Actually, there are multiplayer realtime online roguelikes... google around for MAngband, TomeNet, and Crossfire. But I don't think I'll get that complicated... a regular roguelike is hard enough to write as it is!
Speaking of which, I'm looking for a good way to store game data. I was considering XML, but it's pretty unwieldy unless you have a decent editor, which I'm having trouble finding. I was also considering some sort of relational database, but most of those require some sort of fancy installation procedures; the only one I can think of which doesn't is Access, and that's commercial and only runs on Windows. So unless I can come up with a good XML editor or a free portable DBMS which can be used by a program without the user having to jump through hoops to set it up, I think I'm left with one option (well, two, if you count hardcoding everything
): text files. But text files mean I'd have to do all the parsing and consistency checking myself - not that that's TOO daunting, but I like to make things easy. So any suggestions?