It just strikes me as something that "should" have happened years ago, like so many of the other things I've mentioned in here, considering the confluence of interests, mechanics involved, and honesly many P&P things boil down to being Roguelikes that use paper, people, and physical props in lieu of any actual programming and such along standard videogame lines. Largely, if people wanted to come up with games that are fun while not having skills/capabilities/drives to learn their way around prgramming/art/sound---P&P is where they've been turning to. Which is very logical since D&D itself manifested from some older primordial ooze of strategy war gaming as per my gisty understanding of it.
Main thing that sparked me on this was discovering 2 very decent LP's on youtube, one completed in part and the other well in progress, by 2 delightful German players running the gauntlet and commenting on the first 2 games in the Realms of Arcania series in English. By that I mean, I've spent the last few days of traitorous-mouse-time watching through them and thereby studying the games/this older incarnation of the Dark Eye system and how they implemented it for about 10ish hours a day...
Though to be fair, Incursion and Sewer Jacks DID cause the first bubbles in my head months ago as they came up and to be.
On the Roguelike front, I've seen various people in various places that seemingly have technical talents getting utterly bogged down on the actual ruleset/game world/content part and result in nothing coming of it. So with the P&P/tabletop fare already handling the heavy lifting on that front combined with an existing fanbase of sorts it would bode well. There are some general online play P&P outlets out there...think the Blood Bowl one is called FUMBL or some such...but nothing on the level of really breathing life into the schematics as a full fledged videogame experience. ( I mean outside of Blood Bowl and the knockoff'ish game before it, the recent and upcoming Drakensang games, you get the idea. Those are far and away the exceptions rather than the rules out of the vast myriad of English language P&P and Tabletop stuff alone and even then very "compromised" versus say how deep and varied Incursion will be representing D&D should all things continue rolling on along)
Like most of the stuff in here, food for thought until the time comes down to tracking down people, organizing, and rolling the dice on the lot of it. Roguelikes pretty much invented "kitchen sink'ing" it in terms of inclusion in/breadth of games so this strikes me as far too plentiful a bounty to ultimately leave on the table unawares.
There's also an anime store in my area that has taken to miniatures, TCG's, and the like for regular events as ye mention Elig. Comic shop too though I've no idea what they have going on per se. I suppose it should round out somewhere in my todo list to try and find myself up there to pump for more information and the like and buy a pack of gum or something so as to make it worth their while in any case. Might not be a bad idea for your's either should the notion and oppourtunity happen to avail itself to you sometime here on ahead.
