We’re playing the DDO Head Start now and chat still rocks.
Our experience with the game so far is that pretty much you get to sit around, drink beer, and play pickup D&D campaigns with every gamer in the U.S. We haven’t run across any rules Nazis yet whining about deviations from the books, although they’re out there. But, I probably don’t meet their standards and they’d leave my group anyway, so I’m not too worried.
New idiotic Metro story: on Friday morning, the first escalator down to the train platform was not running. This converts it into a “staircase.” There was a Blue Line train at the platform when I got there, converting the “staircase” into a “staircase full of suits rushing down at breakneck speed.” Then I discovered that a woman had stopped halfway down and was benignly going through her purse as if she were in the powder room at the theatre and not, as it were, trying to place her manicured thumb in the dam that would stem the tide of lunatics. For a few moments I had this eerie feeling that she was going to get killed, like I was in a dream that had suddenly turned bad. Finally she started moving again and made her way safely to the bottom, gazing around in a cowlike way at all the people glaring at her as she did so.
Please, fidget in low-traffic areas only.