The World Is Wide or In Media Res

You can write the most gripping and detailed setting document you want. You can record yourself singing ancient epics of your land. You can patiently sit your players down and tell them about the world. Yet you are still guaranteed to find that, at least a few times, there are players who just don't want to hear it or read it. These people aren't malicious and they aren't stupid, they simply don't find any joy in reading setting material that is unrelated to their own experiences. They may be a bane to your existence or you may in fact be one of them. The thing is, anyone can have this experience at any time.

I used to write very long setting documents. Rambling mythologies, I would take my players on long walks around my highschool campus and describe in gory detail the relationships of the gods and the world, how magic worked, and all that jazz. People who didn't pay attention I singled out as troublemakers, paying close attention to them and making sure I gave them more material to absorb on the theory that if they were paying attention less and I threw them more, at least some of it might stick.

Planning and Pain

Character creation can be divided into two general categories when it comes to RPGs. There are those which are planned and crafted by the players from the start, and there are those which are randomly determined by the dice. Of course, this is not a perfect system of division: planned characters don't necessarily remain planned and in some systems can advance organically rather than according to the preordained order that the player has decided upon. Some systems incorporate more planning than others do, while other systems have no element of chance in character creation at all.

There are certain advantages to either system. Neither is "wrong," or without merit, but each has strengths according to its function. Planned characters excel at allowing a player to start a game with a fully realized concept. They get to play "what they want," using the rules to design a character that is as close to the one they imagined as possible. This is perfect for systems where most player-characters are exceptional or none are. The reason for this is simple: if you can be exceptional at character creation and you are allowed to plan, most people will be. This skews the demographic of player characters unless the system already takes this into account.

It's very hard to play a normal man in 7th Sea, for example, since you are meant to be a swashbuckling hero. Even if you avoid taking a sword school, you'll still either have a wide variety of skills or be very good at some.

Levelling Out

Everyone should be the same level. I should be allowed to make characters that are level 8 from the get-go. Experience needs to be handed out equally so everyone can gain their levels at the same time, and rewarding different classes for achieving different amounts of experience is outrageous. Levels themselves are a terrible notion and need to abolished. These are but some of the complaints I've heard about levels in my tenure as a DM. Some of them ring more truly than others: I have played and enjoyed many rpgs that do away with the concept of levels altogether such as BRP (particularly its incarnation as CoC), Hârnmaster, 7th Sea, and Aftermath!) but that doesn't mean I can't appreciate why they're used as shorthand for advancement.

Levels are a fast and easy way to determine how powerful a character is, for one thing. It works as a rapid shorthand for understanding just where they stand in the scale of might and it obviates the need to track all manner of niggly little advancements that would otherwise not be tied to level. I actually prefer the Hârnmaster/Aftermath method of skill improvement over levels, but those games are a bitch to teach to anyone who doesn't have an advanced math degree and the patience of a particularly peaceful deity.

The most common issue that I actually run into in my games is level disparity. Because I have a tendency to run lethal games and because Danny has a tendency to constantly be recruiting new players, we have a high character turnover rate. New people join in on old games, or old people watch in horror as some manner of awful creature slaughters their character. Either way, it leaves a core party (composed of the original two adventurers in this case, Crispus and Oloz) that is hovering on the door of level 5 while new players must join in at level 1.

These waters are wide but shallow

A lot of players that grew up using 3.x and 4e have a real problem when coming back to 2e. I've noticed it repeatedly, and its very persistent across the board. Even one of my longtime regulars was once of this mindset before his complete and ultimate conversion to AD&D (I believe at my own hands). It's a strange hang-up that has to do with player choice and freedom and character creation, and I believe I can explain its root causes and the types of character it actually winds up creating.

I feel like I might be flogging a dead (or at the very least dying) horse here to state it, but 3.x and 4e are, (as 5e will be also, I'm sure) the product of a player's revolution. To protect themselves from bad DMs the players established ground rules about what they would allow and what they wouldn't. The chief and most noxious of those rules is that player choice means everything, and what the player wants goes; after all, the game is about fun, right?

The problem that I'm talking about specifically is the lack of creativity in character creation. Players of the later editions have come to identify creativity with playing monstrous races and picking strange classes. It's an easy sign of creativity if you are allowed to be a race that is rarely played (say, gnolls) and a class that is extremely specific (say, magical chef). These "concepts" dominate play in the modern systems. Elves, dwarves, etc. are often derided as being boring or even, in one case that I speak of from life, un-fantastical.

I've been workin'...

Everyone loves a good story. Stories, after all, are probably the reason why you're roleplaying in the first place. Tolkien, Dunsany, Vance, Cook, Martin, Howard, here are your reasons to pick up a copy of Dungeons and Dragons and play it. They all weave such good stories of the fantastic that one can hardly resist them. Who among us does not wish to emulate the fantasy greats and tell stories of our own? I certainly do. Every time I read some good fantasy I curse that I did not write it, that my own fantasy is not near as engaging or powerful. But here's the thing: I don't take that desire with me into my Dungeons and Dragons games. They just don't seem to be compatible.

"Why not?" you would be very well in asking. What prevents me from writing out the plots that I would otherwise insert into my fiction as adventures? What prevents me from involving my players in the self-same stories that I want to write myself? There are a myriad of reasons, but they can all be summed up with a single idea: the railroad.

You see, stories are not about branching paths and choices. They are about a plot that drives them. Characters in books (other than choose-your-own adventures) cannot make choices other than the ones they do. Sometimes, if an author decides that he does want them to make different choices, he must go back and rewrite large sections of the tale. But there is always an operative theme, motif, and throughline in a book even if you don't always see one. The only themes or motifs that exist in Dungeons and Dragons are that life is cheap, the world is dangerous, and small things matter.

Tee Arr Yew Ess Tee

There can be no pen and paper roleplaying game without a game master. This is a dictum that, aside from a few games (that I would classify as collective story telling and not games at all), has held true throughout time. Players, you need to trust your game master. There's no game without him; he needs the leeway to make the game function and shouldn't be hamstrung by your trust issues.

That having been said, game master: you must be worthy of trust. I've addressed the poisonous Player's Rights movement that has informed so many of the modern pen and paper rules, but so far I've not actually spoken about the key issue that lies at the very root: the lack of trust between player and game-master that so permeates modern roleplaying games. Where does this lack of trust stem from? It is most likely not a flaw on the part of players, to be fair. So who do we have to blame for this virulent movement? Why, none other than the abusive GMs that put the fear into people so badly that they felt they had to design rules to protect themselves!

Luckily, there are ways to tell if you're an abusive GM; you can change, I promise, and you won't even have to have a player-held intervention.*