D&D 40th Anniversary Blog Hop Challenge Day 28

This post is part of a series of posts in the D&D 40^th Anniversary Blog Hop Challenge.  The information in many of these posts is related to events that occurred primarily in the1980’s. Since it is now 2014, I can not guarantee complete accuracy with such a large passage of time but I will present the events and information as best as I can recall.

Day 28: What’s the single most important lesson you’ve learned from playing D&D?

Simply that variety is the spice of life even when it comes to a hobby that I enjoy tremendously.  I referred to this in my previous post for the D&D 40^th Anniversary Blog Hop Challenge.  My gaming group had a tendency to playing “just D&D” which meant AD&D or Basic D&D.  Even though we would occasionally play something else, the vast majority of the games we played were D&D-like in their rules or play style.  In short, we leaned heavily towards these types of games from 1980 to 1991. 

I took a long break from 1991 to 2000; basically, the entire time I was in the Army.  I played once or twice during that time but I was not excited about A/D&D or even fantasy gaming in general.  It somewhat felt like a chore to me and I needed a break at that point.  The reason for that break was that I had over played A/D&D and similar games to the point that I was not interested in playing anything at that point.

I have a much smaller collection at this point in my life.  Fantasy still takes up the most shelf space but it is a slight margin now instead of the vast majority.  I have a lot more variety with games like SteamCraft (a steampunk role-playing game) and Dead Reign (zombie apocalypse) as part of my collection.  It would be easier to GM some of these games now if I would have expanded my horizons back in my early days of the hobby.