Lunar Threads

I was reading about the origins of RPGs and how war-themed table top roleplaying influenced the genre.
I'm just curious if anybody here used to get together before this pandemic to do some good ol' fashion DnD?
Are there any other games people have played and enjoyed? Either western ones like Call of Cthulhu or japanese style like Record of Lodoss War?

Yes, I've been a tabletop roleplayer since college. A little bit of history:

My first ever game was in the Buffy/Angel RPG system. We got together for a semester and did about 5 or 6 sessions. It was a healthy space for introducing roleplaying - a mixed-gender group, emphasis on roleplay over battle strategy, not too granular with the rules.

The next semester, I was introduced to AD&D. Second edition. We had a few sessions and then our DM flaked. That group introduced me to what was a more granular, naggling system. Incidentally, I also got a long-term girlfriend out of the group.

Throughout the rest of college, we would sometimes play or try D&D 3.5 and D&D 4. It never quite stuck, though I was always interested in continuing it.

My first year of graduate school, I found someone online at my school wanting to put together a Trails of Cthulhu game that used the Masks of Nyarlothep campaign. Think 1920s paranormal investigation. It turns out the GM rode the same bus I did, and most of the other people worked at or attended the same school. This was an amazing game - a lot of creative roleplaying, gradually ramping up tension over months, and a core group that I'm still in contact with. We didn't finish the campaign as printed, but we wrapped it up after an amazing finale.

After that, I shuffled between several games and several systems. Savage Worlds was big for a while (including an adaptation of Eberron to that system) - it's a system built for pulp-action battles. We bounced around with old-school Runequest for a gritty mercantile campaign. We dabbled in a little spacefaring system called Diaspora, and then another called Starblazers. Eventually, Fate Core is what stuck, and I ended up running both a Star Wars and a late-medieval campaign.

Currently, I'm in two games. In Pathfinder, we're doing the AP for Reign of Winter, where I play a plucky lawful neutral cleric. Then my in-laws are running a campaign in D&D 5e. I'm looking to restart the medieval Fate Core game, but it's been hard with COVID.

Yep, both Jenner and I have done a fair bit of it (Jenner much more than me, and she's still pretty actively doing so online).

As for what I've played, some DnD 3.5 (which is where I got my start, albeit a bit later than most folks since I didn't start playing until after college), did just one or two sessions of DnD 4e, and a lot of Pathfinder (which, as far as fantasy-heavy systems go, is my preference).

On GMing, I GMed a campaign using the Serenity/Firefly system which went for about 12 sessions I think. It was shortly after the system was first released, so there was a lot of improvising, but it was (IMO) a great and really fun campaign.

On what I want to GM, I really want to run a Shadowrun (5e or 6e) campaign and have been putting together ideas for what that'd look like. If I actually had more time, I'd also love to do a Pathfinder campaign with an islands setting (that is, the world setup I have is like a "points of light" one except with the entire world being small islands in a giant archipelago, like the SW Pacific Ocean, and things like ship travel are much more important).

Also In my case I never, with very few exceptions do pickup games. I only ever feel comfortable playing with people that I know pretty well.