Dice

I love dice. They are simple herald's of fate, life, death and the physical embodiment of random herself. They've gotten me through critical strikes, plagues, and even a math test (don't ask). Realistically you'll need a full set for every player. I've played with one set shared among all players and so long as the group is small you might get a full set of the seven to work. Well technically if you use some basic division and ignoring the d"100" you only really only need a d12, d8, and a d20, and I guess if you worked with some probabilities you could play with only a d20. And technically with a computer you can find dice rolling programs so you really don't need any dice at all... Sorry, I got off track there for a minute.
Now realistically each player needs at least a full set. Rogues will need a pile of d6's and depending on what kind of character you're playing you might want more. Rolling and interpreting dice takes time so it's your job to maximize money spent on dice/ time spent rolling them. It might not take long to roll 2d6 with only one d6 but once you need to start rolling 5d4 for magic missiles you're gonna want to pick up some more dice. If its a one time influx of dice needed you can usually just nab an extra from a fellow player for a second without them noticing.
DMing's another story entirely. Since you're going to be rolling more dice in weirder combinations a starting DM's going to need at least two full sets of dice. That will deal with a lot of monsters quickly but just in case I usually have three to four sets behind my screen, or at least two and several extra d20s. Depending on what you're running your needs might change. Percentages are fine using two d10's but if you're running a plague campaign or a random romp through the wilderness invest in a zocchihedron (go look it up, its not perfect but its still darn cool) or learn how to get a random percent on your calculator/ computer. Also pack a big fat coin in your dice bag, it'll speed up 50/50 chances. I know these sound like pretty minor minimalistic time savers but after 6 hours of the same drawn out encounter you'll want to get quickly to the players' turns so they don't lose interest. Trust me I'm a self-proclaimed doctor.

Horses and Houses and Boats, Oh My!

Bam! Gauntlets of Ogre's Strength +x, Mithral Full Plate, and Belts of Healing are favorites of of any good adventuring party but these are only the transparent loves of the combat-loving ruffian. Behind the scenes players need a lot of stuff. Obviously food and water are needed constantly (unless your DM is nice or doesn't care) but from 1 to level 20 thousands of gold pieces are spent on all sorts of non combat related expenses. Socialism is fine but devoting the tiniest share of the loot to expenses helps. Lodging is big, if your DM's evil sleeping under the stars will grant you an early breakfast of gelatinous cube so long term thoughts on beds are a must. Apartments are dirt cheap in awful parts of the city but make your own guild house. If you don't mind converting a bunch try the 3.0 Stronghold Builder's Guidebook for ideas and base prices but your sourcebooks have basic info and Campaign settings should come up with more lodging options. Try designing your own castle for once, its very satisfying.
Unless you're agoraphobic I suppose you'll need some transportation as well. Easy answer for overland storage is to get a horse or five. One for riding, 2 for storage, 1 testing for traps, and a fifth for tax-returns --whatever you want. They're cheap to feed and at those early levels when a bag of holding is either too expensive or too small they're economically worth it. Alternatively get something big n' nasty which can work all purpose. Run over to the Talenta plains and wrangle a dinosaur or find yourself an axebeak, whatever works for you. Running a campaign in Eberron I found it helped to have the players keep a carriage or some other sort of moving platform. A stable base gives you speed, some protection, and a place to call home.
Oh and boats, those I could write a book on. Boats in RPG's are my life's work. I'm going to get back to you on boats.

PC Death

The death of a player is something that all gaming groups have to deal with at some point.  Whether it is due to malicious DMing, poor rolls, or just plain old stupid roleplaying, there are a couple of things that need to be considered.
A)  Can the body be recovered?
This is a pretty big thing when you think about it, as most forms of resurrection require the body (or at least some chunks of it) to work.  This also matters for the items the body had on them; if the player wants to make a new character after death, but the party still has access to everything the dead PC had on it, what is the DM to do?  I really feel that the players and DM should, right then and there, make an agreement on whether or not to take items and leave them.
B)  Does the player want to be resurrected, or do they want to make a new character?
In a reality, death is a pretty annoying thing to have happen as a PC.  From experience I can tell you that it makes you feel like the character that you built is weak, and that you should build a new character.  This should be avoided; it's more than likely that you died not due to character weakness, but to a few bad dice rolls or bad situation that escalated beyond the party's control.  Stick to the character, it's part of the game.
C)  This is an odd one; did they die epicly?
I know for a fact that, after a sufficiently epic death (see Gandalf vs Balrog) that I wouldn't want to be resurrected, and that I would be perfectly happy making a new character after that, so that the legend could live on.

