I can second some of what
Lommy said here. I have been RPGing since my eight years or so, from the moment my older cousin persuaded most of our family to play an RPG with him on the holidays (oh, had it not been for him, I would not even have read LotR - at least not the way I did - and would probably not have joined the Downs at all!). Almost from the very beginning, I became a Dungeon Master (or how is it called in each game) and was a DM in most of the games I ever played. I enjoy the stuff greatly, preparing all the stories, very detailed settings, own worlds and everything. Middle-Earth has always been my beloved world, but this is also maybe why I did not dare to step on its ground too often and preferred to create worlds to play in on my own, so that the players - unworthy barbarians - do not violate the precious world. And I am very grateful for it, for at last, a year and something ago, my players (of my current group; the basic players of my group have remained more or less the same through the time, some left and some came, but the current one was in fact created by a synthesis of our high school roleplaying group with our camp roleplaying group, when the high school ended and part of the campers moved away or became working people with less interest in RPGing) reached the state when we agreed on starting a roleplaying setting in Middle-Earth. I have written about that somewhere, if anyone is interested more on what we are doing, in
this thread I wrote something more about it.
Otherwise, I have played several computer RPGs - Baldur's Gate I&II, Icewind Dale I&II (though I didn't finish either of them) and also others of non-fantasy genre (namely Knights of the Old Republic I and II, which were one of the few computer games I ever completed); but let's face it: these lack the very important aspects of RPGing like interaction with other players, using your own imagination and mainly,
mainly, the thing I value above all: freedom of choices. In a computer game, you cannot decide to climb up a tree if the game does not allow you to do so, nor talk to the NPCs using your own words (one of my friends once kept arguing with me that in some Neverwinter Nights with the DM supervisor, one is capable to do almost anything. Bah, don't be silly).
And concerning other ways of RPGing, the Barrow-Downs are the only place where I tried it and I must say it looks very good here overall, though mostly I have been only reading to this point
As to LARPs, I could recount a funny story about myself that is classic among my friends, but I have already written a long post, so let me just say that I never LARPed though especially in my mid-teens I really wanted to try that. But, bah, nowadays I'm feeling I am just too old for it or what