I go way back with Dungeons and Dragons. I started on the black box, DMed 2nd Edition AD&D long ago, have dreamt of running Ravenloft for nearly as long, upgraded to 3rd edition in high school, joined some friends in college for D20 Modern (hey, it was the Aughts. A game is a game, right?), and ended up in a 3.5 game for a while after college. I skipped 4th, and played 5 or 6 levels of a 5th Edition campaign on Roll20 a couple years ago (a great campaign and a character I miss). I have played or run most versions of D&D in the last 25ish years, and it all comes down to this: I’m not very good at it.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m all for the optimization community and their efforts to tweak, fix, or break the various editions of the game. I love the technical twists and turns of an inventive build as much as the next guy (honestly, probably a lot more than the next guy), and deeply appreciate the far end of it: the PunPuns and Peasant Railguns and Elven artificers who use a feedback loop of suffering to understand all things. It’s inventive and crazy and I am not the guy for it. I don’t play that way, and never played with a group that deemed it important enough for us all to rise to the occasion. As a result, the one player who rides that train does so alone and stands head and shoulders past the rest of us scrub rookies. I went down a different path a while ago. more “A Gaming Hippie Heads Back to the Dungeon”
