I’ve been playing Dungeons & Dragons since I was in third grade in the 80’s. Through junior high and high school I poured through printed materials, playing when I could get a group of friends together. I spent hours painting minis, designing dungeon crawls, and progressing my favorite character up to Immortal status using 2nd edition rules (and ignoring some of them too).In college I DM’ed a large group (as many as eight at one time, I think) for a couple of years in a weekly game, and had a great time doing it… ahh, memories. 🙂 Unfortunately, after college I didn’t play for years.

A little over a year ago I got the itch to play again largely because of a couple of really good podcasts (Major Spoilers’ Critical Hit primarily). David and I started talking about putting together a game and a couple of months later we had four players ready to go. We have since grown to six (with 5 actively playing right now) and have settled into a pretty good rhythm. We’re playing 4th edition and I love it… that’s not to say that there aren’t things that I think could be tweaked, but we’re level 7 today and happy.

Not unexpectedly, over the past year I’ve found myself with the kinds of spin-off projects that DM’s often undertake to make their game better – houserules, papercraft, game organization, etc.. And that brings us to strangedice.com… a place to post some of my thoughts and ideas about role-playing with Dungeons & Dragons and hopefully give back to a community that has given me so much over the past year.

That’s it and that’s me. I hope you subscribe and I look forward to hearing what you think of some of the projects I’ll be working on in 2012!

While the details are a bit fuzzy, I’m pretty sure I started playing Dungeons and Dragons in the 4th grade.  I picked up the Players Handbook and DM’s guide at a garage sale.  I went on to buy the original Red Box, and the Blue Expert set.  I spent hours reading through modules that I poured what little money I had into.  I played and DM’d an equal amount, running friends and siblings through classics like Village of Homlet, Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth, Beyond the Crystal Cave, Castle Amber, and many more.  My sister still holds a grudge because she was killed by a snake the one and only time she decided to play with me and my brothers.

In college, I found a great gaming group that went on to be my closest friends from college.  We played weekly for about a year and a half and then drifted apart, and I continued adventuring as a solo for a while.  To this day I ponder what surprises the world my DM came up with had in store.

John wrote about how we got into playing again. Since we started, I’ve been completely obsessed: consuming blogs, podcasts, and Insider material.  I’ve recently started DM’ing for my 10 year-old son and 4 of his friends, and he’s now equally hooked.  I’m really looking forward to sharing thoughts on our game, and the game as a whole, and hearing your comments.