The greatest challenge in my experience has been adjusting the players’ approach to play, since it’s more narrative than traditional RPGs. There are no detailed charts and tables for combat and encounters; you derive those details from the players’ decisions and the fall of the dice, rather than the other way around. Once you can get all the players to help add details to the environment, and the GM to work them mechanically into play, you’re gold. The game is worth all its buzz.

Chaosclockwork: Fixed! That’s Miles for you, though — you think he’s one place, and then he’s gone.

The “I already know what I want” GM will perhaps find this all too much of a muchness, but I have come around to thinking that the original Dungeon Master’s Guide knew what it was doing with all those random tables and lists.

Buuuuuut the art of the Random Table has come a long, long way since goddamn ‘expensive doxy/haughty courtesan/rich panderer’ – as e.g. Day After Ragnarok demonstrates. Compulsively tabulating trivia is one thing, writing evocative improvisatory play aids is another; any praise of Gygax’s fetish for random encounters probably ought to be leavened with the admission that he was only accidentally designing a story-game, and RPG designers employing randomness have had to swerve around his idiosyncrasies as much as they’ve jumped off from them.

Well, and there’s your overwrought random-table-related defensiveness for the evening, thank you much.

Regarding the Winchester boys, I can only go by what the ladies tell me, and they seem keen for Dean in my neck of the woods.

So you went to a Thing… and there was Stuff… with you so far.

Oh, and Sam Winchester is prettier than Dean, IMHO.