A fresh new adventure

I am going to be GMing a fantasy gaming campaign again for the first time in a while.  I have made a couple of stabs at running games for Pinkie Pie, but they always ended quickly for one reason or another.  This time it is a game for 5 players who are all adults, so my standards for people's effort are going to be way higher, and hopefully we will get some exciting times in.  The last time I did this was probably around ten years ago, so there is definitely some rust to shake off.

It is weird running a game for people you don't know.  Normally the GM takes charge and organizes things, but I wandered into this gig without having met some of the players at all.  That makes things... tricky!  With people I know it is easier to know how much to push for things, and what I can expect.  Hard to do that without experience with the players.

Also I managed to totally avoid taking my own advice about setting up a game.  I have often said that it is trivial to get a bunch of people to say they want to play DnD.  The interesting part comes in actually hammering out a schedule that has you meet regularly.  My theory is that you should pick the schedule first and get players based on that.  Don't just invite six people and then hope you can all meet up, that is a recipe for meeting twice over six months and giving up.  First pick a schedule, and then choose players that can meet it.

I apparently didn't do that, and we are scheduled to meet once a month.  This usually shakes out to meeting once every two to three months, so I am dubious.  But it is too late to do anything about that now, so I will run it and hope that my worries are unfounded.

One of the issues with this campaign is that my stuff is all at Naked Man's house.  I took my miniatures back and forth to games at his place for awhile, then ended up just leaving them all with him.  So it went with my battle mat and my markers too.  I am going to have to confiscate many of my things to go to this new game and that will leave Naked Man's house sorely lacking in materials, as much of the stuff that he uses actually belongs to me.

I would just buy more miniatures, but the $5 price tag for each one gets me every time.  How can such a small thing cost so much?

The last thing that is making this all exciting is that the people aren't actually going to be playing DnD... they are going to be playing my game, Heroes By Trade.  I expect they will enjoy it and I am confident in the work I have done, but there is always a bit of extra pressure when both the in person experience and the game mechanics themselves are something you have personally created.

I do love to see my creations in action though, so that part of it has me pumped up.