns.)About four years ago, I finally got sick of never quite getting a game, and decided that the time had come to actually do something about it. So, I started up what was, then, a D&D Meetup site, and thus started putting together a new group. After a little while we abandoned Meetup for Groupspaces and then abandoned Groupspaces for a custom-built site that we have full control of: <a href="http://www.falkirkrpg.org.uk/" target="_blank">Falkirk RPG</a>.And that has been working extremely well. We play a whole bunch of games, with D&D remaining the most popular (and D&D 3.5e for me). And here I've been running the fourth of my "big four" campaigns, which is expected to complete at the start of next month.And that's more or less it. After my current campaign ends, I'm going to be taking a long break from D&D (all versions), and am hoping to actually play for a while. My next campaign, though, is provisionally scheduled to start in October, and will use the SWSE rules.</blockquote>

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