The best advice I can give is to focus on the game at hand. Too often, we GMs have glorious plans for our campaigns and look too far ahead. You don’t need to make the campaign awesome. You need to make *tonight’s* game awesome. If you make the game tonight excellent, the players will buy into the game, you’ll have more eagerness, more focus, and less flakiness. Do this for each game and the campaign awesomeness will take care of itself.

The best way I’ve found to make this happen is to focus on conflict. Every scene in the game should be either setting up, exploring, or resolving a conflict. If its not doing any of those, then you’re wasting your time and dragging the pace of your game down. Cut to the next scene already if nothing is really going on.

Second, be prepared to throw your notes away. Your notes, plans, and outlines are not real in the game world. They don’t exist until the players interact with them. They are just suggestions and if something better occurs to you (or one of your players), go with it.

@James – good advice! Conflict and choices are backbones for game sessions.

Talk to your players, and find out what they’re looking for in a game. There’s no such thing as a “best campaign ever” in isolation; if you achieve it, it will be a collaborative effort between you and the players, and will require things that they are interested in doing, characters that they love to play, NPCs that they want to interact with (good and bad), and so on. I usually pitch a couple different settings I’m excited about running, and only go forward with the ones that the players show enthusiasm for.

Joshua’s last blog post..The Rule of Cool: A Useful Tool

Thanks Jack, and glad to have you as a reader.

I think the ‘know your world’ part is so essential. I actually think that is why I ran the Palladium FRPG for soooo long. I really loved the setting and knew it better than any of my players. Lets forget the fact that the system is shot to all hell. But the setting carried it for a long time with me. I think that learning a completely new setting will be a little challenging, but at least it will be completely new to my players too.

Samuel Van Der Wall’s last blog post..Help Me Run My Best Campaign Ever

I would echo James’ & Josh’s advice: Focus on individual sessions (rather than trying to come up with some massive overarching plot) and make the players an integral part of deciding on the setting, tone, and theme of the campaign.

Here are my tips:
* Start by having a pitch session where everyone talks about what they want from the game: What setting appeals to them, what kinds of things do they want to do, and what kind of tone (dark, gritty, high fantasy, etc.) are they looking for. Let THEM do all the heavy lifting for you.
* Make character creation a group effort – no one makes their character at home, nor do you have them work independently during the creation session. Instead they should openly discuss their concepts, pitch ideas to each other, and settle on niches for each. During this time you take notes and offer suggestions: You can nudge them in certain directions, but once again, let them do most of the work since you can mine all of this to create themes and plots that directly involve these characters (rather than the “traditional” way which involves coming up with some sort of plot and then trying to shoehorn the PCs into that story).
* Similarly, character backgrounds should be done together. I always do the following (stolen from SotC): Player 1 turns to person to their left and answers the following question: “How do you know him/her?” They come up with an idea that they can sum up in 1-2 sentences. I then move on to the person to Player 1′s left and repeat, going all the way around the table. I often throw in my ideas or shape theirs to make things a bit more coherent, but otherwise I let them free associate and come up with interesting (and sometimes unusual) links. BINGO. Everyone is instantly linked (no more strangers meeting in the tavern) and you can get some pure gold for creating stories out of these sessions.

An example from a recent game of mine: I currently run a 4E campaign for a bunch of teens at an after-school game club. Our first session involved just character creation and talking about what they wanted. So they settled on a “we want to fight a dragon” and chose character classes (cleric, wizard, rogue, paladin, & warlock). So Player 1 (elf wizard) has to turn to player (half elf cleric) on his left and say how he knows him. He says “You’re the illegitimate son of a distant cousin.” Wow, hardcore relationship but I need to turn it up a notch: I say “No, he’s the son of your SISTER although you don’t actually know that yet.” Already the campaign is off to an awesome start, at that very moment, because there’s antagonism between those two characters but also a linked history and bloodline. Deep…..and from a couple of 16-year-olds. You can read a more detailed description of the session on my blog here: http://rpg.brouhaha.us/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=41

Wow…this is a long comment. Ok, one more tip before I stop:

The players’ character sheets are an amazing research resource as well: Look at each one carefully after the character creation and find out what’s important to each player. The skills and edges they choose in SW are a big hint. Also, those hindrances? You them. Don’t let the players get away with free points just for picking something that never comes up again: Somebody pick a phobia? Use it. Repeatedly.

Run your game like you had an imaginary boss to whom you had to get “script approval’from.It gives you an interersting perspective to rule on difficult decisions.
See the noval Dream Park by Larry Nivan.Ive run my games like this for decades and the council I get from my self is illuminating.OK you really need to read Dream Park.