Ideas on making your Role-playing group better

So my normal Dungeons and Dragons group has had to change are scheduled game and that's fine, the new time works great for every one. but the night we normally play we still got together for one last time for that night and in character talked about are selves, as if we were sitting around the campfire in-between are adventures. It was nice to re-hear some of there back ground story's and to hear new details about them. This got me thinking on other activity's or in game ideas that other people have used to keep there on-line groups growing as a team. and maybe helping develop relationships out of game as well any one like to share ?

In regards to developing relationships between the characters, I would say that it is about 30% up to the players and 70% up to the DM. When I DM, I take a character's backstory and see if there's anything I can do with my campaign to draw them in. For instance, I have a Cleric who was orphaned at a young age. Cool. He could meet his parent(s) way later on in the story, with lots of foreshadowing. Other players will catch these clues and relate that Cleric has a dark past that isn't quite history. It would then be up to the player to PLAY that role. An orphan is typically broodish (Luke Skywalker, Harry Potter, Batman, Cinderella, etc) or has a good reason not to be and will cling all co-dependently to that. With both the player and the world around him giving the feel that this character DOES exist, the other players will have now have a reason to temporarily suspend their disbelief. If EVERYONE is doing this, it can lead up to a really great roleplaying campaign. As far as developing relationships out of game, well... use the same social skills you would use in real life. It's not all about D&D, so try to discover the other player's interests and discuss them... or do them! If they like blasting people in Planetside 2 if they're not looting treasure, DL the game and play with them! I hope you've found this useful.

Nice post kBrad and good point on the DM. I failed to state that he also took down every ones back story's so he could work them in at separate intervals along our journey. and as for the out of game, I don't know why I put that there I guess because were all playing on-line now. Again thank you for the post. hope to see more form all you VTT players out there

As a GM, I've had plenty of successes and failures in getting my teams to mesh well and work together; frequently players develop characters that clash with each other and in those instances, it's ultimately up to the GM to figure out how to make it work. For me, I've found that ensuring that the danger pushes each character to the same objective at the same time makes certain that your characters have to work together--or fail. This is much easier in linear games, but can also work in settings that give them more freedom. This is as easy as ensuring that your characters all have the same identifiable villain and that the stakes (their survival or other goal) is tied up in each other being able to work together to overcome the antagonist. I don't have much experience GM'ing in Roll20, and most of my own players are people I know in real life, so I'm not sure how one might build relationships outside of the game. But like Hamlet says, I imagine it's a good idea to discuss what other things the group likes to do when not in Roll20. I'm sure we have a lot of traditional gamers here--MMOs, etc. so that might be a place to find common interests.

Great post PlayfulDreamer.