Role-Playing Games
Warning: Here I am referring to the good old-fashioned grab your books, your dice, and a bunch of friends, paper based role-playing games. If you don't know what a D20 looks like, you're probably in the wrong place.
I started Role-Playing at a young age, and that makes it many, many years ago. Of course, I will admit, back then my friends and I did more Roll-playing than Role-Playing. For those of you who don't know the difference, people who Role-Play create characters with backgrounds and personalities that interact with each other. Roll-Playing involves rolling the dice to see what we can kill next. Roll-Playing characters are just a bunch of stats without life. Unfortunately, I learned this lesson later in life, after my friends and I's lives became so busy it became extremely problematic to actually try and commit enough time to playing the games. (amazing how little time we have to game after getting full time jobs, spouses and children).
Like most people, we started out with the good old standard D&D (advanced edition if you want to see how old I am). Followed by lots of others like 'Gamma World', 'the Mechanoid Invasion' to name a few. I've even collected some of the 'Rifts' books (but haven't had a chance to play).
D&D only held our fascination for about a year. Then my friends and I were exposed to the Rolemaster gaming system. It combined two things we all enjoyed, a setting in Tolkien's middle-earth (it did way back then at least, things have changed), and a realistic rule set. The problem with D&D is you are limited on what a character can do, plus once you get enough hit points, it's very heard to die easily. In Rolemaster, you can kill or be killed from a single blow, plus a character can do just about anything. The difference between fighters and magic users is what comes easy and what comes hard. You can have a fighter cast spells and a magic-user wield a sword, it just isn't easy for either of them.