I think a forum might be a little harder than a chat, just because of the time lag issues; there’s enough stuff to keep track of that it’s a little hard to keep track of if you’re not doing it all at once. Plus, you’ll need people who are honest about their dice rolls. AIM chats have a dice rolling function, so that wasn’t a problem for us – everyone’s rolls were right there.

As Itliaf said, you do need to have some idea of what you’re going for. We knew we wanted a world with pirates, and without just the typical D&D races, and something not too silly and not too serious.

Our game took a lot longer than six hours, but that’s in part because we were playing online, and the first age involved a lot of sending image files around. After that, I took care of adding cities and whatnot, since I have the best image program.

My suggestion: Read the rules very carefully, think about them, and don’t be afraid of changing your interpretation mid-game. We realized halfway through the third age that we’d been looking at Advance all wrong. We’d been using it just to give a civilization the technology, which we realized we should have been using Command City/Civilization for. And there was definitely a lot of arguing about what certain rules did and did not apply to.

We also did run across something of a PvP issue. We had some different ideas about what was ‘polite’ in the game, and took it out on each other’s races. We ended up with some epic battles, which was great, but sometimes the points that got poured into raising armies could have better been used adding to other aspects of the world.

The only house rules we came up with were these:
1. Avatars can raise armies without needing to command a city. We had some nomadic civilizations that wanted to get into fights, but since (at least according to our reading of the rules) you need a city to raise armies, there was nothing that could be done. Raising armies with just an avatar is much slower than if you also have a city or two, which makes sense, given the time and effort required to unify a nomadic people into a fighting force.
2. Avatars can fight on behalf of an army, giving it a +3, but if the army loses, they will die. This made sense to us, as it seemed like having an avatar on your side should confer some benefit. We came up with this towards the end of the game, so it could probably use some tweaking.

I ran the Dawn of Worlds game with my group a few weeks ago. Scott’s post on the topic pretty much gives you the preview you need, and everyone in my group was totally pumped to run the game.

A few words about my own experience, since while I had fun, I didn’t come out of the session with a finished world I wanted to DM in.

1. Don’t mess with the RAW much. I spent way too much time beforehand coming up with house rules that only ended up slowing down the game and not adding much fun, and not near enough time addressing…
2. have some idea going in what can and cannot happen in your world. I have some wacky players, and once I allowed one silly thing to happen, many other silly things followed that I couldn’t bring myself to ban.
3. Get some poker chips to keep track of points. It always helps to have something tangible to represent the give and take of power that happens round to round.
4. Six hours seems like a good amount of time for the game to take. We had to rush at the end of a four hour session to get a couple third age rounds in.

Again. Despite all of this, it’s definitely a lot of fun to play. so enjoy.