A couple things I can think of that might be of use: 1) If you start throwing some things at your players that require a quick response now and then, it might make sure they pay attention. This can be anything from another player triggering a trap or event to an NPC suddenly showing up due to teleport or dropping invisibility, making a demand and giving them an ultimatum (you have 10 seconds to comply). If you don't get a response, ask for initiative, and any player(s) that doesn't roll their initiative goes at the bottom of the order. If they don't respond within a certain amount of time when it is their turn, they get skipped. If the ultimatum is given by someone or something that isn't trivial to the group, not paying attention can certainly make survival by all players less certain. Since you can hide tokens on the GM layer, it is pretty easy to do this on Roll20. You could make up a couple scenarios and have the tokens somewhere out of the way just waiting for the right moment. Since they can be copy/pasted between maps, you can take these ready made adversaries anywhere. If this becomes something that does happen now and then in your games (rather than as punishment only used when you think players may not be paying attention), then hopefully that will help train your players to be paying attention. 2) I may be in the minority, but I think expecting someone new to a specific rule set to run out and buy the books may be unreasonable. The number of books and their cost varies by system, so some might not cost much and some can be fairly pricey. If you are going to require the books, either don't allow new players or require them to have their own books up front before playing. Do you use any house rules? Are there any online resources for the system you run? Do you use anything that isn't going to be in the basic books that isn't available freely online? If your answer is yes to any of those 3, then maybe you should make more use of handouts and the bio and info tab of character sheets. I run a system that went out of print before some people playing on Roll20 were born. With that being true, I have created the ruleset within Roll20 on a network of just over 1000 handouts. When someone makes a character, I create a link to the handout for their class on their bio and info tab. Same goes for the spell list for their class if they are a casting class, and then a link to each spell they actually know. I create handouts with info on in-game books only viewable to characters that know the right languages. I create handouts for magic items, usually viewable by the whole group. I have mule characters that do nothing but carry spell/ability macros (a sheet for each class that can use special macros) into new games so I can copy/paste them onto players' sheets. Same for global macros for some commonly used rolls I might request. The reason I bring that up is that making it as easy as possible for people to run the mechanics of their character through Roll20, the faster things move. The faster things move, the easier it will be to keep people's attention. The longer people have to search for things, the longer everything takes, which allows for more meme searching. You can do a similar thing on a smaller scale. Have a handout with any house rules. If there are many or covering different parts of the rule set, make a handout that is a table of contents with links to the different specific house rule handouts. You can make links to those house rules on someones bio and info tab if one of the house rules specifically affects their character due to race or class. You can make links to online resources that might help new players with their character (articles on their race, class, and any special class abilities). Make sure they know they can log in at any time to follow those links. I'm not going to pretend that doing stuff like this takes no time. However, you can make a base game with any handouts you make and copy that game any time you want to start a new game. That way, you only have to do it once. As far as the interpersonal problems go, making your game run as smooth as possible may reduce some of them. Maybe. Other than that, all you can do is have a talk with your players. After all, if you aren't having fun, then why bother?