Post by LanceBut you can play multiplayer without being in a persistant world,
can't you?
I admit I haven't ever played anything but single player, but my
understanding is that there's a vast middle ground of people who go
thru modules either with a DM or even just as a "party" who are
exploring together. In situations like that, a "pause" in order to
allow someone to go use the restroom or feed the baby or whatever
isn't out of order...
Yes, you can play multiplayer not in a persistent world (PW) but
that's a different animal. (I have two PCs linked by an ethernet
crossover cable, not connected to the internet at all, for playing NWN
with my son).
When you pause in multiplayer, you pause all the characters, too.
When you pause (or cast Time Stop) in a PW, you pause the Entire
World. This is very annoying to the other 5 adventuring
groups/individuals who have no idea who you are, why their game just
froze, and may be living across the world somewhere - which is why
almost every PW disables pause and Time Stop.
Post by LanceAnd personally, I'll find it hard to adjust to not having a much more
casual pause factor, since I'm often found clicking around for a
minute or two finding the spell I want,<snip>
Which is fine for multiplayer but not for PW. Pretend you were
playing a Playstation or other console game, and every time any other
person in the world playing a Playstation paused their game, yours
would stop too. That's what pause/Time Stop is like for a PW. OTOH,
if you had 4 players hooked up on your one Play Station, pausing the
game for a bathroom break is no biggie. That's the difference between
PWs and multiplayer.
HTH!