Ben Finney posts, in part:
I know of many knobs that can be tweaked on
GMing and play style, and I'm painfully aware
of the trouble that ensues when everyone has
different expectations of how those knobs
will be set.
It's good that you're aware of these things. I'd point out a couple
of pitfalls you may need to avoid, one with the way you are planning
to do things, one with one of the suggestions others have offered.
You say you'll ask general questions, without reference to the
mechanics, regarding what kind of character they want to play, and
that you'd implement these in the mechanics for the players later. I
would worry that the rules might not sup****t their desires exactly -
especially since, when making their descriptions, they won't
understand the constraints of the rules. They're also likely to leave
out details that might come to be im****tant later. For example, if
one said, "I'd like my character to be able to fly", you might assume
they mean "fly" in the Superman sense, and they might actually mean
"fly" in the Chuck Yeager sense. That example is blatant enough that
you'd probably catch it, but there might be others less blatant that
would still be im****tant.
Since these people do play board games, might it be a better approach
to pick a simple set of rules that they can understand - say, The
Fantasy Trip, or even something like the simplistic rules that come
with the Games Workshops "Lord of the Rings" figurine sets? Once
they're used to the idea, you could move to more complex rules later.
The other thing I'd suggest is that if you take a setting straight
from fiction, you be careful about which setting you select. Authors
have control over protagonists that gamesmasters don't over player
characters. Some fictional universes translate well to roleplaying
games; others don't without a lot of unspoken genre rules that all the
players have to buy into.
Warren J. Dew
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