if you can find a group near enough and are still worried about being super new (dont be but if you are) you might be able to get together with a GM and another player and run a simple 2 character session where the idea is to get you familiar with the basics.
I have done this in the past its not to hard and most gamers would be willing to spend some extra time to help you out this way.
If you can’t find a local group, and want to play D&D by the 3rd edition rules, get Neverwinter Nights.
It’s fairly easy to find a campaign game suited to your desires, and you can play a single player game if you desire. It’s easy to learn and it will help you with concepts if you find a game group to play tabletop D&D.
You can get the game with both expansions for under $20, or pay $30 and get additional content.
Ah, much good advice from the SDMB. 
To echo others, I think you’re best suited to tabletop gaming, given your stated interests. While it is possible to create backstory for characters in online games, your ability to really play the role is limited to chat interfaces and some simple emotes. Since you’re missing physical and auditory cues, that really makes it hard to engage with people.
Echoing again: You will most likely find gamers to be a very welcoming bunch.
Amplifying: Many of us like nothing more than to introduce someone to new games. And there are new games all the time, so even people like me (40 years old, playing AD&D since 1979, owner of more than 50 different RPG systems) are getting things explained to us as we learn new games.
So, find a gaming convention – I found this one in Connecticut in about 45 seconds of Googling “connecticut convention gaming” – and go to it.
Talk to the convention organizers – they’ll be the people hanging out at the registration desk – and see if they know any places to play that are closer to you.
Heh. I didn’t start playing D&D until I was nearly 30. I found a group with a DM about my age, & a bunch of younger kids not much more experienced than me. Not that big a deal.
Of course, I just quit a couple months ago. The stress when my character would die was getting hard on my brain.
I agree completely. The roleplaying I love is impossible online. In an ongoing campaign, I play a cleric of the Norse pantheon. The rules just require me to say “I cast cure moderate wounds” and such. Instead, I do research into Norse culture and mythology, and make impassioned pleas to the relevant gods. So, instead of just filling the function of healer, and the other spells only priests get, my priest is a person with quirks, flaws, hopes etc.
The best tactic I’ve ever heard of is impossible online. A friend was playing a priest whose god required absolute poverty. He owned a begging bowl, a walking staff, and a plain, tattered robe. The adventuring party he was with was ambushed by mercenaries. Every one else was killed. The soldiers looked at the priest and were about to kill him. He held out his bowl and said “Alms for a poor leper?”. They looked at him, decided he had nothing of value and could really be diseased. The soldiers turned and left.
This is one of the few places that the Simpsons has failed us. Gaming geeks do not scorn outsiders. You will not be laughed at for not knowing what a d20 or saving throw is.
It’s very similar to the urge so many of us feel to introduce people to Monty Python, Zelazny, or the SDMB.
Hee hee! You know what’s funny? I was in Rainbow Girls (basically, Freemasonry for teenage girls) and one year, all us nice little girls in our dresses (you weren’t allowed to wear pants ever when attending Rainbow functions) arrived at the hotel for our yearly statewide convention…only to find the lobby full of black-clad people, mostly young guys, some with vampire fangs in…
…Turns out that through a scheduling coincidence of extreme humor, we had been booked on the same weekend as ConnectiCon
The old ladies who were on the advisory board for the Grand Assembly (as our state convention was called) were completely mortified, and we were all strictly forbidden to speak to or have any contact with those horrible people meeting in the second ballroom
Which, of course, didn’t stop a lot of people from hanging out with the guys, though, or, as one of my particularly daring friends did, going into the room where they were selling stuff and buying a unicorn tarot deck
I think that was when I first got really interested in DnD, actually…watching all those people having fun at their convention, staying up late and playing games on the terraces of their hotel rooms, while we all shuffled in straight lines in our church dresses and weren’t allowed to do anything out of the sight of a grownup 
…and, looking over the site some more, it seems that I must have encountered the former incarnation of ConnectiCon, as the one that exists now has only been running since 2003, and my story is from 1994 or so.
I swear it happened, tho.
Oh, & as for online gaming, the graphics-intensive stuff is kind of … just a video-game. But there are MUDs & such where people can use text interfaces to tell stories about characters. It’s not real visually stimulating, but an idiot cousin of mine online games like this for hours & hours a day. Places like www.chatalot.com --on second thought, don’t take this up.
Just to be a bit of a salesman for online gaming, I would say that “ability to make a story” really isn’t an issue. The world itself may have to stay relatively static, but the other players you are with are real humans and what you do with and to them is going to effect “your” story. So indeed, you may never be all that important in the history of the game, but still you are able to choose the life your character lives, and properly written it can be quite the soap opera.
Currently I am playing World of Warcraft, which has a nice community on the RP servers and will pretty much allow you to create a character and start living, anytime you want, and no dice.
However, if you want a world that is more in-depth, changing, and where the players do change things, you might look at EVE. It’s a future, space game and you are essentially a space ship (which is a little bit of a letdown admittedly.) The game very much allows for total immersive roleplaying, though oddly there are not all that many RP groups. I, at least, was perfectly happy with the one I joined.
So, the plusses of Online are, Easier to get started, no dice, no math, no driving, and no paperwork. Your and others’ characters will be able to live more realistic lives as 1) living your characters life is all you can do and, 2) anonimity lets you not get weirded out by your character making friends and lovers and whatnot.