Well, that's my opinion on PC death, more may be added later.  For that one guy reading this, I'll be sporadically putting more stuff onto here.

Why you need to run Tomb of Horrors

One word: Catharsis.
A good DM does nothing but keep their PC's alive. A good %95 percent of the time none of your players will die and after level 10 the chance only goes down to %85 percent tops depnding on what kind of a game you're running. And yes every single goblin you play is trying to kill the PCs but in reality if by some horrible will of God the PC should be on the brink of death by the hands of my CR 1/8 toad I can assure you the DM will find a way to save you the embarassment.
For this reason the Tomb of Horrors is beautiful. Not only can the Tomb be easily found online legal and free for most any version (cept 4.0 but that's running around $20 on Amazon) but it was originally written by the gaming messiah Gary Gygax himself. Furthermore the sad sorry lot that calls themselves players will die by their own hand. Not to give a single piece of the dungeon away the players will die. They are tasked with complex traps and puzzles and a few nasty monsters that will destroy the sorry lot of animated meatbags. Best part of their demises will be the fact that there are always hints to there upcoming dooms and even then PC's will usually be granted one free save before they are devoured by howler monkeys. And when those howler monkeys picked the last shiny kidney stone from your sorry remains the DM will begin to silently giggle behind their screen.
Now the extreme difficulty of this dungeon does give some issues for up and coming players. Its suggested for 4-6 lvl 9 players but higher level players can't hurt especially because much of their success hinges on their own metagaming common sense. Since the PC's will die, maybe all at once and sometimes their corpses and gear can never be recovered, you'll have to make some sort of societal contract. This isn't hard to do, as Dungeon Master you will receive the catharsis of having your howler monkeys eat the PC's entitled corpses and in return the PC's will get revived at no cost, they will only lose the gear they found in the tomb, or perhaps most logical the PC's build temporary, expendable characters just for fun.
If you're a DM at least read it you'll at least get some nice ideas for your next personal dungeon crawl.

My Considerations on Playing a Human in a RPG

Don't play a human.

My Kingdom for a Table

The physical environment for where you're playing means a lot. Easy answer is a dining room table, they're normally clean creatures that have a solid number of chairs loitering around them. Downside: they're right in the middle of house living and tend to be in active areas of the house, they're not always the most comfortable if the house is going for a colonial American feel, and that nice clean state needs to be resumed after you're done. No matter what you play on make sure its out of the way, having people constantly in and out and making noise can be infuriating. An attic, basement, odd tv room, or even an outside table on a non-windy summer day work nice. Like I said tables and chairs are preferred but if you're young playing on a low pile carpet (for dice rolling) with some friendly backrests is fine just make sure your DM has some defense against higher altitude players peaking over your screen. Other things to consider when finding a space are proximity to a bathroom, is there a TV in the room for breaks/distractions, and definitely lighting. Try out a couple places and be sure to be flexible, its nice having all your books laid out neatly before hand with chips already on the table but if your players want to play out on the deck go for it.

The Eberron Campaign

Part 1
The idea of a d20 game that takes a step away from traditional high fantasy values is a God-send so long as it doesn't go to far. Eberron hits the note perfectly by supporting some addded tech with enough magic history to make it work. Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms work rather well as settings if you want a bit of conflict and especially with Forgotten Realms a time tested world. Now I haven't played Eberron 4.0 but 3.5 had some nice additions; warforges, dragonmarks, and the insane balance of powers system in Khorvaire. All the material on this helps from a DM's perspective but there's so much that if you really want to engross the PC's in the campaign you really need to find a focus. I ran Eberron with the schema campaign path and then followed with the Grasp of the Emerald Claw and these were great as really adventerous adventures with lots of crazy turns and locales but if you don't want the unfocused approach pick one. Running all the above I only had one character care about the warforged renaissance, no one wanted dragonmarks, and everyone had a grand indifferent patriotism for Breland. With a world this interesting it can't be wasted on overstimulation.

