I suggest you go to youtube and watch tutorials like "Create random encounters" or "How to handle an hostage situation".

You will see that it's quite easy to make basic situations and you will learn about some vital elements in stories : call of events, set up variables and use them, make regions that activate triggers, Waypoints, AI changes and so on.

About your initial question, hard to answer as i did not use RPG Game Maker but had more than 1 year of doing this or that with Neverwinter Night 1's Editor.

The main difference with the last one is that you don't need to code triggers, allmost everything is there to create this or that. Of course, highly experienced modders may code things, but this is not necessary. Moreover, most triggers function are self explanatory like "force actor (---) to move to /region/location (x/y)/prop (item)"

I think you should start as we all did : by following the wiki toolset tutorial.
Then you will do as we all did : leave the tutorial apart after 2 hours and try to build scenes with what you allready know and what you find on the fly in the toolset.
Then you will do as we all did : Create a post here or on SR Universe forum like "i did this, why can't it work ?"

What to do : start with a modest project like a single run and a few scenes : your home or starting point, a meeting place like a bar, a place to meet patrons and get stuff, a plot building and, if you have courage, a big exterior setting to link the whole. For your 1st try, don't bother with supra-creativity and adding external content or images (it could lead you to search for days why this or that is broken for players).

Each time you create an action, check how it works testing the scene (with the green arrow).
Sometimes it takes ten tries modifying this or that to fix up a single effect. Don't bang your head on the door : there is allways a solution :p

Then save frequently your work in a separate file, then make a copy on an USB key : on some occasions you will break everything with no return (especially if you dare to modify data in your content pack files), and it's allways good to have a recent save.

Last tips : it's good to have a separate UGC you use for testing more complicated actions.
When it's fine in your test module (that needs less decor work, just a few ground tiles, walls and items / chars you need), you redo the same in your real work : that is really more handy.

I will advice you to wait for Dragonfall to mod a lot, because the editor will be rewamped and it's highly possible that some former triggers/mechanisms will not work the same, creating bugs in your campain (it happened to many UGC with last patch).
So, you have more than 1 month to give it a try and you'll be ready for the Big one :p

Thanks for the great reply. I'd give anything to make NWN mods but thought they would be out of my league (e.g. require programming knowledge). Shadowrun seemed like the next best thing (no offense, I'm just a hardcore NWN fan).

My main concern was support: RPG Maker has a plethora of resources and tutorials and a very active community -- so if you're stuck, you're not stuck long on a problem. I've not had any Workshop forum experience (obviously) so I didn't really know how active it was. It would really be unpleasant to have many hours invested in something and not be able to get a solution.

In any case your advice seems sage and thanks for reminding me about Dragonfall.

Again, I have a lot of patience and I have some aptitude -- I'm just weighing which route would be the most rewarding and viable. I should really just hunker down and write a book, lol, but I am such a game afficianado I think I rather see my stories in action per se. I wrote a novella for a mount & blade mod and it was a lot of fun and well received but it would have been better as a game, in my opinion.

It is possible to make more complicated stories. Much authors chose to cut their campain in 2 or 3 parts to make it easier. But you can swap all in a single UGC, for sure, in an open world.

But it makes things much more...complicated

But i really advise you to start your first one as a simple basic story, to learn how things go and to be able to fix bugs that allways remain when public published. Then do a masterpiece :)

I did the exact other way, created more than 20 scenes, items and dialogs in september.
Then it took me more than one month to polish and correct unsuspected things.
Then i thougth i would never end because each day i would find more logical to add this or that, endlessly.

Then, it worked for me on a local game, and it took me 3 weeks to understand why it was broken for players, each time i removed some "risky things" and my story lost a little originality because the flaw was not there.

Nota : you have a console and a debug tool in the Editor, makes it easier to track bugs, but on some occasions...the martians did it and flew away with their secrets.

You can as well set several of your UGC as dependencies, saving variables from one to another, thus linking several separated contenus to a kind of hub.

You also can create any number of factions and chose the default way they behave towards each other for each scene, track the factions attitude towards the Player with variables and change their attitude during the scene (per ex as a consequence of a choice in a dialogue, or activating a device...)

Nota : you have a console and a debug tool in the Editor, makes it easier to track bugs, but on some occasions...the martians did it and flew away with their secrets.

I have to remember that excuse...lol. The faction thing sounds good. Ok so, YouTube, then Wiki then just dive in, create a cluster of a mess and curse myself, and who knows maybe end up with something playable at some point. :) Thank ye.