Hunting the Beast: The Real Reason I Left D&D (Only To Return)

When a person leaves anything that he or she loves doing, deep-seeded reasons have to be involved. What follows is an attempt, after a 15-year hiatus from TTRPG, to delve into the reasons for my abrupt departure. It’s the first time I revisit this period: who knows what I’ll find deep inside of myself. I approach this post as an adventurer would approach a cavern entrance that has barely legible inscriptions warning of dangers within. Therefore, I jump right in: on my guard…but excited!

The year was 1995. I was barely out of my teens and the world beckoned to me like a siren to sample its delicacies. I had come to the big city of Ottawa from my small town of Kapuskasing in northern Ontario, ready to indulge in the pleasures that such a change brings; an overflow of cultural possibilities, a vast mosaic of unknown beautiful women, new friends of varying types (much more varied than the small-town template could offer), and perhaps most importantly: freedom.

Naturally, my AD&D 2nd Edition books had made the journey to the big city as well. Part of the wonderment and anticipation of moving to a metropolis was, quite honestly, the prospect of gaming shops! Ottawa had a few of them in those days, including one that still survives right in the downtown core, Fandom II. Money that should have been used for—oh I don’t know— textbooks, was instead diverted to rounding out my Dark Sun collection (note: if you’re reading this, Mom, it’s not true – the previous sentence was artistic licence). Luckily, many of my gaming friends had also chosen Ottawa as the city for their post-secondary education. Hence, a resumption of my DM’ing of the Dark Sun campaign was expected.

Once we got together for the first time in Ottawa to play, something was off. I don’t know and can’t recall if anyone else expressed that sentiment, but I remember feeling it very keenly. I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. There seemed to be a general blandness to our adventuring, a lack of focus. It was as if we were all going through the motions, trying to keep at least a part of our hometown with us. Perhaps that’s just 15 years of wisdom being thrown at that particular cold case mystery. Nevertheless, the important thing here is that after a few sessions, we quit.

I quit.

Image Credit: Kevin Pelletier

I no longer had the thirst to read the game manuals, nor the hunger to prepare gaming sessions. A lot of stuff goes on when you’re 19 years old and released from the shackles of a small town. There were now a plethora of entertainment options to take up my free time. I suppose a part of me was embarrassed about my gaming hobby. I didn’t want my “cool” new friends to find out that I really liked to be a fantasy storyteller, guiding a bunch of D&D “geeks” to loot and lore. Presenting myself as a music nerd, a political junkie, a sports aficionado; all of these seemed better suited to my newly-found “hipster” status. Let’s face it: trying to impress a girl you like with “Why don’t you come back to my place, I’ve got this great collection of U2 bootlegs for us to listen to” sounds so much more suave than  “Hey, I know how to calculate THAC0 – wanna be my gnomish bard?”.  (For the record, the U2 thing never worked…)

As the months became years, and as one apartment became another (an then another), my D&D stuff got lost along the way. I can’t recall if I dumped it, sold it or gave it away. At some point it became expendable, and it vanished from my life. Sadly, I didn’t notice (not consciously, anyway). Video games were now becoming better and better, especially in the RPG and sports categories I loved so much. So, my gaming itch kept getting scratched. The closest brush with D&D during the intervening years was a playthrough of Bioware’s Baldur’s Gate. TTRPG had become, in my mind, “something we once did when we were teens and had nothing better to do”.

Not surprisingly, I can see that I was desperate for a creative outlet over this period. A void had appeared once I stopped DM’ing. I tried my hand at a few blogs. I tried to learn to play guitar. I completely threw myself into these new hobbies, trying my best to find my niche. Nothing stuck. Finally I settled down, was lucky to find a woman with whom to fall in love, bought a house, got a dog, etc.

And then: the Community episode happened.

I was already a fan of Community at that point, never missing an episode. As I sat there watching Jeff, Britta, Troy, Abed, Pierce, Annie, and Shirley play through a D&D adventure, I was flooded not only by nostalgia, but an overwhelming need to play again. I wanted to create, I ached for the camaraderie. I craved to engulf myself in lore and systems and campaign settings. Bubbling under the surface, without realizing it, perhaps I had missed D&D ever since leaving it. I had to come to a place in my life where I had never been more at peace with who I was. With that peace came the confidence to declare, without reservation, my love for whatever it was that set my heart aflutter and ignited my passions. And one of those things was D&D.

There it was, plain as day: the adventurer, after years of searching the cave, had come face to face with the beast and found it to be less daunting than he had imagined. So began the process of recruiting like-minded people amongst my circle of friends to be the adventurers in my campaign, and to do so with wild abandon. Have you been “away” from the gaming table for a time? What drove you away and (more importantly) what brought you back?