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

[cbwjm]

I think I've stopped playing DnD for a few years ever since I started, not because of going to another game but due to life. Happened with 2e, 3e, and 4e. 5e I've been able to play somewhat consistently, I have played some OSE in between and am still playing 5e because that's what the DM wants to run which I'm fine with.

 

[Voidmoji]

Have you looked into Pathfinder 2E? Many people suggest it shares some qualities from 4E.

I have looked over the online version of PF2e, but bounced off of it. It didn't inspire me to buy a copy of the core book. Which is too bad, because it might come across better that way. I only recently returned to gainful employment so I need to spend my entertainment dollars carefully. I guess I should watch for a bundle of the new Core books.

 

[Vaalingrade]

When The Good One ended and none of the good promises of the Next Playtest didn't materialize, I hung around a bit to see if the whole 'modular' promise was going to happen. It quickly became clear it wasn't, so I floated off to PF2, but PF2 has Vancian Casting and at the time still pretended alignment deserves to exist, so I looked back to to follow the 5.5 playtest. Currently waiting to see if any of the better ideas from there actually make the PH and if any of the inevitable shocking swerves from the Playtest turn out to be good.

 

[AdmundfortGeographer]

The termination of Living Greyhawk. I was deep into LG and the treatment of the organizers was not great… I left RPGs entirely it was so demoralizing.

Only a few years into 5e did I even give a consideration as my kids were coming to an age they started asking questions about my shelves and shelves of books and boxes. I started returning to my mapping projects, and they asked to have me run something for them.

Now I play weekly again with my nephews and kids, and brothers.

 

[Charles Lowry]

I left in the early 90s and played a lot of Cyberpunk 2020. I simply was not enjoying 2nd edition. After Cyberpunk 2020, I pretty much stopped all RPGs and played 40K exclusively. Life has a way to limit the amount of time one can spend on hobbies.

Fast forward to 2021 and my teenage kids wanted to play D&D so I picked up 5th edition. Played through the summer but the kids felt there was too much to keep track of and the modern adventures were simply too long. Characters got to 4-5th level but games stopped.

Fast forward to present day and I've really got the itch to play/run Shadowdark (D&D 5th edition light). My knees and back hurt too much these days for long bouts of 40K. Shadowdark feels like it will scratch the creative itch and comradarie of sitting around the table with like minded folks.

 

[Sulicius]

I left it because of DM burnout and being in a bad mental state.

I came back because things got better and I learned how to DM without getting stressed.

 

[jmartkdr2]

Initially: as a preteen, we got tired of AD&D's cruft and were pretty open to trying other stuff - I played a fair bit of MERP and a smidge of Cyberpunk - but it was mostly "Doug found this new game let's try it!" rather than a deliberate choice to play something other than D&D.

When I was a young teenager World of Darkness was just hitting its stride and my friends and I all switched over. AD&D was getting extremely bloated and Basic D&D didn't really allow theory-crafting some we couldn't spend as much of our free time on it. We did develop an attitude about it, but in my defense I was in my twerp years generally. The 90's generally had the perfect zeitgeist for Urban Gothic Fantasy, and Vampire scratched the itch beautifully, even if we were just playing an edgy superheroes game. Werewolf was modern-world D&D but without all the weird cruft of D&D, so it worked for us.

Then 3.0 D&D came out and it was, relatively speaking, a breath of fresh air - more streamlined while being more flexible, a dice system that worked as advertised, and usable monsters already written up. So we switched.

I didn't get to play as much 4e DnD as I wanted, as a lot of people I know had either stuck with 3.5 or PF1, but that was also the period of my life when I had the easiest time trying new games so I got to play Start Wars and Fate and 13th Age and a bunch of stuff at conventions - but for the most part it was a series of competing versions of DnD.

5e's popularity explosion made finding games of DnD so much easier, and 5e is a great robust game for playing DnD a lot of different ways at least fairly well - but at the same time until PF2 came out it made getting a game of dang near anything else much harder it seemed. I have been back to conventions since the plague so I've only really played two games since then: 5e and PF2.

 

[el-remmen]

I've never left D&D because of D&D itself.

In the 2E era I had a gap between August 1989 and August 1991 because I started college and had a lot of other interests that overshadowing any kind of gaming.

I then had a 3-year gap between August 2009 and October 2012, when I started my PHD program and moved away from my friends. But I moved back to the NY area in fall 2012 and joined an ongoing 3.Xe game that had started in 2010 and ended in 2016.

We then tried some other games just for a change, including the Marvel Superhero Saga game and some PF1.

I was pretty tired of 3E's granularity by then and knew that if I started up my own game I might just run BECMI. However, moving to a new city in 2019 I had a friend who really wanted me to run, so we formed a group and I bought the 5E books sight unseen and while I still quibble - i have always been a houseruler/homebrewer - I liked it fine. That game started in 2020. It didn't hurt that Mearls sent me a copy of Ghosts of Saltmarsh (we had friends in common/gamed together back in his pre-WotC days) and while I have gotten other 5E adventure books, GoS (plus adapted 1-3e material) has been all I have needed for the last four years.

So yeah, my playing years are 1983 to 1989, 1991 to 2009, 2012 to 2016, and 2020 to present.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

That game started in 2020. It didn't hurt that Mearls sent me a copy of Ghosts of Saltmarsh (we had friends in common/gamed together back in his pre-WotC days) and while I have gotten other 5E adventure books, GoS (plus adapted 1-3e material) has been all I have needed for the last four years.

In another life, I could definitely see just running with the Ghost of Saltmarsh setting and mini-campaign. Between ancillary products like the Tower of Zenopus, all the stuff on the DMs Guild and good old-fashioned homebrewing, there's definitely a ton of potential there.

I never picked it up, because there's the remote possibility my dad will use it as his first DMing experience, but I've admired the product fom afar.

 

[Ogre Mage]

Most times I didn't make a conscious decision to stop playing D&D. Usually the group I was in evaporated and I was too busy with other things to find another one.

But there was one time I deliberately stepped away from D&D. This was in the dark days of the edition wars in the late 2000s. I did not like the direction the game was taking. And the internet discourse around D&D had gotten incredibly toxic. I played Vampire the Requiem and Savage Worlds instead. I tried 4E in 2012 but it only proved my initial skepticism correct. I quit again.

5E brought me back to D&D in early 2015.