Wait just a carnsarned minute there, mousethief! Weren't you the one chiding ME for beating up on myself? If I have to cut it out, so do you. So there.

My original "beef" was that I wanted to get to know people and (quoting myself here) "not JUST their characters." I had and have no objection to socializing with people as we are role-playing and, in fact, have done so in my D&D-playing days. My problem is that I want to feel free to "break out" of the role and explore the differences Mario describes above (people taking on different roles in different circumstances) and get a better picture of the "whole" of each of these people.

It seems apparent from other responses above that the answer is to make sure, if I do join SCA or a Ren fair or a reenactment group, that I do socialize with other members in various other settings (not always easy, as has been pointed out). Unfortunately, my D&D experience was that some friends, whom I had gotten to know a couple of years before they took up the game, became interested in it to the exclusion of other social activities. On short visits to see them, I found myself observing their game without being invited to create a character to join their "world" (they didn't want to deal with the character after I left). When chatting on the phone, they were describing their characters' activities at length, and their own almost not at all. So we drifted apart.

I guess I fear that the same would happen in the SCA or the other groups mentioned here.