Advanced Squad Leader, yo.
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Thassit. Our GM also picked up Phoenix Command for extra reference material, and that book was insanely detailed; gun stat porn.
He eventually ended up coding a program on his Amstrad CPC to handle some of the more complicated rolls & rules, but combat still wasn’t fast. I think that’s why he emphasised the diplomatic side of the game over the fighting 
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The last actual D&D rules I bought was 3.5
When 4.0 came out, I saw it as a money grab, planned obsolescence. I’m not saying it was entirely without value, but the timing and pace of new editions was so off-putting that I couldn’t bring myself to pony up another couple hundred dollars.
So I went Pathfinder, which I consider to be the spiritual successor to the game created by Gygax, Arneson, et. al.
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The one thing I enjoyed about 4th was that it was really the first time you could take a complete newbie to the game and let them actually roll a magic-user. Before that we’d always steer them toward something less complex.
5th takes the best of 3.5 and that streamlining from 4th. It’s my favorite edition, and I’ve been playing since I was 9 years old.
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4th was a lot of fun; it made it a point to give every class something cool so that fighters weren’t just hitting things with a club every round as magic users had a list of awesome spells to choose from. The big downside was that it was built to work best with D&D’s suite of online tools for character creation and dungeon crafting — and some of those tools never got out of beta while others eventually just went offline.
The campaign I’ve been in for 8 years started in 4th and converted to 5th, and I have to agree. It’s really the best of all worlds.
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My problem with 4th was that compared to 3.5 it was really inflexible. We tried to convert a 3.5 game to 4th. My 3.5 rogue was wielding a spiked chain. She literally could not use that weapon in 4th without losing access to pretty much every single rogue skill. They were all dependent on you having a dagger/hand crossbow/rapier.
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Very true. It was pretty obvious that 4th was designed to pull in the World of Warcraft crowd, and it somewhat succeeded in that, but was a lot more prescriptive. 5th lets DMs play around with the universe a whole lot more.
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That is awesome! It is fun to know others have kept a game going for so long. I’ve been running mine for 38 years. I’ve changed to different versions of the game during those years, but kept the same world and campaigns going. I stopped updating at 3.5 and that is the system I still use today. The in-game history of my world has grown to include the exploits of the characters from my older games/campaigns. For example, at the end of my first epic campaign–which ran for 9 years–four of the characters were elevated to godhood. Two of my players today worship gods who were their original characters in that first campaign. The changes that original group of characters (and the characters from some of the other subsequent campaigns throughout the long run) echo through the timeline/history that runs through my current campaign in myriad other ways as well. Congratulations on such a long running game!.
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OMG, someone needs to write a history of that shit.
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Related, about the recent revival of D&D:
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I think that, like Metal, Goth and Skateboarding, D&D just lurks, ever present, in society’s shadow. 
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Christ, those damage tables.
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Punk, too?
I feel like I’m trying to formulate a unified theory about this stuff eventually. Not there yet, but it’s rumbling away in the back of my mind…
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Indeed they are! I miss that game.
I wish I could fix that.
Zach Weinersmith / www.smbc-comics.com
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Darn, how could I forget that Punk’z not ded? A colleague regularly posts facebook photos (yes we’re are old enough to still be using facebook and ruining it for the kids) of him and his middle aged punk chums smashing it up at various seaside towns around the UK. There are mobility scooters in evidence.
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if you’re going to include that, include the A/V kids.
Our list of weirdos grows longer by the day!
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