Around the holidays I worked on putting a new campaign together with all new voices and personalities. A painful process to be sure. I work very hard to try to vet and judge if a potential player will work out (and not be some lunatic, socially anxious snowflake, or LGBTQ plus individual with a chip on the shoulder- which all seems to be about 80 percent of potential players online). I have gotten pretty good at it.
I stumbled upon a small group who had played together before, led by a young grad student who had run their previous campaign. That campaign did not reach a conclusion, and I did not get a solid reason why. Red flag number one. OK, cool. Grad student was super enthusiastic so I figured it just might work. His buddy he had been playing games with for years, a guy who was maybe at least 10 years older than him, showed up with him for a quick voice chat to talk about the campaign. The two ladies they had been playing with a while did not show up. Red flag two. But again, Grad student wowed me with his enthusiasm.
Now, I want to say I normally avoid running for established groups. For a variety of reasons. They seem to have particular expectations, and it can automatically be an "us vs. him" situation. But I was lazy. I just wanted to get going without a ton of fishing for individual players. So I invited them into the Discord text chat. And here is where my doubts came in.
It was the holidays and I wanted to wait till after the holidays, which would be maybe three weeks. No problem. But here is the rub. There was barely any chatter in the text chat. I might ask about characters, and might get a "oh, thinking of this or that." OK, no worries. They knew each other already. In most campaigns my players would be introducing themselves, mentioning character ideas, and maybe talking about the anime they liked. But hardly anything. Your chat should at least look something like this:
But hardly anything. I came across a young couple who wanted to play, and when they got in the chat they started the chatter. They hardly got a reply. I knew this was bad but went ahead and started the campaign. We had two games, sort of my "0.5" sessions (pretty much some casual doings and encounters in a tavern) with a little bit of action. It went fairly well, although the two ladies were mostly mute. The young couple were goers and tried their best to interact. After session two grad student (by that point I had realized he was gay and one of the "ladies" was trans, for what its worth) said he did not think it was working. So two wasted nights. Not just that, the couple said they liked my style, but that not only did they also see it as a waste of time, but that they had messaged the others in characters during the sessions to role play and stuff and were met with silence. They said that the experience with these others left such a bad taste that they were going to take a couple months off from gaming. Sheesh.
So my advice is this: get new players into the text chat as soon as possible. Tell them to introduce themselves to each other and discuss character ideas. Then see what happens. If they are all over it, that is a good sign. Cherry on top is if they talk about nongame stuff and end a lot of sentences with exclamation points. You are probably good to go.
My new group was like this. And not only that wanted to have side chats to talk in character between sessions. I was over the moon about this. Two games in and so far it seems all good.
So again, get the text channel hopping. If it is quiet, consider asking if they are really into this. Or just abandon all together (maybe keeping one or two people you are more hopeful about) and get fishing and vetting in forums again.
Cheers
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