Dungeons & Dragons (D&D)

My impression was that my mates considered themselves pretty hardcore players. I like to think that if they'd ever played with an experienced dungeon master who wasn't also 15 (at most) that they'd have got their arses handed to them. 

I did get to play a few times. I have a distinct memory of a game where my character got killed within the first few minutes. I don't remember the workings of the game very well, but I always felt this wasn't bad luck or a silly mistake on my part, but something done deliberately by the dungeon master so the regulars didn't have the hand hold me. Just speculation, but maybe you could tell me if that's actually a possibility. 

I think the point I finally gave up and everything got packed away was the time I actually hosted a game. It was only me and two other players. One of them took about an hour to sort his character out, which wasn't a lot of our playing time before they had to go home. That game was then left on a table in our spare bedroom for months waiting to be resumed. It never was. School ended. I got a job for a few months at a local supermarket over the Christmas period, and then went to college and then university. I haven't seen the player who took so long with his character since that day. 

Some of the same group also played the Pokemon Trading Card game in those years. I wasn't really interest in that. I collected the cards and kept them nice in a folder (something which also made me a lot of money years later), but I did actually know what I was doing with that game and could have played if invited, since I certainly had enough doubles to make a serviceable deck without risking damaging my collection. I had a long standing trade ban as far as Pokemon cards went though, due to my refusal to give up the rarest cards from my collection, so I wasn't exactly welcome at that table either. I wonder if that spilled over into the D&D games now actually, since the dungeon master was the guy who made several attempts to get a rare Japanese holofoil card I owned off of me. 

They weren't exactly the best of friends. It's no wonder I've lost touch with most of them now. 

I'd first read about it in the novelization of E.T., and it sounded like fun, because I loved movies like Conan the Barbarian. A few guys at school were into it as well. We only played once or twice, but my younger brothers got keen on it too, so we used to spend our entire summer holidays playing it every evening while watching World Series cricket on TV (I'm from a farming family, so summer was always harvest time, so no summer holidays away).

Our games weren't big on the role playing and were basically dungeon slash games, like table top versions of Gauntlet or Diablo.

I haven't played it in probably 30 years, but my brother still does, and has got my nephews into it as well. And my uncle and aunt have both played it since the 70s, and have even been LARPing at various times - we even asked them if our newborn cousin was going to be a halfling.

I'd love to get back into it again, and I think my grandson would love it if I could play it with him.