Today is my 21st birthday for the 31st time. Or something like that. I survived another sojourn around the Sun and can chalk up another year on Planet Earth. Birthdays invite reflection. Given that this year has been full of re-evaluations, I thought that I would share my recent thoughts about Dungeons & Dragons.

I am putting together a bit of a Dungeons & Dragons game, initially pitched as a one-shot game using Old-School Essentials (itself a clone of Basic/Expert from 1981). This coincided with reflections I have been making on my methodology as a GM in roleplaying more generally. And so I ended up digging out all the editions of D&D and reviewing them.

This activity, innocuous though it seemed on Saturday, actually helped me delve back in my memory to the better games of D&D that I have experienced over the past 40 years or so…