As you can guess, it's pretty much Dungeons and Dragons...online. The rules are little bit different from the pencil and paper games I played back in High School, and when I was stationed in Massachussetts, but the concepts are the same. Here, I play 3 different characters (no, not all at the same time!)
The game is based on the universe of Eberron, which was created by a guy who won a contest to create a new universe. Eberron is kind of steampunk-ish, with a curious mix of magic and technology like magic.
I play with a Fighter, who is your typical 'sword and board' fighter - a sword and a shield. He excels in slicing and dicing his enemies, although skeletons are tough to slice (you should bash them) and oozes have a tendency to multiply if you slice them (they hate lightning, tho!). I created this guy when I first started DDO a long time ago. The guild he's in has vanished...well, the guild's still there, but I'm the only active player in it.
My next character is a "Favored Soul". It's kind of like a paladin, but not as fighter-y. Kind of like a cleric, but not as...cleric-y. It's hard to describe! It's interesting to play, because the class has limitations that a straight Fighter or Cleric don't have.
My third character is a wizard. Traditional spellflinger (in fact, I made his last name "Sparkflinger"), and I tend to use lightning spells whenever I can. He's very 'squishy' though, so I don't play him alone. He's the leader of a guild I made, and although there's only 3 or 4 actual people in the guild, we have enough different characters (besides our active ones) that we look like a 'real' guild.
DDO is a slightly different online game, different from LOTRO and the others. You have 'adventure packs', groups of quests that all tie together. There's no overall storyline, except for the upcoming expansion, where they're going to allow us to cross universes to the (apparently) more popular "Forgotten Realms". I like the design concept of DDO - you can log on, do a series of quests, and feel like you've accomplished something. Sorrowdusk Isle, for example, lets you help out a friendly monster regain his clan's home..cave. Once you've gone through the quest chain, you're done..except you're not. You can do the quests several times, with harder and harder settings (the hardest being 'epic'), getting more experience and better rewards the higher you go. Even if you don't do that, once you finish a set, you feel like you've actually accomplished something (at least I do!)
When my guildmates and I play, we also have Skype going, so that we can talk about what we're seeing on the screen - "Watch out for the scorpions", "Need a heal", etc. DDO offers a voice chat tool, but it's not as simple as Skype. :)
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