Hi, my name's Adam and I've been playing D&D for fourteen years. I started off in the early 1990s with computer games based on the rules: Eye of the Beholder and its sequels. In late 1994 some friends at school invited me to join the tabletop game and I got into it straight away. We had a huge gaming group - 12 people on some nights - and our DMs had to really work on their feet to make the game fun for so many people. Then everyone scattered off to university and we got our group down to 5-6 people playing regularly, which was better. We cycled through a few different DMs and played other games as well - the awesome Deadlands, the so-so Star Wars, the totally awful Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay - but D&D, then in what was known informally as '2.5' Edition, was the one we always came back to. My most memorable character was Thorin Axeforce (reprezent!), a dwarven fighter/cleric with a monstrously overpowered +7 magical battleaxe known as Deathswipe (yeah!) and bouts of periodic insanity. It was a Renaissance fantasy setting, so my character also had access to firearms and light artillery, and thanks to the Engineering nonweapon proficiency, actually built the world's first functioning gatling gun (which was destroyed in battle with the tarrasque, but that's another story).

Obviously, subtle and nuanced roleplaying was not our forte. But we had a hell of a lot of fun.

The release of D&D 3rd Edition in 2000 split the group: some people, most notably those who'd spent a ton of cash on 2E books, were not keen on crossing over. However, for the rest of us 3E actually succeeded in merging the 'classic' D&D experience with the more skill-based rules we'd seen in other games and resulted in a much more interesting game. We lost one of our players, and frankly our best DM, as result of the move, but in the long run we had a lot more interesting and varied games because of it. We also started playing other systems a lot more regularly as well (Cyberpunk turned out to be fun, Robotech even moreso but our various attempts at playing the World of Darkness games just cheesed us off). I also took over as default DM for 4-5 years and frankly, did a pretty good job. Also, the players, now being a few years older, were perhaps a bit more interested in narrative and story than before. For those wanting to be a writer, being a DM can be an interesting training ground. Having built an elaborate and impressive empire, it's definitely an experience to have four or five people trying to pull it apart on the grounds its economy doesn't work and its population level is not consistent with its real-world medieval antecedents, a bit like a writer having five or six editors delighting in tearing their MS apart. It helps build up a thick skin, certainly :-)

Unfortunately, our RPing died down 2-3 years ago. Another member of the group, Sanders, (whom I think Isis will remember as the "I earn £24K a year so everyone bow down to me," guy) took over as main DM after I got tired of it and his campaigns were awful, often making little sense. His way of dealing with a problem if it related to a rules mistake he made in a prior session was to completely rewind the campaign to that point and start again (no other DM I have ever encountered has even thought about this as a way of resolving problems). The game stopped being fun. Occasionally I joined in a session if Chris, our most experienced roleplayer overall, was DMing but otherwise avoided the game.

Last night our group got back together. In the year since the last time I played a session the group had picked up a new player, Sanders had improved as a DM (some of his campaigns now apparently get to sixth or seven sessions before he cheeses everyone off and the game collapses) and D&D's new, fourth edition had emerged. The game was fun, even though D&D 4th Edition is more broken than a wheelbarrow full of vases that has fallen off the side of the Empire State Building and we'll probably drop it if it doesn't perk up soon, but other than that it was really good to be hanging out with mates again, having a laugh, fighting bandits and stuff.

Whether I'll go back to DMing or whethere this is just a temporary means of seeing my mates again now I'm back remains to be seen, but certainly it was a laugh and we'll see where it goes from here.