austin_tycho | more questions for Mielikki!

"How long have you been playing D&D?"

I had a crush on a fellow in 4th grade with the virtually untraceable name of John Clark (and I have thought about trying to find him). He was my first nerd crush. So if I was in 4th grade I was probably 9 or 10 which would have made it around 1977. He and I were in the gifted program which bussed a handful of us once a week to a much nicer school than the one we normally went to, where we played break-out on Apple computers and learned about the difference between analysis and synthesis, and other nerdy fun.

Anyway, John often talked about this game he'd been playing called Dungeons and Dragons, and partially in an effort to have more reason to talk to him, I convinced my parents to buy me the game. At the time it came in a box and had 2 stapled soft-cover books, and a set of brightly-colored dice (which I still have to this day, and always associate the shapes with those colors- d4=yellow, d6=orange, d8=green, d12=blue, d20=white. No d10, there's no such thing as a damn d10, you just use the d20 which isn't marked 1-20 anyway, it's marked 0-9 twice, and I bought a silver paint pen to color half the numbers so it would be a functioning d20). I remember calling John so I could ask him to explain how to read a d4 to me in a blatantly transparent attempt to get more attention from him. Oh, those were the days.

Of course, shortly after we got the game we moved to another city and I never saw John again. I didn't play because you can't play D&D by yourself, but I read all the books countless times. I finally got my brother into it when I was in 9th grade or so, and being too broke to afford modules we often made up adventures to run each other's characters through. By then we were able to get our hands on what are now considered 1st Edition books (the hardcovers, now Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, oooh), which we bought off some friend. We played around with it through high school. I got in my first actual campaign in college in 1986-7 or so, where I met the guy I almost married. That was second edition. After he and I broke up I didn't played for years until hub and I started playing in Mike's group (third and 3.5 editions) in 2003 or so.

Short answer- 27 years, more or less.