I have difficulty playing any new games, too. If I can manage to push myself past the first half-hour or so, I usually manage to do OK, but I almost never feel that the trauma of that first half-hour is worth the payoff of having another game I can play. In the past half-dozen years, I've probably only done it twice.

Role-playing, I've never really managed to force myself to try. I got so far as to have a character rolled up on two occasions, but always panicked out of actually doing anything with it. There are too many things about it I don't understand, and it is not the sort of thing you can figure out all the ins and outs of at leisure and in private, you have to do quite a bit of it during the game, and with people watching. I'm sure once you get the knack of all the mechanics and such of the playing, it's loads of fun (though I suspect the actual role-playing bit would still trigger my "speaking in front of people" phobia for quite a while), but that learning curve scares the daylights out of me.