How to run a roleplaying game

Scheduling

Have a regular run time. Trying to do ad hoc scheduling will likely cause you to lose your most reliable gamers, and will lead to inconsistency.

Pick a sane amount of time for your group. For some people, 5 runs a week for 8 hours at a time is reasonable; others find a weekend day for 12 hours is good; yet others approve of a 6 hour run once a week.

Have a food plan.

House Rules

Almost no one uses only the published game rules. You are going to have house rules. You should keep a collection of house rules, so that everyone knows what they are. Additionally, you should have a meta-rule, which specifies how you will add new rules. I recommend, "The GM will make rulings on the fly. All rulings hold true for the remainder of the run. Rulings may be edited between runs."

Encounters

In any run, you should have a number of encounters; they may be visits with shopkeepers, or battles to the death with some orcs. You should prepare cheatsheets for encounters, so that you can run them very smoothly. Having a half-sheet with all the relevant information can make these quick, and prevent boredom for your players.

Dynamic Scenarios

Many GMs tend to run encounters "by the book" -- having NPCs effectively never moving (so player can retreat, rearm, and come back into the same encounter). NPCs should be adapting - if they're attacked in one place, expect them to build up some defenses.

These are set of suggested steps if you find yourself with an interested group of players yet the daunting task of cobbling together a believable, consistent environment for them to explore. This can actually be achieved with some properly allotted preparation time (20~25 hrs for your initial set-up and first session).

1. Seed concept : don't work in isolation ~ truly ingenious constructs are born of conversation and collaboration. Talk with your peeps (players) before beginning in earnest - because you're essentially their director and audience in this potential production. A performance of Antigone with an all Shakespearean troupe would be sadly awkward. Similarly, your elaborate desert campaign is just going to end up disappointing if all your players are serious Celtic enthusiasts.
   
   Informal brainstorming over coffee or drinks can produce some intriguing foundations ~ best done when most of your potential players are around. If you can evoke a specific parallel time & place, then much of your conceptual groundwork is already established.¹



2. Dense Core vs. Musical Spheres : one difficulty that arises at the outset is the question of where to start - the make up of constellations and moons and planets, or, the temperature and fauna around a local village. Some consistent and all-pervasive historical truths luckily come to your rescue here if you're going for verisimilitude ² :
   
   
   • first, the vast majority of the world's inhabitants were wicked-poor, illiterate peasants, primarily subsistence farmers or at best artisans, with little or no geographic or historical awareness.
   
   
   
   • This is particularly true of the Dark & early Middle Ages, when most kings and lords could barely read, and aristocrats rarely travelled outside their realm (as it was simply too dangerous & unprofitable to do so). Real travel for most of medieval Christendom didn't begin until the rise of guilds & universities in the 11-12th c.
   
   
   
   • Those who did travel, pilgrims and merchant-traders, were the primary sources of rumour and current events. There was no paper, books were useless objects to most, or jealously guarded rarities.
   
   
   All that last point is a roundabout way of saying, don't elaborately detail every continent and city in your world just so you can begin the game - most people in the Middle Ages were born, lived & died within a 50km radius, never read a single book, and that pretty much made up the borders of their worldly knowledge. Resist the temptation, in other words, to go big. Start Small.
   
   
3. Tiny Steps: Ever seen a medieval map? Lines drawn from one circle to another that represent `you get to A by going to B' - that was it. No scales, no compasses, no borders, no perspective - this held true until just before the Renaissance. So, make it easy on yourself & your players - map out the wider details as they occur to you.
   
   That isn't to say ignore all the micro matters: you'll need a local religion or two, some kind of rough calendar, names for a few planets & stars - but this & rough description of a 100km area around their starting point or hometown is really all the players should know about the wider world. Any other knowledge they have would more logically be professional skill or localized information.³



4. Local Colour: Start with a map (and some strong coffee). Words on paper are good, but reality is spatial, not textual and if you want suspension of disbelief, there has to be a logical, geographically sound element to the surroundings. As mentioned above, if you can nail down the specifics of roughly 100km surrounding the players staring point, you're in good shape for the first little while and the rest will flow from the game; after all, there's nothing quite as frustrating as spending hours on an intricate map of a secluded forest where the players seem to be headed, only to have them change their mind and veer off in another direction.
   
   As far as mapping goes, best to draw first and name things after the features. Placenames are pretty transient after all, even fluid, but serious landforms are stable referents. What's important in that first map?
   
