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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Telperion" data-source="post: 1444045" data-attributes="member: 15711">I would suggest using boxed stuff for your first game. There are a plethora of short games that you can basically grap from your neighborhood RPG store, read trough and start running with the minimum of prep work. You don't have to do so much prep work, and most of the stats and everything else has been custom made for the adventure at hand by others. Sure, you probably want to go over all the details, and most likely change things a bit to better suit your DM'ing style, but that's not so bad.The main reason why I would suggest doing this, instead of running a home brew, is because as a general rule DM's tend to create lenghty and indepth games. In my case if I ran a "short story" that I had created myself it would probably last about 2 - 3 session, and each of those sessions would average 7 - 8 hours. Not to mention that most newbies would be totally cluelessly lost with a significant portion of the intriguing plot hooks that I had spent hours writing into the script and sinking in the story to be discovered there. So, to give my players a better session I usually read some short story, make small changes to better suit my style and then just go and run a "light" session of RPG. It isn't half as time consuming and can be very fun all the same, because everyone can easily get into the game, grasp what they need to do and get over the technical bits with the minimum of fuss.And to top it all off: those boxed short stories will most likely actually last something like 6 - 8 hours instead of multiple times that. About the characters: you don't want to go over 6th level. Things get exponentially difficult for both GM and Players. I have found that 6th level characters are manageable, if they are not full-casters that have to prepare their spell lists at the start of every day. Spontaneous casters are your friends in this as well, because their known spell lists are considerably shorter than divine caster spell lists or the spell book of even a half-decent wizard. Other core classes are still fairly straigh-forward at 6th level, although I would suggest staying away from the fighter core class. The plethora of feats can seem very intimidating to a new player. Also: write short descriptions and explanations on all class abilities and feats that individual characters have and include these at the back of any and all character sheets. A player with the capacity to read will thank you many times and even the dimmer one's usually spot the helpful notes at the back sooner or later. I would also suggest that you have at least one extra copy of the PHB with you. This is essential if you recruiting/introducing new players: having a book there simply to be looked at and briefly paged trough is a very good idea.</blockquote>

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