Time flies…

[Frabby]

After I had wrapped up the last adventure that I GMed in our long-running Middle Earth campaign, another player took over as GM and I got to play again. I decided to play my original primary character for this setting, who mostly featured as a NPC while I GMed.
Checking our logs, we found that this character had last been played in 2014!

[foilfodder]

I have used old "retired" characters as minor NPCs, but never a major role and I never transitioned one back into a player character.

In my original game group we would switch off running games session by session, whoever was running the game that day would usually invent a reason for their character to be absent. This honor system eventually broke down when a few sessions resulted in large amounts of treasure winding up in the hands of the gamemaster's personal characters, so I opted to run a different game system entirely when it was my turn to host.

[Spectre771]

The last time I was able to play my first PC was 1992.  Since then, he's only been used as an NPC a couple of times here and there and only seen in passing as background hints to the theme of the session.  e.g.: He was seen as the only human to be allowed into the Dwarfen mourning gathering while all other non-dwarf mourners only left their tributes with the honour guard.

No one knows how to GM RM but my son loves the game and I have been teaching him the minutiae of the mechanics because he would love to GM a session.