   
   • Scale - otherwise travel times are going to be tough to calculate. If you take an 8.5 x 11 sheet, and make each inch 10m you're be working on roughly the scale mentioned above. 110km may not sound like a lot ~ but it's a solid week of walking ~ so for the first little while it ought to do.
   
   
   
   • Major landforms - rolling hills, foothills, mountains, valleys, plains, marshes & forests, along with coastline and large islands (if any).
   
   
   
   • Major rivers & lakes - remember, lakes collect in basins, and rivers run away from high ground to where ever low ground is. Rivers start begin in many branched tributaries, then come together to form larger & larger currents. In other words, the aqua-system of most areas with varied landforms (assuming there's water) should still look like a tree, ending with a trunk river, lake or ocean.
   
   
   
   • Roads, trails & habitations: where there are sources of water, or waterways, in the Middle Ages, without deep wells or aqueduct expertise, this is where communities found it best to congregate - so villages & towns should probably go where you've drawn lakes or streams. The bigger the lake, river or harbour, usually the larger a city might conceivably grow. Roads were originally built to move armies first, their commercial value was considered secondary - the opposite holds true for water transport.
   
   
   
   • Local Details : delineate farmland, pastures, wood camps, mills, marshes, bridges, tolls, ruins, fishing ponds - all the little intricacies that make a locality feel like it has depth and history. Then pick the hometown & ratchet up the focus still more by laying down street names, pillories, markets, alleys, wharves, warehouses, guardhouses, taverns, inns, etc.
   
   
   
   • Nomenclature: this was always the worst part for me, banging my head against the wall for names that weren't all Something-haven, Blank-wood or Thingy-anor. After your fiftieth placename you start to make some bad linguistic calls (same totally applied to people, and if you were tired enough, you ended up with a slew of He-Man names). Save yourself the anxiety & conserve your creative energies for your most important roles - description and surrounding events. If you have a rough geographic parallel in mind, naming is a breeze with all the medieval resources available online (or by a medieval atlas): goggling for map + medieval + 'region you'd like to model after' will give you hundreds of maps, each with dozens of regionally consistent and authentic sounding names for you to adapt. That way, each region's place names have a consistent sound.⁴ An impressive resource for historical maps is at the University of Texas Library's Perry-Castañeda Map Collection: http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/historical/history_europe.html.⁵
   
   
   
5. Economics = Politics : Believe it or not, figuring out where the salt & spices come from, who catches the fish, how the metals get mined and hauled to market, who cuts the wood & other rudimentary economics like that will a) convey a realistic sense of life's business in your setting, b) make it much easier to develop the characters of towns, c) help flesh out the politics, and d) make believable walk-on characters with intelligent motives a lot easier to improvise. A checklist of details to consider:
   
   
   • Imported materials - metals? spices? salt? textiles? horses?
   
   
   
   • Exported goods - fish? wood? grain?
   
   
   
   • Movement of goods: Trade routes, caravans, tolls, taxes?
   
   
   
   • Guilds - how many, how big, how competitive & how powerful?
   
   
   
   Answering these general questions (while looking suspiciously like homework) will aid immensely in maintaining some degree of sense to your world - particularly if you want to limit the availability of certain commodities, explain political intrigue or explain banditry/piracy/invasion.
   
   In terms of political systems themselves - there is a vast spectrum of possibilities -Anarchic, Aristocratic, Autarchic, Authoritarian, Autocratic, Bureaucratic, Capitalist, Collectivist, Colonialist, Commercialism, Communist, Confederates, Constitutional, Constitutional monarchy, Democracy, Despotism, Direct Democratic, Dynastic, Ecclesiastical, Ethnocentric, Expansionist, Fascist, Federalist, Fundamentalist, Gerontocratic, Imperialist, Internationalist, Interventionist, Isolationist, Matriarchy, Meritocracy, Monarchy, Orthodox, Parochialism, Paternalist, Patriarchy, Pluralist, Plutocracy, Police State, Protectionist, Regionalist, Republican, Separatist, Socialist, Theocratic, Totalitarian, Utilitarian, Utopian. Each system experiences different forms of intrigue. Feudalism and other aristocratic forms of governance tend to be subsumed by court intrigues revolving around legacies, dynasties, succession, etc. Republics, on the other hand, obsess over questions of law, rights and public resources. Finally, just as in the real world, a nation might call itself one thing, yet behave quite the opposite. Humans might be treated quite well, but minorities of other races (or the same race), might be subject to entirely different laws, slavery, forced exile, etc. (Thanks Cletus the Foetus for making me think about that).