The Miniature Dilema

I've bought several hundred miniatures for all the table top adventures I've run. I've got mostly D&D 3.5 and a few metal Reapers, but I've used odd 3rd party figures, dice, and a quite sizable replica of St. Basil's Cathedral (you had to have been there). But even with such a plethora of possibilities come the next stage of the adventure I find myself needing more. Using the proper miniature adds a whole new level to a gaming environment: 3D terrain, cheetos, and block text gorged with description help but these will all change as soon as you move to the next room. Actually seeing your battle clad dwarf stand alone against three rage drakes feels awesome. PC personal figures are a must. A lot of people use Lego figures which are pretty cool because you can change it up based on the situation, take that sword out and switch it with a crossbow or when disguised as a pirate throw a little hat on. I always use a D&D mini because they're cheap and some of the 3.5 sets look gorgeous, but I find myself switching to metal unpainted minis because they have better detail and if they're painted right they look really awesome. For NPC I'm split. Before a large campaign I'll always buy the super obvious figures I'll need. For the start of the Curse of the Crimson Throne I bought a Queen Ileosa figure and for a heavy undead module I was running I stocked up on nondescript zombies and vamps. There will always be NPC's and monsters you wouldn't or couldn't have thought out so instead of bringing the entire bin of minis around with me I always grab a catchalls. A few random human fighters, a couple goblins, one large, and some descripts in case the PC's don't have or forget theirs. This seems to work in case you don't have time to plan em out perfectly before hand or if you're running a random adventure. One problem I do have with any figure system is the hoard scenario. If you have more than say eight of the same monster on the board keeping track of em all is rough. This is when you pull out counters, spare dice (if you're fighting goblins or something else with really low health have the dice show how much health that creature has taken, sure the PC's will know they're health but at that low health it'll be obvious) or even your secret supply of 5 cents a piece cthulu statues. But of course with this many pieces on the board even if you do differentiate each and every mini from the actual creature it's representing you're going to forget which one lost how much health and when. Since hoards pretty much always rush in try to give them each a number going clockwise or something and keep track of their health on a piece o' paper. This way you can usually correspond the right health to the right monster and if you off by one monster over its okay because hoard fights normally have low ECl's and having one less monster on the board probably wouldn't mean life or death. I can't stand this encounter but with a lot of practice you can OCD them down to a science. Once in your lifetime make a gelatinous cube out of real jello and some random miniature bits its fun because you can actually eat adventurers by jamming em in there and upon its death you can hack it to pieces.

Music during RPG's

I don't listen to a lot of music except for a few classical and orchestral composers but even I can understand the need for music during gaming. My tabletop group has tried a lot of different approaches. Silence works fine but inevitably this leads to more backround talking from idle players or if there's a laptop in the room it will metaphysically find its speakers honed onto the high concentration needing, visually saturated youtube song such as Supersonic Electronic. I've tried a few tabletop specifics like Midnight Syndicate and the Eberron soundtrack but they're so super specific to the encounters at hand that they didn't work. Yes the Herioc Clash song would work great as encounter music if the encounter only ran 5 min. 46 sec. and not the hour it takes for 5 adventures with their menagerie of companions to heroically pick away at my Cadaver Collector. Sure you could put the album on loop but your casual NPC encounter will randomly get interrupted by the immersion breaking Undead Waketh song. What you need is something that you can leave running in the backround and just forget about. All three LOTR soundtracks are great but be sure to remove the vibe killers. If you're running a long encounter the music can help to keep the mood but dear god take out Gollum's song and Into the West, Pippin's song can stay... Round robin picking works. Pass a laptop around and everyone picks one song. Basic ground rules: check it at backround volume, nothing too rough, and the Ghostbusters theme, Katamari Damacy, and The Entrance of the Gladiators must be played at least once. Or if its easier go into the high hundreds channels and turn on non-stop classic rock or pull the Flob and turn on the endless hours of smooth jazz... Aww yeah....

Set Sails for Silly

I like a good monologue. My dream job would be to sit in a bar all day and inspire rabble to take up arms against the British, but seeing as the jobs market is lacking and I'm not Samuel Adams I will have to settle for ranting on the internet about geek stuff. My home port of Bear's Fury is the culmination of silly and creativity, and that's awesome but I need to rant. H.M.S. Fury sets sails for discussionary monologues on random topics that come up in my day to day life. Sometimes while prepping for an adventure I will have random out of body experiences where I will run an entire Seinfeld stand-up routine based on whatever it is I was doing that second or perhaps I'll have a long debate with my keyboard as to whether or not Edward James Olmos would make a good Dungeon Master or not. These crazy treatises on a multitude of topics must be released on the world somehow and I figure why not sacrifice them to the maw of internet longevity. Ah whatever. I'm gonna rant. You want to rant? Cool. Wow. I'm ranting about how I'm going to rant. That was a scary realization...