My Start with D&D

I got my start DMing back in 2002 when I was in grade 7,  and while I know that means that most of the oldschool gorgnards have dice that are older than me- and far-far more gaming experience, I do consider myself to be a part of the oldschool movement.  My parents played D&D pack when they first met and during my childhood there were two strange boxes sitting on a self in my basement. Even before I could read these box covers entranced me, as did the many pictures in the books the boxes held, and I spent many hours running around my neighborhood  pretending to fight the strange creatures printed on those pages.  It turned out those boxes were two Moldvay basic sets, in good condition with the original crappy weird dice and even the little green colored pencil.  Once I had gotten a little older I was given another relic of my parents brief flirtation with D&D, a copy of the AD&D Players Handbook.  Eventually in grade 6, I was over at my friends house for newyears eve and he pulled out his new D&D third edition starter set and I realized that I had an older version of the same thing at my house.  A few weeks later I was able to gather up a handful of players from my class and we played our first game of D&D using the Keep on the Borderlands module that was included in the set.

We ended up playing fairly regularly all though highschool. Slowly but surely newer editions and thier rulesets started creeping into the game we were playing, evolving into a wierd hybrid system using elements of BX, AD&D, 2nd Edition and finally 3.5 towards the end of highschool. Throughout that entire time I insisted we used the character sheets included in the basic set.

In 2008 we started using 3.5 only, and then early last year I got into Pathfinder pretty hard with my friends here in university.  I really do love Pathfinder, but more and more I am feeling a pull back towards BX and the oldschool vibe in general- Its something hard to define, maybe I'm just yearning back to those carefree days and long afternoons fighting dragons across the monkey bars of my local park.