6. Wider Maps & Chronologies : A single time line chronology on a 8.5" x 14" will actually encapsulate most of the broad historical detail you should need to get going - unless you have some heavy weight scholar types amongst your players. The truth is, most of your gang probably just wants to PLAY, not receive a twenty lecture on the time-shrouded mythic history of...whatever. All you need to worry about in that time line are the broadest historical strokes for now, the major sea changes over maybe the last 500 years, such as:
   
   
   • Succession of rulers and/or changes in the form of government;
   
   
   
   • Invasions, movements of peoples, or dramatic mass migrations;
   
   
   
   • Disaster related to plague, fire, disease, famine, pestilence, etc.;
   
   
   
   • Victory in war, establishment or expansion of colonies, major changes in borders, etc.
   
   
   
   Similarly, the far-flung geography of a world means very little to a group of characters with barely a sack of silver between them. So suppress your urge to overboard ~ always focus on what they can see, feel, touch, hear and taste. Tactile description - that's how to entertain and engage people. This is not to say you can dispense with a wider-scale map, which eventually you will require regardless. The 100km radius local map advocated above should be supplemented by a regional/provincial map detailing an area roughly ~1000 km North-South, with the area you've mapped in detail falling roughly in the centre. The most significant use of this regional overview will be allowing name-dropping, allusion and foreshadowing about ongoing events, news, and rumours leaking into the locality from the wider world; in painting, you need a horizon, similarly here your aim is to reveal some distant perspective, however blurry, to give the atmosphere of reality. ⁶



7. Finishing Touches : a) soundtrack: nothing's more important for setting atmosphere, esp. for particularly scenic or cinematic episodes. A list of excellent accompaniment would run a whole other node, i.e. soundtrack to The Mission or Gabriel's Passion, Avro Part & Henryk Gorecki, Eno's early ambient Music for Films or Ambient 4/On Land, any drone like Amp, Scorn, Windy and Carl or Lull (for fright scenes), or Dead Can Dance/Love Spirals Downwards/various ethereal stuff for mystical settings; b) battle mats & miniatures : a dry-erase marker & wipe-clean hex map, while expensive, really makes stage-setting & combat immensely more comprehendible, but miniatures are rarely worth the time and money you put into them (unless that's an end in itself). Truth be told, chess pieces work just as well; c) lighting: lots of candles are the only way to go, and cheap as dirt, though if you want to be on the safe side, get tea candles & put them in dollar store lanterns; d) booze/drugs: you have to have your guests comfortable enough to get into their characters (most people who've never taken drama find this pretty challenging sober) and yet they have to be able to think. Moderation, on a full stomach, is usually a workable policy; e) laptops: will only slow things down or sidetrack things. Paper based, table-top gaming relies on improvisation and inter-relation, not a room of people staring at an 11'' screen. Prep all you want using whatever tools you like, but once you sit down to play, things will flow much better without the puter.

~ welcome to role-playing game

So, you've decided to convict yourself to nerdery. But you want to do it with style. You figure, if you're going to run a role-playing game, it's not going to be a hack-and-slash monty haul dungeon crawl. No, it's a role-playing game, damn it! It's going to be a work of fucking art. Oh yes: you are a storyteller.

But, you need some ideas to get you started and keep you focused.

First, you must remember the golden rule: this kind of role-playing is a game, and should be fun. This doesn't have to be Larff-Fest '02; some players enjoy the catharsis of tragedy or the mental exercise of peeling away layer upon layer of intrigue. The point is, make sure everyone is participating because they enjoy participating. The second rule, which is corollary, is to know your troupe. Know what kind of game you like to run, and what kind of game your players like to play. Help indicate what you're interested in running by hashing out basics of plot and atmosphere with them in a brainstorm. "Yeah, what about a sorta Gothic Weird Tale blend set in eighteenth century Croatia?" It's often said that the only limit to role-playing is your own creativity, but remember that you don't want to tax or bore your players, either. Imagination is the most important faculty when it comes to role-playing, but don't let yourself get carried away.

