OH MAN DnD...such a past with that. I don't think I'll ever go back, honestly. It wasn't so much the joke in the comic (though we were plenty confused in many areas) but I just did NOT take to all the rules. Not that I didn't agree with them...it just didn't sink in. Every damn time you do something you have to roll, add, look something else up, blahblahblah. The worst thing is that by the time you're done with all that junk you still have a good chance of just MISSING. It's one thing to choose "attack" in a video game RPG and miss. You didn't lose much by pressing a button. But in DnD you waste SO MUCH TIME figuring all this crap out JUST to miss in the end. Make that twice in a row and you sap all my energy for the game right quick.
I did have some good times, though! We kept at it for awhile and continuously changed the rules so we increased the imagination part and decreased the "roll your life away" part. One of my favorite stories involved our group trying to get into a building full of badguys without being noticed so we could get the drop on them. The DM made it clear that getting the drop on them wouldn't be possible, but we all decided that a diversion would work. DM couldn't fault us for that, but wondered what the heck we could do for a diversion. WELLL someone noticed that chickens were crazy cheap - I mean we didn't even have to pool our money to buy hundreds and hundreds of them. So we bought those hundreds of chickens, got on the roof of the building, and POURED THEM IN. Bam! Instant surprise attack amidst the chaos. DM couldn't disagree.
Of course that was during our first game where we were still playing it straight classic style, and since none of us were skilled in the game - including the DM - we all ended up dying by some Phase Spiders 'cause aparently if something can attack your constitution to zero then you die just like it was hitting your HP. (My character in that game was a halfling with a riding dog named Chewybitems. The dog also had a catapult on it's back that would launch me when you pulled his tail).
Anyway, like I said: we kept changing the rules until we all grew tired of it...or maybe it was just me, I can't remember.