Towards the end of my roleplaying phase I stopped playing normal characters in Dungeons and Dragons campaigns. While a lot of people would fudge their rolls and make super bright wizards or super strong fighters, for one character I went the total opposite route. Waffle had been captured by orcs as a child and was rescued after he had been half eaten. As a result, he had threes for everything except intelligence. I just wasn't certain I could keep him alive with a three intelligence. It was difficult enough to roleplay a three wisdom and three charisma, and I wanted him to be able to talk.

Waffle did all right. He made it to second level wizard despite having only two hit points. He stole money from his mother so he could become an adventurer, got slapped by several women after innocently asking them for sex, got very sick eating a raw alligator egg, and killed the big bad guy with a magic missile.

Waffle was my second to last campaign character. The last campaign I was in allowed people to play mythological creatures. I played a brownie, a foot high elflike being that lived in the woods. Since he was a brownie, I named him Cupcake. The name was a bit deceptive. Cupcake had the personality of a mafia don.

On his only adventure, Cupcake completely ripped apart the Game Master's plot. Our party had been minding its own business travelling between cities when we were attacked for no reason at all by a band of villagers. The GM's plot was supposed to have us learning that a group of adventurers matching our description had done something nasty to the village, and that was supposed to inspire us to go chase them down. Instead, I got pissed off at the attack. So we snuck into the village, kidnapped the mayor's six or seven-year-old daughter, and threatened to torture her if we weren't given a large sum of money as reparations.

For some reason, the GM never invited me back to play, and at that point I was pretty much done with the whole roleplaying thing. I never got into running a game, I was a significant pain-in-the-ass as a player, and I had gotten pretty bored with it all.

For the prior twelve years I had played more or less constantly, but the end had come. It's fun hanging around with friends and interacting with imaginary characters, but in the end it all comes down to rolling a bunch of funny looking dice and pretending that they are used to kill things. In real life, I've never deliberately killed anything bigger than a fish, and I would probably be emotionally traumatized if I had to kill even one person, much less seek out and blithely destroy hundreds of fang toothed humanoids. That disconnect didn't mean anything to me ten years ago, but now it's somehow important, and I can't see myself ever wanting to do it again.