Now, you need to know your rules. There are just so many rules systems to choose from, and all of them have acre upon acre of handbooks, sourcebooks, umpteenth editions, supplements, modules, boxed sets, and adventures. It's important to remember that even the best rules can be abused by bad (or simply bored) players, and even the worst rules can be redeemed by enthusiastic and concientious players. The two industry benchmarks are Dungeons & Dragons, which is in (what is commonly referred to as) its third and arguably best edition, called simply "d20;" and the Storyteller system, which was pioneered by the surprisingly popular indie game Vampire: The Masquerade. The d20 system is basically level-based; characters' combat skills improve automatically, and their other abilities are developed together at discrete intervals. It's good for games that will involve a lot of combat. The Storyteller system, by contrast, is skill-based; there is no quick index whereby the "power" of the characters can be compared, but skill development is gradual and more realistic. Two other popular systems are the HERO System, which is a point-based game designed for campaigns in which the players take on the roles of superheroes; and the various Palladium systems (Palladium, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Rifts, et alia), which are level-based and are very much inspired by the original editions of D&D, though applying those concepts to a variety of genres. Then there are the indy games, which tend to be simpler and geared for specific niche genres, like Marcus Rowland's shareware "science romance" game Forgotten Futures. Furthermore, there are a number of free form or customizable systems available, such as TheBooBooKitty's Open Roleplaying Game; or the excellent (and free) Window, in which a central design premise was that characters should be described primarily with adjectives and description, not numbers. Take a look around for the system that has the right kind of balance for the kind of game you're looking for.*

No core rulebook will be perfectly adapted to your needs. For this reason, it is tempting (oh, I know all too well how tempting) to comb through supplement after supplement to find the right patches for the kind of game you want to run. This is a bad idea. There is a deep, abiding contradiction in the role-playing game industry: In order to survive, they need to sell books. Since getting people hooked on games in the first place is difficult, they often end up making their money by developing existing games – which almost invariably means, developing existing games more than they need to be developed. This only makes it harder for new customers to get into the game, and makes running successful games more expensive, thus limiting the market even more. Supplements represent options; but the cornerstone of a successful campaign is focus. Actual rules should impede on game preparation and play (and on the wallet) as little as possible. A campaign doesn't need to have every single published prestige class or Discipline or "official" campaign secret; trying to amass this will leave you depleted of creativity. Choose a handful of resources (the core rules, maybe a handbook or two, and some magazine articles or something) and go from there.

The same is true of house rules. Try to avoid die rolls as much as possible; when they are necessary, make them as simple as possible. If the company whose game you're playing also published a LARP system based on similar rules (as the Mind's Eye Theatre productions are based on the "World of Darkness" Storyteller system), you might consider incorporating roll-saving procedures from the LARP system in your own tabletop house rules. Above all, don't get bogged down trying to develop the "perfect" rules before you begin play.

You will want to set up a campaign plan. First, you must decide how your troupe is going to be organized. The traditional organization of a roleplaying game is to have one full-time game leader ("Dungeon Master," "game master," or "Storyteller"), and at least one role player or actor – the typical campaign will have three or four role players. However, other arrangements have been tried; for example, in the Ars Magica system, participants alternate leading the game from session to session or story to story.

Ideally, all of your players can meet in one place to roleplay. Sometimes, this can't happen. When the person playing a central character can't make it to the game, you'll have to either play the character yourself (a prospect that puts many off, leaders and players alike), or come up with some good in-game reason for the character to be absent. On the other hand, sometimes you're going to have a character who's separated from his group for a more extended period. In these cases, you'll want to run a one-on-one adventure, just you and the player. These can be run just like any other adventure, or they can be handled via the wonder of "bluebooking." Bluebooking consists of writing a narrative version of the adventure in a log book of some sort, which the game leader and the player trade back and forth, each adding a new section in response to the previous. This works much like a live game, but is great for between-session gaming; it also lends itself well to an e-mail format. Be creative when trying to find alternative methods of playing.

