From the beginning

Here it is, my first post.  My plan is to write about things related to my experience with RPGs and it seems that in order to build some context, the place to start, is the beginning.

At high school one of my group of friends obtained from somewhere the classic red box of dungeons and dragons.  Lunch time was never the same again.
A few dungeons were crawled, usually prefaced with a riveting tale of how the party had randomly turned up at cliff face and noticed a cave entrance.  The only sensible thing to do was to enter the cave and slay whatever we found within.

We rotated the role of dungeon master and drew maps and mazes that were populated with improbable collections of monsters we didn't worry about things like story, or anything that might exist outside the dungeon.

At some point, still in high school, we got hold of AD&D 2nd edition.  This seems to have coincided with the first of our extended campaigns.  Finally the party had an objective beyond 'slay everything'.  Within the game we traveled through a fantastic realm while in the meta-game we wondered what possible use the bard could be.  This was a golden age in terms of the amount of time and energy we could invest in the game, we had a solid group, we collected vast numbers of game supplements, some of the cool kids at the school became interested in what we were doing.

Moving from high school to university roughly coincided with the release of D&D 3rd edition.  What a revelation 3rd edition was, no more THAC0, saving throws that seemed like they might be possible to make, books that didn't smell slightly weird.
We lost some players, but gained some to offset the loss.  I joined the university roleplaying club and was exposed to some new stuff, Rifts, Vampire: the masquerade, the awkwardness that is LARPing.
We were perilously close to two stores that specialised in RPG stuff, so I accumulated a wide selection of game systems, GURPS, Champions, Earthdawn, Brave new world, Terminus V.  I was particularly interested in those games that dealt with a modern setting or with super heroes.
Then D&D 3.5 was released and I wanted nothing to do with it having just purchased the 3rd edition rules.
During my time at university we usually had a campaign running but they would always end abruptly, usually interrupted by exams and never resumed afterwards.  I ran games in a few systems, some of those listed above, plus a couple that I concocted myself.  These games were always either intentionally short run or ran out of steam after half a dozen sessions.

Post university the members of our group dispersed for work and further study and gaming fell by the wayside to some extent although there were sporadic efforts to get a game running, sometimes with just two of us, sometimes with more.  After a few years though there were enough of us in one place to muster a regular game a long running campaign using a hybrid of 3rd edition and 3.5 (primarily dependent upon which books a particular player had).  As this game went on additional players joined the group making things more complicated for the dungeon master, and we attained the lofty heights of the mid-levels, complicating things further still.

In an attempt to rein in this explosion of complexity we switched to the recently released 4th edition of D&D and combat suddenly took three hours to resolve. Gradually we figured our freshly rebuilt characters out and things resumed a reasonable pace.  For a variety of reasons this campaign came to an end and was replaced with another also in 4th edition, this campaign reached that point where so many go astray, the planes, and fizzled out about two years ago.

During this time I decided that 4th edition was too much like playing RPG video games (which I've never been a fan of) and discovered Pathfinder.  Described to me by a friend as D&D 3.75, Pathfinder promised to hearken back to the good old days of 3rd edition with most of the kinks ironed out.  Having recently read a book about the era of European colonisation I had a great idea for a campaign that would deal with the moral quandaries of making money off the exploitation of native peoples.  I wrote an initial adventure to get the ball rolling, it would end with a decision point, the party could side with the company or the natives. Things went spectacularly well, but in a totally different direction.
I find myself now, two years later, faced with a party of eight plus an animal companion and and eidolon, trying to find that balance of story telling and dice rolling that keeps everyone interested.

A longer story than I might have anticipated, but hopefully there's a lot still to be written.