Thoughts on effectively evaluating players and GMs during looking for group process

This is more a general question/discussion than looking for a specific solution. I've seen some posts in the Suggestions forum looking for ways to rate players and GMs, and, while I don't think that's a good idea, I know from my own experience that selecting players from a campaign posting can feel a little daunting. A popular game system will usually get enough submissions within the first few days of being up, and I feel a little like I'm just selecting players at random, rather than intelligently picking players that will fit well with my group. Other frequent Roll20 users, what tricks do you use to help find players who will be a good fit for your campaign? Do you ask people to fill out questionnaires? Do you ask to correspond with them in some way prior to inviting them to the campaign, almost as an interview? Do you just try to be really specific about what kind of game you are running and what you are looking for in players and trust them to self-select? Do you take first comers and just go through enough players until you find the ones who fit with your campaign? My interest is not so much in finding ways to "weed out the bad players," but just finding players who will be a good fit for a campaign. And likewise for players finding a campaign and a GM who is a good fit for them.

A few steps I've found that work and improve your time as someone attempting to acquire people, it wont work 100% but it will remove a portion of the people who apply then vanish. - Insert LFG posting obvious first step. - Reply to anyone who posts a thread, bonus to anyone who posts unique posting. - Ask them to PM their skype to you. - Talk through Skype, get to know them... quality is good, sounds reasonable? Send invite then. - Ask if they want help, do some mock fights or introductions, get a feel of the person. If they go through all that... the likelyhood of them screwing you over is greatly reduced, it isn't 100% but it does work to lessen the time wasters and the people who simply do not fit in your group. Quite often, you'll find if you spend time with some... you'll gain a newbie and they'll learn the game. For future games, it'll make them a better player and the next GM can thank you for it.

In my experience, a lot of people are so desperate for a game that they'll just apply everywhere. So relying on them to self-select will result in a lot of annoyance for you (I recently had someone create an elf spellcaster for a game that was set in the real world). "First-come, first-served" will yield similar problems: people who have no interest in your specific campaign, but just want any campaign at all, will dominate the early applications. If you want people who are a good fit, you're better off rejecting bad fits up front (especially in case you actually get a good fit early: playing in a group made up of obviously bad fits for the campaign can scare the good fit off). Personally, I try to be as explicit as possible about the style of campaign, game system, scheduling, etc. when advertising a campaign. While this won't prevent lots of applications from people who didn't bother to read any of that, it will make the applications from those who did read and are actually interested stand out. Then you can just delete all the applications with no content other than "I'm in" and focus on the applications that show the person at least read your ad before responding. At this point, some people will do questionnaires and/or interviews. I tend to just do a simple PM asking about character concepts they have in mind. The response will generally give pretty good insight into the kind of player (do they seem interested in power characters? interesting RP characters? characters completely unrelated to the setting you specified because it turns out they didn't actually read the ad?), which can lead to either a "cool, send me a charsheet when you're done or let me know if you want to do a one-on-one character creation" message or a "sorry, I don't think we're a good fit" message. As a player, there's a lot of dovetailing with the above. Read the whole ad before applying, and only apply if you think it sounds like a match. Just like I won't bother responding to a "I'm interested" (with no other content) application, I won't bother applying to a "this is a D&D 3.5 game" (with no other content) campaign posting. If the campaign seems interesting but the play style isn't obvious, ask. Asking the GM questions about the campaign won't scare off a good GM (in fact, it'll probably make you look more attractive to a GM who's used to wading through postings by people who don't show any interest in the specifics of their campaign).

I've done a ton of techniques... endorsing the ideas Gary posted... That said, I still get shocked and surprised by Players fairly often (ones who turn out to be the opposite of what I was looking for, even though their initial responses / profile / character idea / skype chat sounded great). Based on my ups and downs with Player recruitment, I don't know if I would take my own advice for evaluating players. Note: I have managed to find a few really excellent players and DM's, but also had some drop-out who looked like a perfect fit earlier-on. My techniques are: Really good detailed campaign description text, telling the game style, any house rules, describe the setting. Here I'm both selling the game pitch, but also trying to weed people out by telling them honestly, what's emphasized in my game, what's missing in my game, what kind of players we are looking for, what kind of players we don't want, including both play-style and also technical issues ("You need a microphone"). Ask some questions in the LFG or the Campaign's forum threads, and read the Player's answers. The ones who make the cut from here, ask them their character idea (GM can approve, reject, or modify), and ask them for a "Session Zero" (meet-up in the actual game table and just talk not play).

