First time HERO GM

After a pretty long hiatus, I was ready to get back into role-playing. It wasn't necessarily by chioce. I happen to be the kind of person who is looked on to organize everything. I'm sure there are more of us out there. I buy the books for the games we play, I study the rules and then teach everyone else how to play. I make all the calls setting up times and places. I always get stuck being the GM.

Now this isn't a horrible thing, mostly its a 'martyr point' brought up when players in the group complain about something I'm doing that they don't like. Obviously, if this arrangement didn't fit my personality it wouldn't happen. I am an organizer and I love a good story. I believe you can get just as much entertainment from running the good story as you can playing your ultra cool character. Perhaps I'm just a lazy writer wanna be.

Regardless of what had gone on before, I was ready for a good story. I do have quite a bit of gaming experience and had been trying for a few years to break into Hero. At one point, I actually had received two copies of Fifth edition revised given to me as presents (on the same birthday) but being the aforementioned point man, couldn't drum up enough interest.

To combat this, my wife and I signed up for a Hero demo @ Gencon '07. I needed someone besides me to show us what it was like. Whoever it was that ran that game, I thank you. After that, something just clicked and we resolved that this was something worth getting into. However, it also meant a far more daunting task of creating a game that was fun for all to play. I knew that would fall to me. I also knew it would be a challenge for me.

I have GMed numerous times before and am considered by my gaming friends to be an excellent GM. I however, disagree with them. Surely we are our own worst critics and I fall right in line for punishment issued from my own hands. My major knock on myself is that I have a tendency to be strong out of the gate but weak down the stretch, to borrow a racing term. I can come up with some pretty good start up emotion but rarely does it translate into a good campaign. I also tend to not be very detail oriented and don't prepare as much as some others might. Don't misjudge, I'm really good on my feet and can improvise with the best of them. I've never had to stop the game and retool because of curveballs my players have thrown me. (I also am firmly against railroading so its not like they simply had to march to me drum beat.)

With this campaign, I want it to be different. I want to change my past hiccups and show everyone that we really can have a darn good time. I mainly want to correct my GM 'staying power', to detail an environment that easily facilitated immersion and to allow my players to express themselves without the heavy hand of 'I don't allow that in my campaign' being fiated from on high.

We had tried before to get a super hero game going before but it fell prey to my aforementioned weaknesses. Personally I felt it also lacked compelling PCs but thats in the past. With my new system and some fresh enthusiasm, I set about trying to get this thing going. Next I'll try to detail the player search and character creation process.