A little story about how I became ensnared in RPG. I was a first-year at UVa and a dear friend Anne convinced me to try a game based on the Lord of the Rings. I was 17, a naive kid suddenly at univeristy, and I thought this sounded stupid. Oh, my god. As soon as Pete, the charismatic GM, allowed me to roll up a character (Agonar) I was sucked in. I was intimidated, because almost all the other players were older than me by a few years (and this was UVa, my dream school, and I was still pretty star-struck), but the rest is history.
Many years later, Pete was playtesting a new game, Dreamtime, where we would flip between several realities. I got to really roleplay then, as there was a near-future where I was a scientist for the National Geographic something, and I had magical glasses that looked like the yellow NatGeo rectangles. But most fun was as a Pierson's puppeteer in the far future. I made some styrofoam eyes and made sock puppets, my little LARP. My favorite was having the heads look at each other, because the humans did not know if we were having a private joke or not.