Next, you'll have to decide whether you're going to have the players' creations define the story, or vice versa. Most game leaders prefer to have a very loose story idea, and then permit their players to come up with their own characters within some very broad guidelines (eg., in a medieval fantasy setting, the characters can't be rocket rangers or some shit). On the other hand, I've found that, with players who are more interested in the acting and role-playing aspect of the role-playing game, a very successful set-up is to have a developed story in mind, and assign roles on that basis. For example, if you've got a space opera campaign in mind, you might decide that your campaign needs a ship pilot, a gunner or engineer, a wealthy heiress, and a mysterious navigator. You might have a particular player in mind for the navigator or the princess, and might even have a full background worked out for those characters. Some players enjoy freedom in developing their characters; some enjoy being cast.**

I like to have my players do short writeups on their characters – some notes on their character's background, personality, outlook, and aspirations. This is a habit I picked up from years of playing White Wolf's Mage: The Ascension, where your character's philosophy can shape the reality of the game world. I've learned that, in any game, it's just a good way to get your players thinking in character. There's no need to make it too long; 500 words is a good minimum for most players. Of course, there's no need to set an upper limit, and giving stat bonuses (in experience points, for example) for longer writeups is an excellent incentive for players to develop their characters before play even begins. I call this "homework," and my players enjoy the assignment. You can keep this writeup, as well as the character sheet and any notes the player might want to keep, in a special duotang folder dedicated to that character; this is a great way to keep everything organized.

Many roleplaying campaigns are picaresque. They consist of "episodes" (separate "adventures") with little in the way of organizing principles that tie them together to form a plot. Many troupes are satisfied with this kind of play; I'm not. I prefer to have an overarching plot. For hard-core roleplayers, plot is the most important aspect of the game.

The plot will come to you in chunks; you might think of a great way to begin the campaign, but not know exactly where it will go – or you might have a great idea for an ending, but not know how to get there.† Before you start play, you will need to have formulated a clear idea of how to begin, as well as some of the challenges, conflicts and villains your players' characters will face. Beginning the game in a way that brings the characters together in a coherent fashion is always difficult; the cliché of having the characters meet in a tavern and discover they're applying for the same adventuring job is not only worn, it's never been very cementing of character bonds in the first place. Consider having your players help you out with this problem, consulting with one another to determine how they know one another and why they might want to adventure together. You also might consider defining some relations by fiat, asking two players to create their characters so that they would be siblings or cousins, old friends, or employer/employee. On the other hand, you might want to sow some intrigue into your troupe by having some of the characters mutually suspicious or at even antagonistic.

Forming a clear idea of some challenges your troupe's characters might face is not as hard as coming up with some balanced challenges the characters could overcome. Your first-level characters aren't going to be able to overthrow Pakhtuq, the Troll Tyrant of Orpa; they'd be eaten alive if they even tried. As the master of the game, you really have two options.

First, you could allow your players to create characters of a level of power more appropriate to the kind of game you want to play. This method has a significant disadvantage, in that players have less background with their characters. A story is always more personally involving if the players have watched their characters progress from weakness to strength. On the other hand, this method allows you to jump right into more dangerous and complicated stories of saga scope.

Your other option is to save the epic tales for later, and develop some adventures that will build the characters up to the levels required to complete those harder quests later. Starting from scratch makes the overcoming of long-term plans and overwhelming difficulties a lot more meaningful, because the players have watched their characters progress from the point where they would never have been able to overcome them. On the other hand, it really means you're in it for the long haul; it takes time to build characters of great power and experience. It can be difficult to hold the players' interest in a plot or a handful of plotlines that may take a year of real-time biweekly play to resolve. What's more, this method also burdens you with trying to extend the main conflicts of the plot into something that touches the lives of the characters from the very beginnings of their careers. Your epic tale in which humans restore the fallen god to grace might be the greatest tale you ever thought of, but if you can't figure out a way to get your troupe's characters on the path to encountering the fallen god, your great game idea is a flop, plain and simple.

Like any story, a roleplaying game campaign – at least one with a strong roleplaying dimension – will have a theme, the idea being explored by means of the story. A theme could be a conflict, like "human against nature," "individual against civilization," "slave against master," or "youth against age," and could be explored from any perspective. Or a theme could be much more introspective: love, hate, redemption, forgiveness, and revenge all make compelling themes. Once you've got a theme, you'll want to decide the tone with which you'll treat it. Tone is the essential component of style or atmosphere, and is just as distinctive to your games as theme. A story which took the conflict between the individual and civilization as its theme could be run in a light, comedic way, in which the characters are burdened by the exaggerated foibles of their fellows; it could be run in a heroic way, in which the characters reform a corrupt or decadent society; or it could be run in a paranoid or ultimately tragic vein, in which the gregarious agents of a totalitarian regime are everywhere, and the character's faith in others is their ultimate undoing (think Nineteen Eighty-Four). The importance of having a clear idea of theme and tone for your campaign can't be stressed enough. While obviously the plot of your story is going to involve secrets your players aren't ready to know, it's essential that they understand and support the theme and tone of the campaign; – otherwise they might become bored or even upset by the game.

