I was in middle school when it happened. I cannot recall why, but the sensation hit me suddenly. A impulse rose through my chest and bubbled over into my head, swirling about like pasta in a rolling boil. I suddenly wanted to play Dungeons and Dragons (D&D).
At that time in my life D&D was no more than a vague notion for me. I asked my father what D&D was like and his only recollections were playing with a group of college buddies and kicking a rust monster to death. That aside, my only other knowledge of the game was a faint acknowledgement that there were lingering assumptions that it was evil and that those associated with it were of irredeemably nerdy. Given that, at the time, I was knee deep in nerd culture, having developed a liking for Magic: The Gathering cards, the latter did little to keep me from investigating and my curiosity easily overwhelmed the former.
I discovered a short time later that if D&D were truly associated with devil worship that there were almost certainly more affordable ways to get involved. The first books I bought were $20 a piece, a small fortune for me at the time. I'm still uncertain as to how I managed to come into enough money to afford two of the three core books I needed at the time.
I set about reading the first rulebook and was almost immediately overwhelmed. My first taste of D&D was 3rd edition, which to this day is still a tangled mess of rules, although I can't deny that it had a lot of flavor. The arcane texts I pored over seemed to be written in some combination of foreign language, ciphers, and a particularly sadistic form of algebra. Determined to play, however, I valiantly forged ahead trying my best to pretend I had any idea of how to play the game. I still remember the first time I sat down to play a session with my friends and slogged through roughly two hours of confusion over rules and a single encounter. That session also happened to coincide with my first attempt at DM'ing. (DM = Dungeon Master aka. the person who runs the game.) My best friend took over the DM's role on the next session and had a little better luck, but the game never quite caught on in our circle.
My first forays into D&D were not a complete loss however. I was fascinated at the concept of the game, an imaginary world in which all the actions and interactions took place soley in the minds of the players and the DM. I adapted the concept into a game which used randomly chosen Magic: The Gathering cards to determine encounters and potential resources. Somewhat surprisingly it was a hit with a few of my friends. From that was born the inspiration for a new game world, one which I played without any form of rules or equipment. It was the essence of D&D in its purest form, a game of the imagination, with only a sheet of paper to keep track of gear and items you picked up along the way.
To this day I still consider it unfortunate that D&D 3rd edition turned me off with its complex web of rules and perverse love of tables. Fast forward a few years, however, and I began to develop a taste for a little more structure. The expensive set of dice I had bought to play D&D continued to tempt me, untouched as they were for so long. Their bright contrasting numbers and geometric shapes called out for use and I obliged. In high school, on a whim, I began crafting my own role-playing game. Had Wizards of the Coast, the company that publishes the D&D books, known at the time I'm sure they would have wept bitter tears for their lost profits. I stole the dice system and the combat rules that appealed to me and mashed them into a simplistic yet effective framework for my own custom game. I didn't even have classes, you were just your character. I later named it 4312 for the year in which the game took place. It was an absurd post-apocalyptic sci-fi fantasy smashed together from all my interests and it was an instant hit.
Looking back, my 4312 game was a modern DM's fever dream. I introduced new rules whenever they were required, there were no books for the players to point to or pages of rules to pick apart. I kept my player's character sheets when they weren't playing since I was constantly upgrading and changing things around. I was still getting a feel for how to balance weapon damage, life points (aka. hit points), and determine which stats did what. And frequently I was the only one who really understood what my items were intended for or how finer details of the rules worked. While that might sound like poor practice, and in same ways it is, it also resulted in much more experimentation and creativity from my players. It was exactly what I had always expected from D&D.
To this day 4312 is still the longest running role-playing game I have been involved with. I played with my initial players, Tim and Brandon, all the way through High School. I even managed to involve a number of other random people along the way. That is until Patrick showed up.
Patrick seemed to appear out of nowhere one day. He befriended Brandon seemingly overnight and soon he just seemed to be hanging out with us all the time. He also happened to bring with him years of D&D 3rd edition experience. It seemed impossible that anyone could comprehend and effectively wield the living mass of rules that was 3rd edition, but somehow he managed it. Little did I known that I would be drawn again into D&D's siren call, or whatever sound a small tome's worth of technical fantasy jargon sounds like. (In my previous experience it typically sounded like a book slamming shut followed by a defeated sigh.) With Patrick offering to take the helm of a D&D campaign, however, my fate was sealed. The legwork was going to be taken care of and after so many years I couldn't help but want to give it another shot...
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