D&D General When did you leave D&D? Why? For what game? And what brought you back?

[Ath'kethin]

I stopped playing D&D around 2008 when I got married the first time (prior to that I'd been playing more or less continuously since 1993). My now ex-wife didn't play and my attention was understandably more focused on her.


A few years later I stated playing Pathfinder in the local league, and when the Next Playtest started I came back into D&D. The after playing 5e for a few years and getting kind of tired of the way it works I discovered Dungeon Crawl Classics, which I've now been playing for about three years.

 

[haakon1]

when I encountered the 3e D&D Player's Handbook and just fell in love. This was the game I was trying to turn 1e A&D into.

Me too! 3.5e, with E6 and Core Rules type limitations, seems to me like the final and best iteration of AD&D.

Fascinating seeing all the journeys into and out of D&D.

 

[dbm]

I started with Red Box D&D, and it was pretty much the only RPG available in a small provincial town in the North of England at the time. Went all the way through to Immortals, though we never really played those rules and instead switched over to AD&D 1e. I also got into Dragon Warriors shortly after that, and we played the hell out of that system. When I went to college and made new gaming friends we got pulled back into AD&D as our primary system but also played Call of Cthulhu and some WFRP.

We moved away from AD&D after playing a little 2e, finding the game pretty restrictive for our wants at the time. Rolemaster became our fantasy system of choice (with MERP as the on-ramp) and we played some serious campaigns using that system. I got into GURPS around this time, and it became my system of choice for a good few years. There was some Space Master and some WEG Star Wars as well.

3e pulled us back in, and about this time I made some new gaming buddies (my cousin married a gamer and he plus another got added in to our long-term group) who were big on D&D so we stuck with that pretty much through 3.x and on to 4e. We enjoyed 4e and played a big chunk of that, too, before getting disillusioned with the maths (this was before the fixes in the Essentials lines came out) and moving away to 13th Age, before coming back to 5e.

I’ve never been a big fan of D&D since Dragon Warriors and Rolemaster, but my gaming buddies enjoy it so I regularly get pulled back in. I prefer more flexibility and like to game in different genres so GURPS became a big thing for me. GURPS proved a little too ‘fiddly’ for regular play so I kept looking and eventually found Savage Worlds as a sweet spot for what I wanted, so that is my game of choice.

But I know I’ll end up playing the next iteration of D&D because it’s pretty much guaranteed that one of the GMs* in my group will want to run it.

* I’m lucky, my stable group of seven includes people I have been gaming with over 40 years and has 4-5 rotating GMs.

 

[GrailNite]

I started playing AD&D 1st edition, though nothing regular, mainly when I went to see my family out of town; my older cousin was into it. I got into AD&D 2nd edition when it was released and stuck with it as a DM through my High School years and after. I made the jump to 3rd edition and the subsequent 3.5 when it was released, married at the time and I had a regular group we played with. When 4th edition came out, we tried it, didn't like it for various reasons and swapped to Pathfinder 1st edition. My group stuck with Pathfinder 1st edition through the release of D&D 5th edition, though ultimately we did try it, running a Tomb of Annihilation campaign. The group as a whole didn't care too much for 5th edition. This was just before my wife was diagnosed with cancer and we ultimately stepped away from gaming while she was in treatment. I took a break from gaming during this time, losing her to cancer and never thought I'd ever game again. One of my longtime friends who I gamed with for all those years asked if I ever wanted to get back into gaming; my initial response was no, but the seed was planted in my brain, I gave in and picked up the Pathfinder 2nd edition Beginner Box. I now run for a regular group of five friends with the new Pathfinder 2nd edition remastered rules and we love it. Alternately we play and run Shadowdark on weekends between PF2E games.

Will I ever go back to D&D? Probably not, I don't like the system and more specifically the company who owns the rights to D&D. I've found a love for Pathfinder and Paizo as well as other Indi-TTRPG's, too many to mention.