Recruiting Pool
Looks like Gunslinger is out on a recruitment drive! But as per usual, the LFG life is a treacherous one. Rather than recruiting in the gaming desert, our perpetual lone wolf now finds himself adrift in the a sea of applicants. But then again, it amounts to the same thing.
When you’re writing up your game description and sending out your Google forms, the applications come back thick and fast. There are low-effort single word replies, multi-page backstories, and everything in between. And somewhere in your scant free time you’ve got to narrow ’em down.
Fitting the player to the game is one helpful strategy. For example, suppose you’re in the mood to run a new player experience with a linear storyline. Suddenly all those applications flexing “10+ years gaming experience” begin to look less appealing. In the same vein, you can also try giving preferential treatment to demographics like forever GMs or just-moved-to-town types. If you’ve got natural sympathies, they can be a great help with tie-breaker decisions.
Then there’s the clearly-did-not-read-the-post group. You don’t have to go so far as adding, “What was the secret phrase in the game description?” field to your application form, but it can help. As a whole, these applications tend to be easy dismissals. They’ll ask obvious questions like, “Do you allow homebrew?” when you clearly specified otherwise, or perhaps you’ll find a pitch for an elf PC in your dwarves-only game. Straight to the Rejected pile with the lot of ’em!
But by far the most time-consuming part of this process is the hunt for red flags. It’s why you bother to interview the finalists. Our own Gunslinger may be a precious cinnamon roll. But for every, “Nobody wants to play with me,” you encounter out in the wild, there’s a real chance of sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, and overall a “not good dude” vibes hiding beneath the surface.
And even then, once you’ve winnowed it down to a single table of gamers, you’ll still encounter folks who ghost on session day. Whether it’s simple forgetfulness or the dude from New Zealand who failed to realize game time was 3:00 am local, it amounts to the same thing. All that work has gone down the drain, and you’re still left with empty seats.
So for today’s discussion, what do you say we talk shop about large-scale recruitment? If you’re an online GM on the hunt for new players, what does your selection process look like? What red flags do you look out for? And how do you avoid Gunslinger’s fate, going from a giant recruitment pool to zero actual players? Sound off with your own LFG blues down in the comments!
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At least Gunslinger isn’t wearing a Hugh Hefner-style housecoat for this. ^^;
Hey – where’s his best chum, Orbert? Orbert would talk some sense into him. 😉
Orbert is holding down the fort at the tea party.
I know you said only core books, but what about Unearthed Arcana? Oh, and I have a couple alterations to the UA that I think are balanced…
I don’t use DnDBeyond, can we just use Roll20 instead? (After saying I use both, but want character sheets in the FREE DnDBeyond service)
I know everyone agreed to Saturday, but I would really prefer to play on Wednesday.
Can we play closer to 10… my time? (much later for everyone else)
I don’t have Discord. (Another totally free app that SO many people use!)
I have heard all of them and more. And it is almost easier to set up an in person game than it is to make something work in a virtual space.
I would say the most key element when searching for a group outside of all the other flags, is the respect of time. If they can’t be arsed to download the free app/program and even worse, can’t be on time for any of the “session zero” games to create a character, understand the setting, get used to the theoretical story about to be told, then that lack of time respect is not going to get better in my experience.
It is the ever thankless job of the GM to wrangle the cats and get them to the table on time… and sometimes that also means kicking one out. Which can also lead to Gunslinger’s problem, because sometimes if one goes, everyone goes. Not even in some solidarity move, but more of “Oh, well I was hoping to play with more than 3 people, sorry, I have to go too then.” and other situations.
I don’t think there is ever a good solution to any of it. Trial, error, and more error, and maybe one day you find a decent and long lasting group… if you’re lucky.
Yo… I got tired just reading the first half of your post, lol.
Me too XD
Outside of college I never had an excess of players. But then, college taught me to run campaigns for groups of 12-17, so my definition of “excess” has been skewed.
These days there are only two groups of gamers (6 & 8) that I interact with, one of which for actual games, the other social via discord.
How did you manage to run for 17? Is that the oldschool style with a designated Caller?
17 didn’t happen a lot, two, maybe 3 times at new semesters/years when people would join in groups. I had a core group of 8ish that lasted all 75-ish sessions and then others that would play for a semester or two. it was usually closer to 12 and I’d call the game at 9.
I was originally too stupid to know this was hard. Fortunately, I’m a computer nerd who was in engineering school, so lots of things that were almost unheard of in the 80s became much easier in the early 90s with computers. I used a database to manage my NPCs, places etc. And I could use Autocad to quickly make scale world maps,
Which in 1992 was pretty rare. Plus I printed a LOT of cheat sheets.
I.e. I had a sheet with everyone’s “notice” and “stealth” stats, all saves and common AC. I also had the players make 20 rolls and record them on a sheet. The gotcha to “I naturally rolled 5x 20s” is that I also use that sheet for NPC rolls. That meant I could streamline a lot of things by just scratching off numbers and tallying up successes.
