Topic: Few questions on standard set up.

I took an interest in mahjong a while back, but live in something of a small town in Florida, and in all honesty, hardly anyone here realizes the games go past clicking matching tiles. As of late, I've been playing on mahjongtime.com since there is no one around here to play with, but I've never really understood how the basic set up is. How many riichi sticks do players usually begin with, which wall are the initial hands picked from, is it the dora indicator itself that is the dora, or is it the tile after it? Finally, the actual scoring system, while I can understand the concept of yaku, what about numerical numbers like if someone was to self draw an all pung hand, or to declare ron from a discard of the same.

Hello and welcome.

We are in the process of preparing tutorials and resources to help people learn all the rules and rituals of mahjong, but they're still under development.

For now, I am going to refer you to a great website about Riichi Mahjong: http://japanesemahjong.com
This website is a good resource in general, and it has especially clear and detailed information about setting up, so I will point you to the sections relevant to your questions.

About betting sticks:
Each player starts with the same number of betting sticks, but the exact number of sticks depends on where you're playing. We usually start with 29,000 points each. But some start with 25,000 and others start with 30,000. Those are the most common.
Here is an example of how to use the sticks to give each player 25,000 points to start: http://japanesemahjong.com/reachmahjong/equipment/chips.htm

About setting up:
Here is information about setting up: http://japanesemahjong.com/reachmahjong/setting_up/setting_up.htm
This section will tell you about how to randomly choose seats, how to use dice to determine the first dealer, how to set up walls, how to use dice to break the wall and determine the dora, how to take your starting hands.
To answer your immediate questions: you must roll dice to determine which wall the initial hands are drawn from; the dora indicator tile indicates that the tile after it is the dora.

About scoring:
Hmm. Scoring can be a bit complicated, and I don't know of any great resources out there yet. We are still working on preparing a really good explanation.

But for a quick overview, to calculate your score (the number of points you receive when you win), you must:

1. Count how many yaku you have
2. Calculate your "minipoints"
3. Use those values to look up your score on scoring tables
4. Possibly add points for counters and riichi deposits on the table

You can download our USPML Interim Rules Summary sheet here (it includes scoring tables).
To learn the exact details of how to calculate minipoints, and to learn about where the values in the scoring tables come from,
MahjongTime itself has an OK scoring section: http://www.mahjongtime.com/mahjong-japanese-scoring.html
JapaneseMahjong.com has a section on scoring as well: http://japanesemahjong.com/reachmahjong/scoring/scoring_overview.htm

Again, we are working on more resources, so stay tuned.
Also, if you have any other questions or need examples or more details about any of the above, please do keep asking!

Thank you very much for the links. I'll admit, I've had a lot of trouble understanding minipoints in the past, but I plan on drilling the text from the links into my mind.

Some links I recommend to everybody:

gamedesign.jp has many games, including mahjong and hanafuda games. Use for practice.

mahjonginmame.com has an excellent tutorial on the basics. However, it won't teach you much in terms of setup.