You might want to keep a campaign bible. This is a notebook or folder that has all the information that your players can consult, especially the basic constitution of your game in terms of theme and tone. You don't need (and probably don't want) to come right out and say explicitly, "This is my theme; this is my tone." Instead, draft up a few pages of background material (known among gamers as "fluff") to whet their appetites. Think of composing a brief history of your gothic Croatian city state and the surrounding country as it is wracked by wars, invasions, and psychopathic nobles; the story of the Troll Tyrant's conquest of Orpa; or the prophecy of the newborn god leading a war to overthrow the current race of deities. Don't give away important secrets, but do try to give your players a good impression of what kind of story this is going to be, and make sure they're into it. This is the essence of what legbagede calls the "seed concept." Your campaign bible is also a great place to put summaries of completed adventures for you and the players to consult, in case there's any concern over forgetting important plot details or maintaining consistency.

Last but not by any stretch of the imagination least, you're going to want a master file. A Dungeon Master file, if you will. This is where you're going to keep episode summaries, session plans, non-player character and monster sheets, campaign maps, notes on imagery, snippets of conversation, segments of script, prop letters, pictures, and anything else you're going to need to run the specific story or adventure you have planned. This is your own personal file, not for any other eyes.

This is all you need to get started. Remember that although preparation is no substitute for creativity, creativity is no excuse for being unprepared. Keeping motivated and interested is also essential to running a long-term campaign. The best way to do that is to have fun.

---

* You can get Forgotten Futures at: < http://www.forgottenfutures.com/ >
Hook up with The Window at: < http://www.mimgames.com/window/ >

** The Norwegian live-action roleplaying community has apparently taken this principle of casting one step further. Many Norwegian LARP games now incorporate a principle called Skjebnespill or Lagnadspell – fateplay. In this system, every player is given a few easy imperatives, or "fates" (skjebne). The fates of the characters intertwine, creating the plot. For example, in a game inspired by Oedipus Rex, the main character may have the following fates: "You will flee Corinth to protect your parents from your prophecy. You will kill a braggart in a duel on the road. You will find your way to Thebes. When the plague descends, you will set out to find the murderer of King Laius." In itself, this fate seems fairly innocuous; but in the context of the larger story, its significance will become apparent. Note that this technique can be used to give more structure to the plot of a story in those cases where you want your players to focus more on character development and roleplaying. It doesn't lend itself well to more structured plots; players will feel that they're being "railroaded" toward preconceived conclusions that have nothing to do with their actions.
More on fateplay can be found at: < http://fate.laiv.org/ >

† A couple of years ago, I was running a campaign consisting mostly of middle. It was set in a small Mediterranean fascist island-state on the eve of World War II (think Malta). It had all sorts of intrigue revolving around the discovery of a forgotten library. Problem was, summer was almost over, players were moving away, and I didn't know how to finish the game; so I decided that the assassin-scholars who maintained the library also maintained something else: a semi-fluid protean infant god. They kept it in a vat, and as they were showing the players' characters around the library, they took the opportunity to shove the characters in, to be eaten by the god as it accumulated power for the end times. I thought the ending felt slapped-together, and had thought of it only the week before, but some of my players said it was the best campaign ending they'd ever played. Go figure.

"Here," he said. "You want to run this stuff? It looks like fun."

My first group consisted of my brother, two friends and my mother (she was a rather free-thinking woman). We used the demo game, and I immediately decided that we'd need to develop some dungeons of our own.

Getting involved in the RPG scene can take literally days out of your schedule. I remember spending months at a time, 8-hour shifts seven days a week working on my little corner of the universe. I have literally thousands of documented Non-Player Characters (NPCs) and well over 300 complete dungeons. I made up creatures, magic items, histories, and cities (down to each little shop and who lived upstairs).

Again, please be aware how addictive RPGs can be.

