I still was in touch with my old college gaming group and that grew even stronger once we were all on Facebook. I bought the base rulebooks each edition as it came out and always hoped to find a gaming group, but there never seemed to be time. The closest I got was Magic the Gathering and playing Eve Online. Once I left New Jersey for California and then onwards and outwards, I stopped playing D&D. So if you know me in the SCA as Sir Myrdin the Just or online games as Myrdin Potter, you can still see the name that I used to play D&D when I was 13 or 14. Yes, I now know that it is for the th sound in Welsh and that character was Merlin but I did not know that then and Google did not exist). The influence of my very early days playing D&D still can be seen on my today as the first paladin I played was called Myrdin the Just (old Andre Norton book that had Myrddin in it and I thought two d’s was a waste and dropped one. The NJ gaming group also played D&D and I introduced Champions to them.
I moved my group to Runequest and Champions, but we still played D&D every once and a while. I played the classic modules, wrote my own modules and even made the trek to Lake Geneva to go to GenCon. Other than the very first campaign I played in (my cousin Mark introduced me the his friends that were playing and I started with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1e), I almost always was the Dungeon Master. I was even the president of the war games club in high school and CEGEP (community college in Quebec that is different than the USA in that it is required and part of the normal university track). Even when I started in the SCA I made time to play role playing games, driving down to the game that our group had every Sunday. I was a big war gamer when I was in my teens and when I was in college.