I’m also a “simulationist” GM in thst I have the motivations for NPCs and the expected events & outcomes if players don’t intervene. I set up a series of time lines and tweak them in flight so I could coordinate the mayhem.
I always had at least 2 tables; typically one really big one with chairs for non-combat or simpler encounters plus a standing-only combat table. I think I maxed out at 3 tables with
4 battle mats in use during a castle assault. My battlemats had grid labels (A1, B2, C3) which helped be clear on positions.
All rooms were numbered on my notes and I’d put the numbers on the “unseen” sides of doors. That way when there were 9 known doors a player could quickly tell me which door they were opening/searching.
Enemies were often squads or groups. I’d have one real mini and then some colored dice to reflect the others of the same type. That also let me say things like “the fireball kills several goblins: green 2,3,5 and blue 3,4” and the players would clear them off the mat.
I also made many, many pregen encounters and would “reskin” them and generally people didn’t notice if a pack of dire bears happened to have the same stats as a squad of ogres.
Winnow? Huh learned a new word today.
I’m a font of vocabulary!
For today’s posting I’m reading the comic as 173 RSPV’ed, but 172 ghosted on our boi, and he cut the list down to three who didn’t show…
“So for today’s discussion, what do you say we talk shop about large-scale recruitment?”
I don’t really know anything about this, I’ve never done ‘large-scale recruitment”. The closest might be a Play-by-post I ran where I want 6-8, got 12 who started making PCs, and took all of them* because I knew between 4 to 6 would bail before we completed chargen.
I was close, 2 couldn’t get out chargen, 2 dropped out before the end of scene one, and one started ghosting within a month. And I knew roughly half of whomever stuck around would be “reluctant” posters, so I ended up with 7 players, but only three who posted with strong frequency, and 2 who preferred “mee-too” responses and two who were really only all there when combat reared it’s ugly head.
* I’ve played PbPs for a long time, so I know the patterns.
“What red flags do you look out for?”
For Play-by=Post games, i avoid bad spellers and poor grammar. And that’s about it. I mean sure if someone rolls into the application process dropping slurs or anything outrageous enough I wouldn’t want to be int he same room wiht them physically, I’d cut them too, but most people strangely don’t usually let their freaky -isms out to play until they gotten comfortable in the space.
And sure there will always be those few who hide it until it becomes a “but it’s what my character would say, I’m not a [group]-ist in real life!” types who make themselves a problem†.
.† There is a difference between playing a [group]-ist and being one, but it’s a super-fine line and I understand if not all groups want to let that happen.
But I get a kick out of playing ‘haters’, like my dirty-hobo Elven psion/sage basically hates Elves. To him “high elves” (of which he is one) are all either “stuck up elitist snots” or “lazy-good-for-nothing entitled jerks”. He also tends to look down on wizards (because he used to be one) as “they always wantin to disrupt the natural order by making abominations” which is how he lost his magic and becam a psionist/cultist of the Outer Gods (though his wizard hate only comes out when he encounters a wizard who is either making abominations‡ or practicing super dangerous or “wild” magic).
.‡ And of course he’s befriended more abominations (he’s well known by the otyughs in the sewers as “guy that brings food” – it’s whee he dumps the bodies) and other “that’s a monster” type of creatures than, ah… well, than he’s befriended ‘normal folk’ in the city.
To me, it sounds like Gunslinger was preparing to announce how the 173 applicants who surely showed up like they agreed would be winnowed to the final three. Because there’s no way that 99.4% of the RSVP-ers would just fail to show up without so much as an email!
> For today’s posting I’m reading the comic as 173 RSPV’ed, but 172 ghosted on our boi, and he cut the list down to three who didn’t show…
It occurs to me that today’s joke comic could have used a few rewrites. :/
Yeah, my intention was 172 ghosting and the 173rd has a scheduling conflict. And you can tell it’s a good joke when you have to explain it.
I believe in you, small lonely man.
Gunslinger asked me to thank you for the vote of confidence.
I always include a rider in the table rules when LFG. Even if they wont be the right fit, the ones who notice and follow will at least be worth the time to respond to in order to verify that.
Seems like good policy. 🙂
For a while I tried running games for random people off the internet, but I can’t live that way anymore. Now I’ve got twenty or so really solid players I’ve played with before, and when I feel like running a new game, I send the details around them first. Sometimes it means I’ve got to delay a game until I’ve got enough players, but I don’t think I’ll ever go back to the madness that is open applications.
What’s your record for “most applications?”
I was co-GM of a Pathfinder game for a while, and I it was the first time I’ve ever written a form response for anything. ‘Hey, I looked at your application, and I’d just like to confirm that you read the description! The focus of this game is difficult combat and reacting to a hopeless situation, are you ready to make a new character when your first one dies?’
Almost universally they had not read the description and were not willing to risk their characters dying.
I think we got two new players out of something like eighty applications.