Dungeons and Dragons
I’ve played DnD since I was seven years old, when my other buddy Mark’s older brother Greg used to run us through the old first edition modules you could buy at the local K-Mart or Schultze's. Back then I just liked killing stuff and playing with the neat dice but over the years, I’ve grown into a very good role player (which is not a LARPer-- LARPers are Live Action Role Players: usually just to the left of role playing geeks in that they take it one step further by dressing up like the characters they play and acting out the stories in real life settings with others who do the same). I don’t do this. My characters are simply personas I create for the table top, not life.
My four gaming buddies since grade school and I have been playing in our own fantasy world since high school. Some of our characters are literally decades old. We’ve seen them grow and mature, get married and have kids of their own. Sometimes they die horrible deaths but sometimes they also just grow old and die. I also run some of my other friends in my own world as well. At one time, I was in four different gaming groups.
And while I love the story telling aspect of the game, anymore it’s really just a great excuse for four nearly forty year old men to leave their wives and kids behind for two long weekends a year and act like their stupid, 18-year old selves again by drinking Dr. Pepper and eating way too many carbs. Some guys fish; some play softball. I game.
The Wikipedia site is a very good, comprehensive overview of the game and its history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_&_Dragons