Starting up a new campaign

So in about two weeks I will be starting up a new campaign for D&D 4e and it will not be with my gaming group of over 15 plus years! During that time I have had a few different groups in addition to my sorta stable group. I used to run Jovian Chronicles from DP9 and Star Wars d20 versions for a store my friend used to own. I recently started playing D&D Encounters at a new local store that opened up before the holidays last year called Fair Game. It is a great little store, follow the link and take a look.

Anyway, I was recruited to run Encounters as I had offered when I first started playing and we had expanded to two tables and still turned away people who said they would come back the following week. My first week of running I had a group of six! Five new to 4e and one regular to encounters, at the end of the night the DM's talk about what we did, how the players fared and the like and I mentioned I wanted to run a game on the weekend.

Normally I just go completely into design mode and start thinking of things I want to do and maybe jot notes down. I am a fly by the seat of my pants DM and the least amount of planning on my part seems to make the games go very well in my group. The thing is this is not my group, or not right now. I do not know who I will get as players though I have a pretty good idea it will consist of several from the encounters crew with a sprinkling of local vets.

Next weeks encounters we are going to hype it up, the plan is a weekly game but if I get a lot of people I will break it into two groups perhaps the same day or every other week kind of deal. I decided with talking with the other DM's that I should probably allow Core 4e books and Essentials material to co-exist at the table which also lead to the conversation to the level of experience I want at the table. I said open to all and I got a few looks like, are you serious?

Initially I looked at it from the encounters player standpoint. How, if you are only doing one encounter a night spread out once a week, do you learn the rules to any proficiency? We have a lot of kids play (10 years old and up) and I thought, "this would be a great opportunity to mold the new generation of players, I would be Obi-Wan Kenobi and they would be the padawan's!" I got a bit of advice from the store manager that perhaps I should say they need to have finished a few nights of encounters before committing to an on-going campaign.

There are going to be a few caveats to playing in my game. Since this is a store game I do not want to loose potential customers for the store so I need to be diplomatic about my approach. I will be running the game for everyone to have fun but once it stops being fun or someone is preventing that from happening for others I will need to have a talk with said offender. I am not anticipating any real problems outside of the learning curve for some of the players ability to grasp the concept of role-playing in general.

I have chosen to run Slaying Stone from WotC as the first adventure and then dig into the Monster Vault and DM Kit adventures from the essentials line. I am probably going to disallow the use of the PHB3 since I do not want psionic's in my game, I might allow the Monk but that is it. Hey it is my game. Of course I will suggest essentials classes.

I am hoping that when game time comes that I have players and I have a decent game.