Games with 300 people

I've only ever played games with people I've kinda known, set up in advance. I don't really understand when I see those Pick up games that have anywhere from 20 to 300 people in them. How does that work? Are all those people really "playing"? How do you run that? Am I missing something?

Do you mean the player list is that long?  That is everyone who has clicked to join and hasn’t removed themselves from the campaign.

Well sometimes there are certain games or systems where the community is hard to find. Then some folks on here created a roll20 support group where multiple GMs and players sigh up. Makes it easier to find a group with the same system/times zone and such.  It doesn't necessarily mean there are 300 in one single session.  :)

Sometimes when you see a game with a very large number of members, it is community (Rerednaw touches on this). Sometimes it is a timezone specific community, a playstyle, or just a system based community. There could be games ran in it or there might be no games ran in it but instead it is a scheduling hub or smaller, more specific type of LFG community. Take for example the Knights of the Written Word 2 game. It has about 800 members but there are no games ran in it. It functions as a LFG, a support, and just a general community. The one common theme for this specific community is that all the members play their games by text instead of voice.

I get it now. Thank you for explaining.