I've also been digging into that hole, and you maybe wanna wait a but with Realmcrafter .
v2.0 is in Beta testing right now and i believe it uses the Ogre3D engine for rendering.. so much better graphics than the previous one, which in my opinion looks really crappy..
With the new one you can use more triangles and have normal mapping.. that'll make it look really nice.

Torque is what i am aiming for with a normal RPg ..
Like the people mentioned before.. i am first gonna make a singleplayer with a group (though we need lots more people who volenteer) when that one is done and released we use the exact same area's models scripts battle system etc and put that into an mmorpg is the singleplayer gets downloaded often , and make a patch out of it .
Just start creating something and keep it safe (kinda gound like gandalf: keep it secret... keep it safe!)
And keep on building .

U am not even near a sharp tool whn it comes to most of the technical stuff.. i know how it's coded in big lines but not the syntax, same goed for modeling ..
I stick to the design part for now though i am learning.

I began with NWN1 with modding. There you have NWScript a C like programming language but made very easy and predefined commands with placegolders for scripts .

Instead of having to code all the stuff what should happens when the player dies.. you simply put a script on the OnDeath placeholder.
And more stuff like that .

Could be usefull to learn some basics.. but the syntax and commands are really different from the real thing mind you.. but the structure is the same wih C
I also use it to concept things out .

For the battle system .. i got lots of chapters to read at cprogramming.com to make a tekst based version of it .
When that is done.. you could inoprt the scripts and code you used for the real deal, which you need to do anyway as mentioned before.

Just some things to see how i work.. maybe you'll get some idea's out of that