Pen and paper D&D was incredible but now that I'm older its very hard to find the time to play. NWN, I hope, will bring all that fun back to life. I do have a few concerns though. It won't take long for people to start hacking their character files and giving themselves everything under the sun and impossible stats to boot. It would be great to be able to jump into a campaign and know the people around you are legit, but I foresee a diablo-like online community. The only ways I can see to avoid the BS is to have characters stored on a centralized server where you can only have access during gametime or just play with people you know and/or trust - which for me will be difficult since I don't know anyone else who will be playing. A centralized server would likely mean "approved campaigns" to avoid excessively gracious or biased DMs and that in turn would lead to $$ to play. I for one won't pay for a game that I'll only have time to play once a week.
On a lighter note though - the game should alleviate some of the anoyances of the pen and paper game, such as slow progress, DMs needing to give detailed room descriptions so that the players don't fry themselves with a fireball or forget quick escape routes. Feuding over loot should be a much more fun when you can't see other players slipping notes to the DM to tell them they are going to pick their buddies pockets.
Its still worth a buy just to see if it can live up to the old days.

Whatcha think?

Ah yes... I can dispel some of your fears right here.
The characters (legit ones anyway) along with all the stats will be saved on a server run&owned by BioWare. That is, of course, for the official and supported modules.
However, the players and DMs will also have an option to run servers themselves, and (if they choose so) might allow cheating, hacked chars and such. But it will all depend on the type of the server you'll play on.
On a side note, the official character vault will keep around the clock scans of the char records and will eliminate any hacked and/or undesirable items and such.
That's what they're saying anyway... it's still a long road to the completion of the game (like a year), so we'll just have to wait and see. :cool: