I started role playing back in the early 80s when I was in middle school. My friend, we'll call him Simon, put together a simple dungeon and I was hooked. Before long we shared dungeon master duties but it wasn't long before I was doing most of the DMing. I was hooked.
We started off like idiots with a horrible monty haul campaign, we treated Deities & Demigods like a high powered Monster Manual. It was dumb fun. Then a friend of my brothers, we'll call him the Colonel, saw us playing and told us the game was better at low level (he wasn't a Colonel at the time by the way).
The Colonel joined our little merry band and we started over with 1st level characters fighting to progress. Then I discovered the glories of Harn, and RuneQuest, and eventually in University I started using HarnMaster for awhile as our game continued and I looked for a bit more gritty realism (a level of realism I no longer care for).
Along the way we shifted from dungeons to political adventures (the detailed Harnic Kingdoms seemed to excel at that). I re-skinned everything I could think of to create new and interesting adventures, I used novels, movies, comic books, whatever. I don't know if the players ever realized the origins of some of the re-skinning but I doubt it. It was all great fun.
I remember while at University a friend had a bunch of 2nd Edition games. I read through them and they didn't sit well. The big improvement was ascending AC but beyond that it seemed, well, bland. We'd moved on to RuneQuest and Harnmaster by then which probably colored my opinions more than a little.
Sometime after graduation the gang all went their separate ways and we stopped role playing while we scrambled for work in the sketchy economy of the early 90s.
I was unaware of 3E until I wandered into a Hobby Shop out of curiosity and saw Pathfinder which was freaking beautiful and caused a number of internet searches as I caught up to the history of the game and learned about the OSR and the SRD and to DrivethruRPG and all that, which led me to researching what happened to RuneQuest while I was gone and my discovery of Legend and OpenQuest and a full return into the hobby again.
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