Nihilistic's Rob Huebner updated his .plan with a giant update on everything about their upcoming game Vampire: The Masquerade - Redemption. It's an enormous update, with Rob talking about their first public testing of the game, and the multiplayer aspect as well (not to mention his picks for the best games of the year). Here's an excerpt with him discussing the press demo of the multiplayer component:

The other big milestone was our first demonstration to the press of the storyteller aspects of the game. Ray was the designated storyteller and our in-house Activision tester Sion was the "red-shirt NPC" for the evening. We were working on various aspects of the storyteller system just hours before the demo, so I wasn't enjoying things too much, always expecting a massive crash to happen at any moment. Ray was STing (DMing) a pre-packaged chronicle called "To Curse the Darkness" which will ship with the final game. The interface was still a bit clunky, and Ray had to manually type a lot of the dialog that will be "triggerable" in the final version. The chronicle starts in a tavern in the city of Temesvar. The amazing thing, to me at least, was that the opening tavern scene, which sets the stage and gets the players started on the plot, ended up taking more than an hour to complete.

And it wasn't because of bugs or problems, it was because the players were having so much fun just sitting around in the travern interacting with the various NPCs (mostly played by the Storyteller, of course), that the story took on quite a bit more depth than we had anticipated. Watching this, it became clear just how big a deal an experienced storyteller can be for an on-line RPG session. I can't remember ever spending an hour interacting with canned RPG NPCs without wanting to smash by monitor, but this first 'real' Storyteller experience wasn't like that at all, Ray had to practically have a bouncer come over and toss them out of the travern to move them along.