With years of gaming experience, including several large tournaments, I suggest the following things to keep in mind if you decide to become a Dungeon/Game Master:

• Know thy shit. There is nothing worse than having a new GM who has not read the basic rules, let alone the advanced ones. If you're working with experienced players, you'll eventually end up butting heads with the players who took the time to read the books. Think of it as a career move that will get you fame and your weight in Twinkies. Study, make notes, put it on a computer, if need be. Don't even consider making rule revisions unless you understand the originals.
• Document thy shit. Got ideas for the next meet? Write it down. Trying to guess what it was you meant to happen at the crossroads in front of the Thataway Inn will not wash. You want to introduce something new, like a creature or a new magic item? Write out just what it is, and give some background historical reference. Which leads us to:
• Plan thy shit. Off-the-cuff games can be a lot of fun - for an experienced GM. Until you've earned your bullshit, you need to write out a general idea for what is planned for that meet. Collect images, create important NPCs (and include everything they carry, in case they become Dead NPCs). You need a map of the area and a map of the dwellings. Note what lives where. Note where nifty items are hidden. Without properly planning, you'll end up with a Monty Haul campaign, where your newbie players end up with uber-powerful weapons and magic that they shouldn't even see, let alone own. They more Crap of the Gods that they own, the bigger the monster you have to throw at them, which will cause ill will. ("What? A pissed-off red dragon? But I'm only a Level 1 Monk!")
• Match thy shit with thy players. Magic should be rare, unless it is the premise of your whole game. This is not Harry goes to Hogwarts. Give them things that can be useful - if they use their heads. A Magic Bucket of One Million Liters of Beer can be used defensively or *hic* offensively. Give your players the tools, and leave it to them to make use of it or do something silly.
• Thine players hath brains. Allow them the luxury of free will and thought. They should be cajoled towards a goal, yes, but do not force them. Then it becomes a room full of people eating Twinkies and watching you move their characters like pawns or puppets. Believe me, it is not fun, and they'll leave for better things, like watching television. One time I had a huge dungeon prepared for my players, and they ended up going to kill an evil landlord that was extorting money from the pretty barmaids. If their characters want to go left, allow it. When the impromptu portion is over, link the evil landlord back to the original mission. This will get them back on track, and they'll feel like they had a say in the lives of their characters.
• Be mysterious in thine ways. One thing I used to do constantly was hand out little notes to players. This got the others nervous, and sometimes it said, "It is starting to get dark", sometimes it said, "You notice your guide has a cloven left foot like the evil mage Ticca."
• Be respectful always. This goes from the real-life stuff ("Thanks for letting us play in your basement", "Thanks for the Twinkies", "Thank you for creating a new scenario for us") to the game world ("No, you fucking MORON, the rule book says you can't do that!", "Oops, I spilled my Pepsi on your stupid character sheet - again", "Gimme the last Twinkie bitch!"). Everyone took time to get the game together, so kudos those around you. Always praise your players after a game, even if they are nothing but a smear on a canyon wall. Characters die, don't rub it in. If someone is acting out of character, politely pass them one of those mysterious notes.

Get to it!

Location
One of the most important factors in hosting a game, whether it be D&D or Paranoia, is the space in which the game takes place. This can be anywhere from the living room to a kitchen table to the basement. While the goal here is to make sure that everybody fits comfortably (or as uncomfortably as they're willing to live with), where you play your game sets the tone. Slaying dragons in that dungeon loses its' aura of magicalness when you're sitting in a brightly-lit room, trying to keep from staring at the grotesquely old family photos on the shelf.

Lighting
While good lighting makes for good atmosphere, remember that it needs to at least be bright enough so that the players can read their character sheets without use of flashlights.

Seating
Again, the comfort of the players is important. Overstuffed chairs, couches, sofas, and so on are good for gaming. If at all possible, the DM should have a more comfortable chair, just because he's the DM. Remember to move all of the chairs and whatnot to the aforementioned Location before the players arrive, the last thing you want is to have a game interrupted by new arrivals having to find a place to sit.

Food and Drink
This is possibly the most important matter to be taken care of. You can play a good game of GURPS in the dining room, but if your players don't have anything to munch on, there will be a riot, possibly ending with the host's liver being served with some fava beans and a nice chianti. If you can't determine everybody's tastes, cover all the bases by having as many varieties of soda as possible, preferably a brand with a higher caffeine content such as Mountain Dew, Dr. Pepper, or Jolt. As for food, while Rancid Pickle touched on the wholesome goodness of twinkies, a bowl of chips or pretzels can easily be passed around, and won't damage your