LFG and New Players

New players welcome? Yes No Ok this setting on the Looking for Players Listing is simply yes or no question ??? .... With so many games that seem to be available and so many levels of experience you should be able to customize this one field of entry to accommodate various levels of skill in different games. You may be new to D&D but have lots of experience with 3 or four other games. While they are different, experience in one is going to help with the other because you understand role-plying games. If you have no experience in D&D, Pathfinder, or any other title it makes it difficult to sift through players who may or may not be able to handle the house rules and custom campaigns with out a good foundation in the core rules or some experience with rules and customization. If a DM has no time to teach the game as well as plan for adventures and supervising PCs you have to put NO , but I hate to be a jerk to new players coming into the game because new generations of players are always welcomed. This is an issue i think would help a lot of DM's and players find like-minded groups, from inexperienced to advanced players you need to have some variations of choices here besides just Yes or No .. Since you already have what the campaign is playing then this just needs to reflect experience levels new novice versed experienced advanced and maybe some descriptors just for fun like styles of play guru, rules lawyer, munchkin, sage Just a suggestion i think would go far to help player's and campaign designer's alike.

I recognize it's a Suggestion not a question. As a workaround, just post the extended info that you want in the campaign intro or a Thread. For long-form / more detailed replies and information, there is available: the Introduction area for the GM to type whatever they want, explaining what they are looking for. And for the Players / Applicants, they can make a post, start a thread, in your LFG forum, telling about their experience or bio. It's very flexible since you can type whatever you want in these fields. If your game desires a range from new, novice, to munchkin, sage, as you listed above: you can put this scale in your intro and ask the applicants to classify themselves as such.

Again taking extra time up for a GM to field his play groups when he may not have the time to filter every single applicant. I agree this can be done this way but people are busy, working dealing with RL and so many other things. I just feel that as a good application aimed at benefiting these types of players should take that into consideration. The process you are talking about is even more time out of my busy schedule to make the rankings understandable to possible player, responding to hundreds of posts on one LFG listing just to weed out 15 players who are not suited to your campaign to only get 5 people that understand your arbitrary system of defining each player's abilites, knowledge, and or special skills. We already have a field in each person's profile that has what they play or like to play why not add an experience level to that say in number of years or something and that would save so much time, not to mention the amount already going to be spent familiarizing people with your campaign, setting up plots, encounters, adventures, and NPCs. While your method is sound and will work it is an issue of time to do all of that as well as the prep-work that is already necessary to run a good campaign. Efficiency of time should be a focus of this application to hit a niche of people who don't have local groups, or need places to play, or have no time to fit it in with travelling to a location, work etc.

I'm not sure I understand how it saves you time, to ask the same information, in 1 field, or in another field? If you want a "short answer" or "one word description" of each Player so that you can weed them out at a glance based on a single word, then you could just ask that in your application: "All applicants reply with which word from this list describes you: New, Novice, Advanced, ... and so on". Perhaps even faster for you, saving you much time: "All applicants reply with your one-word description of yourself in the subject line of your reply", so that you can quickly view your 100's of applicants in a glance. Even faster, weed them out in advance in your Intro: "Only applicants of Advanced experience or higher should apply", if this is the range that you are seeking. Do you really have 100's of applicants? That sounds like an impressive if not overwhelming response to your game pitch. I can see why it would be time-consuming for you to decide on your players, if you really have this many applicants.

I am not being literal with my game per se however I think you are misunderstanding what I am saying. 1. The term New Player is very, very loose, and vague. new player to what , roll20 app, D&D, numenera, so many variations of what new player can mean. 2. If the system were designed from a intuitive usability standpoint on the interface it would make more since to have the app do the weeding out for you with two fields, overall experience gaming, and experience with the chosen rules-set. These are tied into the user profiles and would help the search system find games suited for them based on choices by the DM when setting up his LFG listing. It was just a thought on some efficiency. 3 I don't feel like the search system for games is very well planned or thought out. Limited number of game types in the system, this should be free to anything the DM wants to put. Accommodating the lazy searcher with set number of game types seems counter productive to the apps focus which is implementing remote game play. Devs spending time on coding things that could be eliminated with decent text searches against the data. 4 Many applicants may not know how they fit into "my" arbitrary levels of assessment of their skills so one word isn't really the best option. Maybe including a legend in my LFG description. 5. The Only advanced applicants line is ok but again if you put yes in new players and have this clause, you are going to get some that say "well i saw that but your campaign says you accept new players". again back to #1 6. I guess I am confused on all the work on trying to control searching, rather than having a more free form search system really confuses me. Seems like a waste of dev resources I guess in a way I am trying to manipulate the search also but I think if players had fields that lined up with your game it would simplify a lot of the need for controlled searches. All in all it was a passing thought I am not familiar with all of the process of their development, but having been a developer and project manager for many years I am trying to wrap my head around a lot of it. Hard to do from the outside looking in. :) It is just my inner database developer coming out and i have a hard time not letting it get me going. LOL

Charles said: I don't feel like the search system for games is very well planned or thought out. Limited number of game types in the system, this should be free to anything the DM wants to put. Accommodating the lazy searcher with set number of game types seems counter productive to the apps focus which is implementing remote game play. Devs spending time on coding things that could be eliminated with decent text searches against the data. I can think of at least half a dozen ways to type a search for Dungeons & Dragons 4e, and I could come up with more if I tried. And that's with spelling them all correctly . The GM certainly shouldn't have to type every variation, and the player shouldn't have to try every variation to find a game. This is one reason why a list is used instead of a text field. From the developers' point of view, however, the primary reason is so that if you search for a game system, you find someone running a game with that system. This is why you can't arbitrarily add games to the list; if it's in the list, it's assumed the system is popular enough to always have something running. The developers don't want empty search results.

I understand why it is that way and that whole section was pull out of context as a whole ... and I did not explain my thought process well i often leave thoughts out of my overall topic touching i was getting at a problem i see that this field [playing] and the [field of games] used by player profiles is the same as the one you choose as the search the system if this is all the same field data then why do i have to enter it all in the search It won't just pull up a list of games based on my various "enjoyed games" from my profile to not have to search at all have a good preview section of the game so you can read more about it and focus on presenting things that may interest the player (time, game, playstyle desc ) it is really clunky and seems pieced together after the fact because of problems with the various hundreds of results of variations for game names (then the list should be expandable or expanded very limited choices 'it shouldn't be a popularity contest' lol ) I clearly understand why it is not arbitrary and that popularity changes what's available the point of my entire thing has nothign to do with the text searching it has to do with the vagueness of New Players and screening for eligible players especially for homebrew or house rules .. and it was just a thought now i am off on another topic entirely i didn't go into a lot on that point because i get it ... LOL But yeah that part of the search i would rework from the ground up to where if you didn't play that game then games with that game in its playing field would never be in your search results .. memory management and efficiency man its lost in modern development