| Heart condition? Wow, I always thought it’d be owlbears that got him.

(Also stolen.)

I heard about this through the nerd grapevine at work; someone I don't really work with, but with whom I had previously discussed D&D 4th ed in the carpool sought me out and told me.

Bummer.

My literacy-pushing uncle was bitterly disappointed when I used a B. Dalton gift certificate to buy the red box basic D&D set when I was in 4th grade. I was really into Zork, and Fighting Fantasy books so I thought this would be right up my alley. I tried reading through the set and just had no idea what the hell was going on. I lost the books.

A year later in 5th grade I used another gift certificate to buy the red box again and this time I was able to figure it out. I recruited Nathan and Paul, fellow fantasy geeks courtesy of the Bard's Tale series, and we were off and running. Most of our adventures were moronic journeys through poorly thought out cave systems. There were always a lot of 10x10 rooms with one-way doors. Over the next couple years our group expanded and contracted to include at various times Matt, Dan, Brandon, Jordan... I vaguely knew your crowd (through Eric and Alex) played but honestly you guys were scary-looking fuckers and I stayed the hell away as much as possible.

Not that we ever, ever got anywhere beyond the first five levels, but it was so much fun looking through the Companion and Master level sets (15th-25th and 26th-36th level, respectively) and drooling over the treasure, spells, and arcane rules sets. I spent an entire sleepover at Dan's house one night rolling up treasure troves from ancient dragon hoards.

Playing D&D appealed to my both my sense of storytelling and my obsessive interest in studying anything that wasn't in a school book. By the time junior high rolled around D&D was a big part of my life. When my family went to Australia for half a year in 7th grade I spent a lot of my free time doodling out epic campaign ideas in graph paper journals. Of course none of these went anywhere when I got back, but at least it kept me from going out and enjoying the Australia sunshine.

I basically met everyone in the Action Team through D&D or related activities. In the summer after 8th grade 2nd edition AD&D came out, and Paul and I sensed it was time to put away our childish Basic D&D books. We were men now and men played AD&D, dammit.
In 9th grade the old group was mostly gone except for Paul and Jordan. It was time for fresh blood and Paul was a pretty good recruiter. He pulled in Rude through their pedophiliac English teacher's class, and recruited Ja-el to play a ninja whose first action was to commit flaming seppukku, permanently scarring my ranger. In 10th grade I started going to cons with most of the rest of you bastards from the Action Team and suddenly there were a wealth of players and lots of people willing to run games. And through my first or second year of college we played a lot of D&D, especially me, Mike and JP in the dorms.

Roll four six-siders, drop the lowest. I can't even imagine how many thousands of times I've done that in my life.

At Mattel I met a few more role-players. Mattel bought a company that had bought a company that was developing an, inevitably shitty game based on these weird new 3rd ed rules that were coming. Bob, one of our lead testers summoned the geekiest of us (Denis, Laurie, Mark, Peter, Jay, and I am surely forgetting others) to a dim office and asked us if we'd be interested in reading over the new rules to prep for the shitty game shortly coming into test. Would we be interested? Hell yes, we'd be interested. I signed an NDA and remember reading a brass tack bound printout of the 3rd ed rules in Eric's good old bedroom on Elm, where few women may have set foot, but where certainly many dice were rolled.

Then some of us went to GenCon in 2000 for the big release, still my only GenCon. Playing the new game just felt so fresh and fun. It was obviously superior to the old editions in so many ways. It didn't have the texture of nostalgia but it was a great rule set. It really felt designed.

I honestly have barely played D&D since that last campaign we played, but man, I can still remember almost every detail of that campaign. That fight against the kobolds, where everybody went down except Rudy, and it all came down to a crossbow shot to kill the kobold running for the door beyond which an entire unaware tribe waited, was honestly one of the most tense and fun things I've been through in any game.

Damn, now I want to draw up a dungeon.

I could go on.