Call them whatever you like to call them

[MrObject]

I played Ultima Online when it came out spent a lot of time on it and nobody used the term toon to refer to their characters, nor did I hear people refer to their characters on Everquest as toons, or even the playstation MMO (Adventures of Everquest). First time I heard the term was WoW (pre their first graphic update) as their characters appeared cartoony.

You are partially correct, Ultima Online your characters were usually refered to as 'chars', but other graphical muds like The Realm and Neverwinter Nights people called them toons. In Everquest Online Adventures they used a lot of terms like char, av/avatar, and toon. The majority of the crowd using the term toon played The Realm, Neverwinter and to a lesser extent M59.

[Aleksandr]

You are partially correct, Ultima Online your characters were usually refered to as 'chars', but other graphical muds like The Realm and Neverwinter Nights people called them toons. In Everquest Online Adventures they used a lot of terms like char, av/avatar, and toon. The majority of the crowd using the term toon played The Realm, Neverwinter and to a lesser extent M59.

if you are referring to the old Bioware community Neverwinter and Neverwinter 2 (The former made by obsidian) the multiplayer persistent world servers are still up and active and still lack the term 'toon'.
a list of a few hundred active servers may be found at: http://www.nwnlist.com/

[whilke]

if you are referring to the old Bioware community Neverwinter and Neverwinter 2 (The former made by obsidian) the multiplayer persistent world servers are still up and active and still lack the term 'toon'.
a list of a few hundred active servers may be found at: http://www.nwnlist.com/

I'm pretty sure he's talking about Neverwinter Nights from around 1991. It was a text MUD that ran on the AOL servers. The Neverwinter nights 1/2 games that you're talking about came about because of that old MUD.