The minusses are, potential for getting addicted, probably not much ability for your character to go off and be a great hero and effect anything in the greater world, and your social life will be being conducted over a wire.
Sounds more like a SF Con than a gaming Con.
Contrary to the opinions here, I’ve been making moderate efforts to play RPGs since I was 17 - that’s about 22 years. And I once managed to get together for about three months and get somewhere - actually fought at battle! - about five years ago - but it was too difficult with all the kids (I had two toddlers, another couple had two toddlers) and a group that wasn’t committed.
My first experience was in college. I was made to feel unwelcome when the GM had me roll crossing a log over a stream and I fell in and drowned.
Later, I spent about six hours “walking around in the woods.”
After that, I had gamers play in my own house for three months with Brainiac4, who wouldn’t let me play. I can still get mad about that one.
Then I had my more successful three month long campaign. Unfortunately, by that time I had small kids and small kids and RPGs don’t go together.
I’m told my experience is very atypical.
Oh, Brainiac4 would have been happy to let me play. The other gamers in the group were unwilling to have me play.
One of the gamers brought her small child, then expected me to watch it. After three months I kicked them out.
Twelve years have passed, but I’m not bitter.
I was about to scold Brainy, good thing you had that follow-up post.
I think it’s been covered pretty well. You’re definitely not old for the hobby, and gamers love to indoctrinate new gamers, though even amongst gamers there are occasionally jerks.
One thing that hasn’t been covered in detail (just a bit by foolsguinea) is that there are online chatrooms dedicated to roleplaying. Some use a rules system, some are more freeform and let people concentrate on the story and character, not the mechanics. I don’t recommend them as a substitute for tabletop if you can find it, but they’re a pretty good supplement.
I’m playing in a LiveJournal-based roleplay right now - two, in fact - based on the DC and Marvel comic book universes.
I forgot to mention last night:
In the meantime you can join several of us silly dopers in a freefrom RPG started by Winston Smith.
Henchpersons Wanted. Inquire Within.
No rules, so easy to learn, but basically Role Playing and somewhat funny.
Jim
I’m trying to avoid using the eye roll smiley to express what I think of the idea that the OP is “too old” at 26. There’s not a gamer in our group under 30, and most are a lot closer to 40. No basement-dwellers either.
There is an alternative to tabletop gaming that’s not a CRPG: Fantasy Grounds, OpenRPG, or another one whose name is escaping me at the moment but I want is say is something like Screen Monkey. They’re programs that let a DM run a pen & paper RPG over the Internet. You would usually use voice software like Roger Wilco to be able to talk together, but it could also be done in an instant messenger window that those programs integrate.
:smack: I can’t believe I forgot to mention that. Besides everything else, my use of EtherPyschologist and other terms has always been a blatant reference to Mage-The Ascension.
Despite the total lack of written rules in that thread, everybody is doing an excellent job. Individual goals aren’t derailing the story. People aren’t constantly changing the gameworld in their posts. Nobody is using the invitation to list abilities as an excuse to make themselves all powerful.* Methods for allowing dead characters to return have been created, and are completely inline with the themes.
- I come closest to this with my talk of being the master of the human mind. However, there are two things that keep this from being munchkinism**. First, I’ve got a bunch of posts in unrelated threads claiming the same thing. Second, I’m not using the power for anything other than defense, and to get more of Baker’s cooking.
** Munchkin- a gamer who does not care about story, character development, consistency with gameworld or anything else. They just want the biggest, baddest, most powerful character.
I wouldn’t rule out online gaming altogether, though for your interests I would try out one of the text based ones. They tend to draw more RPers than the graphics games, so it makes for a decent mid ground from tabletop.
If the GM’s running a text are worth anything, your actions can and will affect the longterm direction of the gameworld. Obviously, it won’t give you the same experience that a real live tabletop game will, but it can still be fun.
Heh, that does look like fun. I have thrown my hat in the ring…hopefully, Mr. Smith will like what I have offered to him
A digression…
I thought I was old in my mid-20’s. I think it comes of getting away from schoolkid ideas of age. Bah. 26 is not old.
Maybe. I feel old largely because I feel like I haven’t accomplished all that I want to by this age. I still live with my parents, and I’ve been very, very sick for over two years, and I have no meaningful social life, which is part of why I want to get involved with games (for the social life part of it…I know people will think I’m an even bigger loser in re: the whole living at home thing if I also game, but I can deal better with prejudice than loneliness. :))
eh, prolly too much infodump there. sorry.
I second the idea of Neverwinter Nights. It would be a good introduction to the mathematical concepts of D&D — most role-playing games are similar in that you have defining statistics and rules to manipulate them — and unlike online gaming, it can be saved and paused to give you more time to think, or go back to a previous save and try a new strategy.
It’s also an older game and doesn’t require a beefy new computer to run it.
You might also look into play-by-email gaming, which isn’t quite as good as face-to-face, but would be a good introduction to rules and character configurations. There might even be somebody on the Dope who is currently running one, or who is willing to start one. They tend to move rather slowly by comparison to table-top gaming, as there is more time and opportunity to micromanage individual encounters.
Face-to-face is best. A good Dungeon Master wouldn’t capriciously torment or kill off characters for the heck of it, but he also wouldn’t be so permissive that the characters are defeating the minions of the Sun God on day 2, either.