NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="chriton227" data-source="post: 6565415" data-attributes="member: 33263">I've played in and run several online games over the years, and in my opinion it makes for a very poor way to introduce people to the hobby.  The new player can't borrow another player's book to look through, so if they want to read the rules themselves, look through the character options to get ideas, or even look at the artwork to get a better feel for the world, they would have to make the investment of buying the book themselves.  It is harder for a more experienced player to help mentor the new player; explaining things to the player and helping to answer the new players questions would have to interrupt everyone on the main chat, take place on a separate chat channel,  or be done in text, rather than just a quiet exchange that doesn't disrupt the game, and things like pointing out various things on the character sheet are much more time consuming than just pointing at the sheet in person.  From an IC roleplaying perspective, you lose a lot of body language cues playing online, the chat system itself can introduce lag in the verbal exchanges, it becomes much harder to understand people if they start talking at the same time (which happens more frequently as the lag increases), and the audio compression used by the chat software can strip out some of the verbal inflections that make it easier to understand the tone and meaning of what is being said.  And then you get the technical aspects of actually doing it; they have to find the site to connect with a group, work out the scheduling, figure out the software (even Roll20 had a decent learning curve, and something like MapTool can get extremely complex), make sure they have the hardware needed (not everyone already has a mic connected to their computer, and even then it can take some work to get the audio levels right so you are not too quiet or loud), and they have to consider whether their internet connection can support software they will need to use (20% of US households don't have broadband and dial-up may be too slow to effectively support both a VTT and voicechat, or an unstable connection could result in repeated disconnects). All of this, compared to just showing up at the FLGS on the advertised day and time, where there are people with the books for you to look at and more experienced players to guide them.</blockquote>

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