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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Nytmare" data-source="post: 6129764" data-attributes="member: 55178">My father introduced me to D&D in 1980.  He was a long time Avalon Hill war gamer and had just started playing the first interactive fiction games.  Sadly neither one of us really "got it" (plus I was 6), so we instead focused on playing things like Zork and Cranston Manor in tandem.  At first, he'd sit at the computer and I'd shout out directions and ideas.  Eventually I graduated to making maps and keeping notes, and eventually I took over at the computer and dragged my little sisters into the co-pilot seat.That red box stayed with me however, and I'd spend hours poring over the books and looking at the maps and pictures (especially the picture of my D&D girlfriend, Morgan Ironwolf, hubba hubba).One summer, maybe 1984(?), I was signed up for a summer camp of sorts, where the kids were able to pick and choose their own activities.  I absolutely hated the idea of losing my precious summer vacation till I looked over the list and saw that D&D was one of the activities offered.  For the next two summers, I spent pretty much every day packed shoulder to shoulder with a dozen or so other burgeoning nerdlings in a hot, un-airconditioned home-ec room at one of the local middle schools.  We played through the Keep at the Borderlands the first summer, and the Veiled Society the next and I have absolutely no idea how the DM managed to keep the lot of us in check for 2 and a half hours a day.The following year was a bad one.  The PTA caught wind of the D&D horror stories and warned all the local parents about how D&D (and KISS) were brainwashing their children and turning them into devil worshipers.  Most of what little I had managed to collect with my allowance money was put into the trash.  All told, I think I was only able to save the red box, my dice, and my summer camp character sheet.D&D became a secret that the kids kept from their parents.  We never got around to playing again, but everybody had their little hidden stash (almost always hidden in a clubhouse or stuffed into the back of a closet, and usually parked on top of a stack of dogeared Sears catalogs)  We'd draw up maps and mazes and come up with plans about the games we were eventually going to run.  D&D became a thing that we always talked about, but never did.  Everything was always stories about old characters and games (and most of those were probably complete fabrications anyway) but there were easier things to play with that didn't risk the wrath of the parent collective.In high school my circle of friends grew exponentially.  Not only did my high school have a broader subsection of kids from the area, but I got involved in the governing body of an international club called Key Club, so I had friends in pretty much every high school in the state.  Not only that, but the core group of those "other high school" kids were almost all gamers, and they all grew up outside the no-D&D zone I grew up in.Suddenly, I was neck deep in role playing games.  I was quickly brought up to speed as to what I had missed in recent D&D years (You can play as a Wemic?  What the heck is a Myrmidon?!) and was introduced to the fact that there were OTHER role playing games out there.  Paranoia, Mechwarrior, Rifts, and Call of Cthulhu became our mainstays, and I brought my newly found knowledge back to the game-less friends I had grown up with.College however was the real turning point for me.  I went to college about 5 hours away from home and did a lot of damage.  The first weekend there, I discovered that there was a university sponsored Gaming Club and slowly took over.  In addition to that, I managed to place out of most of my "real" classes and accidentally worked my way into a class schedule where I didn't technically need to go to any classes.  I was working towards a triple art major and had two semesters of classes whose final grades were entirely project based.  So I had an entire army (cult?) of gamers at my disposal, 90% of them either lived in the dorms with me, or within walking distance, and I had convinced myself that it wasn't really all that important to go to any of my classes.Sundays was either D&D at my friend Rob's house or paintball, Mondays was Battletech, Tuesday was the night that we met up with Joe from the game store who was either running an Amber campaign or playtesting some new game called Magic, Wednesdays was Call of Cthulhu, Thursdays was Die Siedler von Catan and Dark Sun, Fridays was D&D and Improvs, Saturday was the gaming club from noon till midnight...  The 90s were a freaking AMAZING time to be a college aged gamer.Of course I flunked out of school, and did irreparable damage to some of my friends college careers in the process, but it didn't slow me down.  I fell headfirst into my career of choice and started working in the local film industry.  That meant that I might disappear off the face of the earth, and work maybe two solid months in a row, but then the project would wrap and I'd be gainfully unemployed till the next show started, three or four months down the line.  Man, and when I wasn't working, I was playing twice as hard.  Week long rounds of Assassin, field trips, 24 hour LARPS, scavenger hunts, guerilla theater, Magic tournaments, cream pie fights.Eventually things slowed down.  I started working more regularly.  I got tired of bringing my games other places, so I built a game room in my house and started inviting people to come to me.  Gaming became a twice a week, then once a week organized event.  We had two, really intense D&D campaigns for a 8 or 9 year stretch, but it eventually fell apart.  My circle of "gamer friends with free time" slowly shrank (and shrank).  People moved away or got married and had kids.  Now, game night is Friday night, but we're lucky if we can squeeze more than two of them out of a month.  More often than not, only two of the expected four people show up and people have to leave early cause they have "things" to do on Saturday.  So we get a couple of hours in of a boardgame or three and I count myself lucky. Adulthood sneaks up on almost everyone I guess, one of these days it'll probably get me too.</blockquote>

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