There are a great many roleplaying games that you could play from your own chair. This is especially convenient if you are too shy to try out some life roleplaying in a pencil-and-paper game. Another advantage of on-line playing is that you can play with people at the other side of the world. It is not always easy to find enough people near you start a game. With the games you find on this site that at least is not a problem.

The first stop you could make is at the WebRPG. This is a site dedicated to roleplaying games. It also lists many games that are running or that are looking for players. You can also find a lot of information about roleplaying games from this site.

Play by email, or PBeM for short, is the general term for many roleplaying games you can find on-line. Players on these games regularly send a description of their actions by email to the gamemaster. And of course every player gets told what happens in an email as well. Because of this emailing pbem games are not generally very fast, but it is easy to add a lot of 'colour' to your actions.
Some pbem games follow a well-known roleplaying game system. Others are completely free form and only require that everybody regularly posts the actions of their characters. In fact there are games that do not even have a game master or any kind of plot at all.
Sources for PBem are amongst others:

• PBeM Base International.