This is cross posted from The Hermits Hut:

I have been playing a regular game of HackMaster every week since June of 2002. All of my players are spread across the western half of the United States. I have players in Portland Oregon, Billings Montana, and various places in Texas. In playing this weekly game, I have never left my house and neither have any of my players. We play over the Internet using a program called OpenRPG. The program, OpenRPG is specifically designed for providing a game group with a virtual table top to play their RPG on. It provides a whiteboard to draw maps on, chat, die roller and nodes which can be used to build things like interactive character sheets. I have found this mode of play to be very satisfying and sometimes I can’t imagine playing any other way. Playing online has many advantages over playing Face to Face (F2F).

• It is easy to get a pickup game going even at 3 AM and none of your friends will answer their phones or everyone is out of town for Christmas. Simply log into one of the high traffic servers and announce you will run a game of whatever and will take the first 4 people to reply.
• You are not limited to your geographic location. If all the games in your local area are Vampire LARPs or 4E games and you hate both games, it should be easy to find other players in other locations who want to play your game.
• If all the game groups in your area are comprised of people who smell like cat piss and you miss your old game group, you can still play like its 1979.
• No lugging game books across town, all my books are within easy reach of your computer.
• No after game cleanup.
• Angry spouses and crying children only affects one player, not the whole group.
• I only have to buy munchies for myself, no mooches.
• It is much easier to accept the cute elf ninja chic if I can not see the 300 pound bearded man playing her.
• It is easy to get rid of annoying players, simply boot them out off the server and change the password.

To be fair there are some disadvantages to playing online as well and it is definitely not for everyone.

• Progress is slow, it takes an online group 4 hours to accomplish what a F2F group could do in 2-2.5 hours.
• As with any online communications, sometimes it is difficult to know what people mean when you do not have body language and facial expressions to help judge, misunderstandings do happen and are more common in online games, especially among people who do not know each other off line.
• It is easy for players to get distracted. Unfortunately it is easy to multi task with a computer and players can and will entertain themselves during the slow times of the game. They will watch TV, play Nintendo, surf the web and I have even been known to play in two online games simultaneously.
• Computer hardware and software are not perfect and sometimes things just don’t work right. The server you are using might go down in the middle of a game or one of your players may have a hard drive crash and loose all of his characters, macros and game settings.
• Cheating is much easier. I have not found an online client yet where die rolls could not be faked with some creative use of HTML or ASCII codes.