I think I first started playing Dungeons and Dragons when I was in about 4th grade. I and the guys played D&D off and on through the time I was in Jr. High (all the other guys were at least a year older than me) and we played Advanced D&D through high school. (Advanced means that you get to start sacrificing live gerbils and sparrows and reciting true-life incantations for your spells... I am being SO SARCASTIC! ...just in case you didn't catch that....)

My mom never really liked the fact that we played D&D, because of all the stuff she'd heard about it. However, she has always been good at trusting that I knew my own limits. That's not to say that I never made mistakes growing up, the point is that I was able to make my own mistakes which probably made me learn from them better than if she had just tried to keep me away from things. But, this blog is about D&D and not my mom or her parenting philosophy.

After high school, I didn't play for another 10 years and that's sad to me. I hear of college students playing it now, and I think that it would have been a fun way to interact with people.
But now, I've just started playing version 3.5 with some friends. It's odd because, not only am i the oldest, but I've never played D&D with girls before. Not only am I playing with girls, but I'm am the only guy other than the DM. (Dungeon Master: Guy who plans and runs the game.) This isn't a bad thing, it's just a new experience for me.

So, tonight was another first: In all my years playing D&D, I've never encountered an actual Dragon. There are plenty of nasty beasties in the game that I've encountered, but the truth of the matter is that in D&D, dragons are just about the baddest of them all. Truthfully, most players never play enough to build their character enough for a DM to have a party face a dragon because they usually just fry everybody. Apparantly, my current character was not strong enough and he's pretty crispy. He didn't die, in fact, we all survived and escaped, but just barely.

I'm not sure this blog (or any of them) have much of a point. I'm just saying; before you face a dragon, just make sure that you're ready.