One evening in 1978 my family visited another family that my parents had known for years. Their son was older than my brother and me, and he entertained us with his home-brew version of D&D. He just made up his own rules, and those I remember seem kind of odd to me now. When we rolled up our characters, for instance, we rolled 3d6 for most abilities but only 2d6 for wisdom, because "people in those days didn't know very much". I remember I got 10 wisdom, and this was good for 'those days', so I became a cleric. We got minimal experience from killing a few monsters, no experience for gold, but we had a lucky strike in finding a wimpy monster whose treasure was a fortune in gems, and then had the option of 'offering up' the gems, to the gods I guess, for experience. How exactly we did this was unclear; I pictured us somehow incinerating a pile of diamonds in a small campfire. Anyway it yielded a huge boost of experience, and since my younger brother had generously given me his share of the gems, I went up a level after only an hour or so of play. What a game!

We went home and I immediately set about making up my own game, based closely on the other guy's, because I thought that was how such games were supposed to be. We had no polyhedral dice, but I knew we needed lots of different random numbers, so I got a lot of different colored poker chips, wrote numbers on them, and we drew them out of bags and bowls instead of rolling dice. That worked well until I discovered that my only player, my brother, had snagged some high-numbered chips, and whenever he needed a big roll, he would palm them instead of drawing randomly from the bowl. The exaggerated way he would dig around in the bowl when doing this was what tipped me off.

I slowly upgraded. The boxed 'Basic Set' came out, which was a sort of beginners' version of the old D&D rules, with a colorful dragon on the boxtop, a slightly better printed booklet, and some actual polyhedral dice, made of astonishingly cheap plastic. Those dice were obviously lopsided, the numbers were faintly printed and wore off, and the plastic chipped badly in normal use. The rulebook only covered play up to 3rd level, and by way of simplification it had every weapon do the same 1d6 damage. It nonetheless succumbed to the basic complexification instinct of all such rules by mentioning that light weapons like daggers might strike twice per round, while heavier ones might strike only every other round. This made daggers the game's best weapon, and halberds the worst.

The first AD&D hardcover had already been out for a year or so at this point, but it was the Monster Manual and I already had quite enough monsters for 3rd level. I upgraded dramatically when the Player's Handbook came out a year later. The Dungeon Master's Guide seemed cool but I don't think it actually made as big a difference. I acquired a group of half-a-dozen players and they had many adventures. A few years later I was running three separate campaigns with about 20 players in total, but I got too busy with high school, so I shut one campaign down and merged the other two. The merged group had over a dozen players and we had to conduct sessions via a middle management layer of multiple callers. This was horrible because it could take ten minutes to resolve a round of combat, and players would wait patiently through it all just to get their own chance to roll, and miss. So I kicked out half of the group and we continued for several more years with a core group of my brothers and a few friends.

Eventually the campaign got rather sophisticated and I made some significant changes to the rules. We kept things up even when people went off to university with marathon sessions in the holidays, but these petered out, especially after my best friend, who was kind of the heart of the group, died of cancer. I did briefly get back into running a game in grad school, but haven't had time for it since.

Still I think that all those years of gamemastering had a big effect on me, maybe especially as a theoretical physicist. I really think of the real world as a kind of RPG campaign run by God. I think about our current understanding of natural law as the game rules, and I wonder whether they could be improved. On the other hand what really interests me most is the ways in which reality differs qualitatively from an RPG. As far as I can see, the difference is only one of degree, namely degree of detail. But the difference of degree is infinite.