<a href="https://app.roll20.net/forum/post/1578939/tabletop-driving-me-insane#post-1750701" rel="nofollow">https://app.roll20.net/forum/post/1578939/tabletop-driving-me-insane#post-1750701</a>

Ken L. said: <a href="https://app.roll20.net/forum/post/1578939/tabletop-driving-me-insane#post-1750701" rel="nofollow">https://app.roll20.net/forum/post/1578939/tabletop-driving-me-insane#post-1750701</a> That's a good link with some helpful stuff on it, Ken L, though I believe my concerns are a little less existential than the OP of that thread... It seems like there are some GMs who apply more rigor to finding players for their game than I get for most jobs I've applied for. That being said, I think asking new players to do a 15-20 minute skype convo is smart. If nothing else, it weeds out the folks with no microphone setup. When I did my first Looking for Group here, I was really self-conscious about asking too much of my potential players. Especially since I was a new GM, I felt that I didn't have enough chops to ask players to jump through hoops for me. Now that I've been doing this for 6 or 7 months on Roll20, I appreciate just how many hoops I jump through every week, and am less concerned about expecting my players to put some time in upfront. How do folks feel about asking personal questions not pertaining to gaming? As in just sort of "getting to know you" questions? When I first started playing on Roll20, I tried to keep things very much "about the game," and neither asked nor volunteered any information beyond that. I feel like people expect a certain degree of anonymity on the internet. On the other hand, once I finally broke the seal and started getting to know my players a little beyond their player character and their avatar, I felt a lot better about our group. After all, I spend 3 or 4 hours with these guys every week. That's more time than I spend with most people outside of my home and my job. Would you ask people to "talk a little about themselves" as part of an initial interview, or would you prefer to wait until they volunteered that information for themselves?

redrick W. said: Would you ask people to "talk a little about themselves" as part of an initial interview, or would you prefer to wait until they volunteered that information for themselves? In the D&D B/X campaign I am currently running, I did not ask for any non-gaming related information during the player selection process. Even once we got started I did not do so. But as we all got better acquainted, people began volunteering information about what was going on in their personal lives. That game has been running a little over a year now and I feel like I know them pretty well. One thing though, I still don't have email addresses for any of the players. We do all our communicating through the campaign's private forum here on Roll20. Or through PMs, if I have information for a particular character that the other player characters would not know about.

One thing I'm curious if anyone has tried -- how about a one-shot or a series of one-shots using material very similar to a campaign you have created. Players who work out well get a PM asking them if they want to come back to sessions on a continual basis. Those that don't work out well… You never have 'see' them again. Anyone tried anything like that?

I've been in a short campaign (1-shot grew to 5-shot), where at the end the survivors were invited to the GM's main campaign. And if the GM's main game had been at a time I could play, I probably would have migrated over :&gt;

Dan W. said: One thing I'm curious if anyone has tried -- how about a one-shot or a series of one-shots using material very similar to a campaign you have created. Players who work out well get a PM asking them if they want to come back to sessions on a continual basis. Those that don't work out well… You never have 'see' them again. Anyone tried anything like that? I've heard of people doing this — run a series of one-shots and then pick their favorite players to invite into a long-term campaign. The plus side is that who can complain about a DM running a game for them? The downside is that I, personally, would have a hard time telling somebody I've already run several games with, "hey, sorry dude, you didn't make the cut."

redrick W. said: Dan W. said: One thing I'm curious if anyone has tried -- how about a one-shot or a series of one-shots using material very similar to a campaign you have created. Players who work out well get a PM asking them if they want to come back to sessions on a continual basis. Those that don't work out well… You never have 'see' them again. Anyone tried anything like that? I've heard of people doing this — run a series of one-shots and then pick their favorite players to invite into a long-term campaign. The plus side is that who can complain about a DM running a game for them? The downside is that I, personally, would have a hard time telling somebody I've already run several games with, "hey, sorry dude, you didn't make the cut." i have done this, just dont tell them the point of the oneshot is to recruit for your main campaign, and if you want to keep some one, send them a private message saying "hey if you liked the session i got a full on campaign going &lt;this day&gt; at &lt;start time&gt; until &lt;end time&gt; if your interested..." sadly even that doesnt work sometimes, sometimes you find out the character they were roleplaying, wasnt being roleplayed, its how they are IRL... one guy i had was an awesome chaoitc neutral derp barb with int 6.... but his lawful good int 18 wiz acted the same way...