Okay. The first and foremost suggestion I have to make is that, for my part, disregard any element of needing food that you are considering. That is the solitary thing that turns me off the most from CRPGs - having to go buy food, and make sure I'm bringing enough water; I'd play "The Oregon Trail" if that's what I was after.

Second thing to do - make any magic items very hard to find. To put this in AD&D terms, getting a sword +3 from the hill giant troupe you just slew ingeniously can be an awfully exciting reward, but not if you got one from the goblins you offed in your first adventure. The same is true of CRPGs. The only one that really successfully innundates the player with magic items from turn one without diminishing the fun factor is Diablo - and that has ten jillion randomly generated items.

Third, I must disagree with Issachar. I rather like having useless spells in my games, just as long as they aren't too obviously useless ("Protection from normal gold," anyone?) and they aren't in overwhelming numbers. But a few spells that don't actually do anything useful can be beneficial - it requires the player to figure out which spells are worth his time.

Avoid stereotypical mishmash. I probably don't have to say this to you, but just to be safe... kidnapped princesses have been done to a painful, bloody *death*, for example. Evil wizards in remote keeps commanding awful hordes of darkness, the rightful king being usurped... unless you're going to put a truly original spin on them, they're not anything we haven't seen before.
In general, I'd point you at the Dungeon Magazine submission guidelines for pointers as to what will and won't be interesting story material, but I can't seem to find them right now. They're somewhere on the TSR website, but ever since Wizards took over, it's been disorganized and reorganized every two days.

Well, that's all I have for now. Except for one more thing - weapons with a limited number of uses (as a standard - requiring arrows for bows is fine) falls into the same boat as requiring food. Ick.

Dar "You're hungry? Wimp!" ien