We were in a bit of a stalemate. It’s been a few years, and I’m still blamed for that death.

Players sometimes become very, very paranoid.

Yeah this happened and 2/5 players died afterwards and they lost the bag… it was pretty awful.

Poison has left one of my players scarred for life.

Well if you’re moving off to college you could do what my group does and play over skype. It’s not person-to-person but it works very well if you’re looking to keep the same group of people. I’ve only played 3.5 and 4th ed. when it comes to D&D so I’m not sure how much more simple or complex those versions are compared to the ones you like playing. 3.5 goes into a lot of depth when it comes to character creation and 4th ed is very ‘balanced’ for lack of a better word. 3.5 is much more complex to set up and its battle system is fairly slow, wheras 4e you can pick up fairly quickly and the battle system has been refined to such a science that it’s very fast paced. But these are just the ones that I’ve played, so again I’m not too sure how they compare to your preferred editions. As basic as it sounds, the DMGs have a lot of insight into the nuances of DMing and I would highly suggest reading those. If there isn’t a DMG for the particular edition you’re familiar with, pick up the ones for 3.5e and have a read through them- I’m sure you’ll be able to apply some of what they’ll tell you in there to any edition you play. If you’re just starting out DMing, the best advice I could give you is to either A) play a canned adventure like Dragonlance or Planescape or B) Hardcore prepare your own campaign in advance for the group. The reason for this is that when I see new DMs(myself included) they’ll typically make stuff up on the spot and while that works for people who are good at improvisation and ad libbing, I find a lot of comfort in knowing that practically anything that the party could possibly do is accounted for in-text. It’s also very VERY important to remember PC names. I know it sounds extremely basic but if you don’t at least accomplish that, you’ll end up alienating the people whose characters you don’t remember. If you have to, write a chart of the players and their characters so if you forget, you can just look at it and go “Oh yeah, he was this person”. Good luck in both finding a group and in college.

Zombies have almost never ever been a challenge, well until this happened.

Had this happen not to long ago, never ever split up! At least not when a Golem is poking around.

I think we’ve all played with a greedy bastard… or been that greedy bastard at one point or another.

While DM’ing the party traveled to the Ice Wind Dale and no thought to bring winter gear.

and fail (reapeatly)