First time HERO GM

I knew I had one slam dunk player and character, whichever one my wife decided she wanted to play. She had shown a penchant in the past for powered armor characters and I expected she would carry over her GenCon character nugget from the intro to Hero game.

I also had a hunch that my brother would jump in with very little encouragement. He usually does when I mention running an RPG. I was right.

Finding any more players was a challenge. I believe most of this is my fault. I'm extremely picky and a self-admitted gaming elitist. I used to have a large pool of players to draw from. A few moved across the state and others (more regrettably) became estranged even after I tried to maintain contact.

After some brainstorming with my wonderful wife, she suggested we invite her youngest brother to play. He fit the mold in certain areas, he reads comic books, has a flair for the dramatic and is a bit kooky in the right ways. He also had some drawbacks that had me worried about group cohesion. We're in our mid twenties and hes in his late teens, a senior in high school. My main worries were with attendance and maturity. We've all had games shot to pieces by a player who is spot on the first few session but then only makes every other one after that. We've also had immaturity spoil a few sessions, at least thats my experience and generalization.

For lack of exciting prospects, I went with this line up to start. I knew I'd have to be intricately involved in the character creation process with Vanessa and her brother Alan as they had never done something like this before. Daniel (my brother) has a chunk of RP experience to I wouldn't have to be as involved with him. Overall, I wanted to be close to the creation process as I hoped to use my PCs to fuel most of my campaign.

As far as rating my players, I felt we could make it work. Daniel has had a bit of a powergaming tendency in the past but has mellowed over the years. I knew my challenge with him was going to be making sure we both had fun. His ideas of cool and my ideas of cool aren't always the same. We are brothers though, so we're used to working together.

Vanessa is more of a novice and I believe is still forming her RPing likes and dislikes. She only started doing this when we were getting married but quickly enjoyed the experience. Fortunately or unfortunately her close association with me lends itself to her adopting some of my elitism in regards to player and GM actions.

My biggest hurdle with her is the involvement factor. I know she likes playing but I'm not sure how 'into it' she gets. She has no problems playing as long as I do all the 'crunchy' work with numbers and rules. Getting character and background ideas from her would be the trickiest part. As a bonus I knew she'd be a reliable player.

Alan, my brother in law, was the biggest mystery to me. He had never played any pen and paper RPG before but was excited about the prospect. I knew I'd have to lead him along by the hand the most mainly because he had no prior experience.

I was pleasantly surprised by what emerged after all the chisels were put away and we took a look at what characters we had spawned. I think I'll detail them in their own entries.