Recently Eshi has been running a D&D campaign that I have been playing in. I have had mixed feelings about tabletop RPGs in the past. The play-acting is awkward, at least for me. I have problems with confidence in the first place, but needing to talk everything through in a realistic manner while pretending to be someone else feels off to me. You also need to interact with other people, and that's always awkward for me. Something that I think scares away more people is that there are often way to many established rules to make the experience an easy one to just jump into.
In the past I have tried to get into games like this, but either they fall apart quickly because people loose interest or the GM is a dick who uses the game as a power fantasy (all the players shall fall before MY MIGHT!). This time though the game has been going well. Eshi is a good GM and getting to play around more than I have in the past has made me appreciate the games mechanics more.
The biggest difference from, say, video game RPGs is that you can do anything you want. Don't like a rule because it is a little unfair to players? Change it. Want to be a class that doesn't exist? Make it. Want to be able to solve problems in ways that aren't preprogrammed into a scenario? Do it. It is also way easier to identify with your character because you get to make decisions about how that character acts. If you didn't want to only choose dialog that was pre-written for you, you can. That level of customization is hard to get in a video game (mods in PC games get close), and makes tabletops way better in my opinion.
Don't get me wrong, I still like video games and play them often, but tabletop scratches an itch that I didn't know I had. If you are on the fence about trying tabletop RPGs, or if you want more out of a game in terms of customization or just stuff to do, get some people together and try some D&D or Whitewolf, you might have a good time.
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