[@Fallenreaper] Absolutely. If you have a clear vision of what you want to do, and you can express as accurately as possible what it is you expect from people, then it makes running the event a whole lot easier. You want to try and articulate all of your rules and leave as little to interpretation as possible. If you want to run "mild powers" you need to define that, and you need to, say, list everything that you consider explicitly against the definition, or that you think would contribute to poor fights. You want to outline the submission/joining process, how you're going to grade profiles and judge fights, how judge adjudication is handled, etc.

For instance, with my scoring rubric, Sportsmanship is a category. Everyone should get a 0 in it because it's context sensitive: you only see a score in Sportsmanship when you played like an asshole, and the score will always be negative. Someone who makes a repeated habit of getting flagged for shitty sportsmanship in my event will likely find themselves unable to compete the next time it's run (I'm aiming for it to be bi-annual or seasonal, more or less). They get a "season" of play where they don't get to compete so they can take some time to realize that acting like a ponce over playing pretend on the internet is really dumb.

[@DLL] In order to have a well-run tournament, you really have to know a rules lawyer sort of guy. The guy who knows D&D inside and out and can make ridiculously gimped/specialist characters, or reads all the errata for a war-game. The guy who developed the "tournament rulebook" that everyone copies in my old community is a rules lawyer, and that's why his approach worked for the better part of a decade; he knew what he was doing and he knew what he wanted to accomplish.

And now he's an [i]actual[/i] lawyer. So, you know. Learning to make and break rules is in his blood.

A lot of people also decide to run events without realizing how much work it takes. If you can't take time out of your day to grade at least one fight a day, or to communicate with your participants, then you're gonna have a bad time. A super, super bad time. And so will they.