Quote from: ergeheilaltWe use IRC as our chat client and when things get tricky about manuevering, we fire up a webcam on the battle mat the DM uses to move minis around for combat. Most of the time however, he just puts up a screen shot of the battlemat on his website that we check after each round

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QuoteI've heard tales of entire gaming groups falling apart because of WoW. I've lost gamers to it myself. They get their fix through that, so they have no urge to play tabletop anymore.

Can´t concur. I have a hardcore WoW player in my D&D Campaign. He even met his girlfriend there. But he´s starving to game for real. Accopmlisments in WoW quickly lost their appeal for him, once he reached Level 60. WoW is his Methadone.

Quote from: SettembriniCan´t concur. I have a hardcore WoW player in my D&D Campaign. He even met his girlfriend there. But he´s starving to game for real. Accopmlisments in WoW quickly lost their appeal for him, once he reached Level 60. WoW is his Methadone.

This is closer to my experience, too. "Real" gamers (whatever that means) don't enjoy CRPGs the same way they enjoy PnP. Sometimes they enjoy it just as much, but it's a different kind of buzz.

My concern is over what will happen when technology is capable of bringing the CRPG experience closer to the PnP experience, or if PnP becomes marginalized enough that younger players aren't even aware of a serious PnP alternative. (Or if CRPGs warp perceptions and expectations enough that the traditional PnP is essentially impossible to do with younger players.)

Quote from: EveryoneOr if CRPGs warp perceptions and expectations enough that the traditional PnP is essentially impossible to do with younger players.

That one is easy enough to shake off; I don't expect that will change.

This really has broken itself down into two seperate issues; MMORPGs (which I am a fan of in theory, but haven't seen it done right or played right yet), and on-line conferencing in one manner or another for actual virtual PnP gaming.

Given that the OP seemed to be referring to the latter, I'll address that.

In my RPing 'career' I've been in 2 gaming groups I would have bent over backwards to keep together.  
The first was a Champions game that dissolved when the GM went back to Boston after his visit to Ohio (where I lived).  I would have happily digitally conferenced to maintain that game, but given that none of us knew about the Internet at the time, and 1200 baud was the average modem speed, it wouldn't have been possible.
The second would pretty much be any game Ralts was running.  I'd happily conference into any game he had going if I were invited, although I'd be worried that the family would be constantly making requests of me that pulled me AFK.  (Would that I were so lucky as some who's family will give them a little peace every now and again, but sadly no).

Conferencing into a game wouldn't be my first choice by any means, but in a situation like mine (3 kids, no babysitters, apt too small to host a game, and no desire to go looking through a small town to see what kind of psychotic gamers Ralts left behind when me moved to Oregon - hehe), online gaming really does have strong points going for it.

I've been in a couple of online games, run through irc on the magicstar server.  (One nice thing about this irc network is that it contains a /roll command that broadcasts your roll, plus modifiers, to the entire channel.)

We don't use any secondary system to handle positions on maps, so as you might expect it generally works best for games where exact tactical positions don't matter.  Our game of Buffy has been going on for years there without much trouble, but our attempt at Conan OGL had problems reconciling the position-based combat rules of d20 with describing more or less where things were.  (Normally you'ld probably want to change the rules to suit the play environment more, but it was a playtest game, so we wanted to try to stick to the rules.)

Generally I'm mostly positive on this sort of gaming - I wouldn't want to only do online gaming like this, but on the other hand without this I wouldn't have had the chance to play with these folks, and I've had a great time at it.