thinking of starting a PBEM game

[Baalz]

You probably want to pic an era (early, middle, or late), how often you want host deadlines (every day? A couple times a week? No weekends?). This is a big one because people vary a lot on how often they can/want to play. Another thing that is sometimes declared (your choice as host) is random nations, where you use some random method to asign nations to the players who sign up, the idea is so that people don't necessarily get the one nation they've pefected to a T.

And on any of this stuff that you don't really have an opinion on, it's perfectly normal to poll the players who sign up.