Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 62 - Vetting Players and DMs

Episode Date: February 28, 2021

Once you find a potential DM or players, how do you know they will be the right ones for your game?  How do you know the game will be the right one for you?  In this episode Jeremy discusses questionnaires, interviews, and meetings to find a good match.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for tuning in to episode 62 of the Taking 20 podcast, how to vet players and DMs. This week's sponsor is the month of March. Cold, blustery, awful. It's like politics in calendar format. Please come visit us at www.taking20podcast.com. You can listen to old episodes there. You can provide feedback on old episodes or even the current one, and I would love to hear from you. Happy one-year anniversary to this little podcast. I am amazed by how far that we've come in just one year. I have gone from a listenership of zero to now I'm getting somewhere in the neighborhood of

300 downloads and listens a week. So I greatly appreciate everybody who tunes in, listens to this little podcast. Those of you that have spread the word, told your friends about it, believe me, I have huge plans for where we can go from here. I already have about 180 episodes worth of topics mapped out. So I'm looking forward to where this goes from here. But you don't care about all that. Last episode, I dropped a hint of something big to be announced this week, and here it is. I had hoped to have all the details finalized by now, but I'm still dealing with some nitinoid details here and there. The broad announcement is that we're going to have a giveaway coming up. My anticipation is that we'll do a giveaway about

episode 75 or so, with details on how you can sign up for the giveaway in the very near future. Tune in to the coming episodes to find out more. It seems like gaming for me is at least most of the time feast or hunger, not quite famine. Either I have one too few games that I want to play or DM, or three too many, usually nothing in between. Right now I'm playing in two extended campaigns DMing a third and I'm probably about to start DMing a fourth. I also volunteer to run new players through one shot so that keeps my gaming calendar really really full. But I received an email question two straight weeks boiling down to how do you find players and games that you can mesh with. As I've mentioned

before good tables tend to have good communication. The players, the GM, work together towards the common good, fun for everyone. Players are respectful of each other and the DM. The DM roots for the party and isn't just there to try to kill the PCs. But what if you don't have a group and you want to establish a new one? Or how do you know you're getting players for your group that are likely to mesh with you? By the same token, if you want to play in a group, how do you know you're joining a group with a DM and players it'll be fun to play with? These are great questions for the past couple weeks. It merits a good discussion. Finding and evaluating

a group is a critical skill to long-term fun in this hobby. Solo adventures and solo gaming systems are out there, but they're exceedingly rare. If you want to game with any regularity, you're going to need to find others to play with. Let me preface what I'm about to game with any regularity, you're going to need to find others to play with. Let me preface what I'm about to say with the fact that I was very fortunate with at least one of my groups. It just so happened that two of my very good friends from college lived in the same town near to where I moved. They had formed a gaming group already, and when they found out I was close by, they invited me to join their table. That was 15 years ago? 18? And we've been gaming together ever since. D&D 3.0, 3.5, Pathfinder 1st and 2nd edition, a little Starfinder mixed in,

some Star Wars D20 adventures. So I was very lucky in that I had built in connections with one of my groups, and that group has since expanded. We're a pretty tight bunch, except for that one. You know who you... No, I'm kidding. We're a pretty tight bunch, and we've been on so many adventures together. Sticking our fingers in things that we shouldn't, being eaten by giant purple worms, slaying a runelord, conquering the chemistry building in the name of the physics department while wielding tinfoil hats and weapons. Studying for finals went to a weird place that year. Burnout's a real thing, kids. Anyway, my other two groups, though, were more random. One of them has been together for five years now,

and the other about six months. So how did I find these groups, and how did I know they would be good ones? Honestly, two very different ways. One group found me, and I found the other one online. So one group found me a little more than five years ago. A friend of a friend had a group who expressed an interest at forming a game, but had no one who had experience as a DM. My buddy mentioned my name to this group. They reached out

to me. I had lunch with one of them, and we talked about logistics, games we wanted to play, type of game they were looking for, My general methodology is a DM. Because things went well, soon after I had lunch with the entire group. We talked about our availability, how often to game, our personalities meshed pretty well. We still have times when it's hard to game, just like every group, but we're going strong. About to finish our second huge adventure path together and we've got plans for a third. The other group was more random where a DM posted to kind of a looking for players group on Facebook. I reached out to the DM and I wasn't fast enough

to join his original adventure but he asked me a couple of questions and he said he had written an adventure and wanted some players to play test it. Six of us started playing. We didn't really know each other outside of one player in the DM being a couple. It's worked out really well, and I'm having a blast with that group. So let's start with the obvious. If you are a DM and you are looking for players, finding players isn't hard as long as you're not picky. If you go to looking for group subreddits or social media sites of your choice and post that you'd like to run a game of 5th edition, Pathfinder, or some other common RPG,

you're likely going to get snowed under with requests to join your game. The people that you get, though, will be a mix of play styles, gamer types, priorities, but you'll definitely get a bunch of players. The DM who posted to the Facebook group said he received dozens of replies back to be part of his game. So finding players is easy, but how do you find good players that would be a good fit for your game? That is where vetting players comes in. Vetting players is a little bit different for online or offline games, whenever the hell we can get together in person again. For online games, I'm assuming you're running your game on Roll20 or Foundry or some other virtual tabletop solution. With online games, the good news is that your potential player base is, theoretically, the entire world.

So the first thing I would do, and the first thing I recommend if you're trying to recruit players for an online game, is to develop a two-to-five paragraph description that states your description of the game and the premise of the campaign, expectations that the players can have of you and what you expect from your players. Commitment of the type of game you want to run. And if it's a real-time game and not play by email or play by post, put the days and times that the game will be held and the time zone. Because just specifying Fridays at 7 p.m. doesn't clarify things. You need to be Fridays at 7 p.m. Pacific time or Tuesdays at 6 p.m. Central European Standard. Second, come up with a list of questions that you want potential players to answer that you can use to help find good players. Pick questions that you can use to

get an idea of what kind of player they would be. Maybe their tabletop gaming experience and a little bit about their personality if you can. Some questions that I've used in the past. Describe yourself. Describe your tabletop experience. Describe your character concept that you were thinking about playing in my campaign. What's your experience with Roll20 and Discord? What's your favorite character you've ever played? If you disagreed with a DM ruling, what would you do? If you need hints and advice and ideas, in the 4th edition D&D book Dungeon Master's Guide 2, pages 26 and 27 has a number of potential player survey questions. My favorite one out of that list. Rate your enjoyment of each of the following types of play from 1 to 10, with 10 being best. Combat, interaction with NPCs, puzzles,

investigations, and mysteries. Third, create a method for people to submit applications and set a deadline. It doesn't matter what method you use. Email, online form, discussion board, whatever. Pick the method and have one location for all the responses. Don't allow people to submit things five different ways because it just makes your life more difficult. Fourth, wait for the applications to come flooding in. If your description is good, or kind of good, or remotely coherent,

in a few days, you'll probably get a large number of applicants if you're running a popular gaming system like 5th edition. If you're running a less common gaming system, you may need to have an extended deadline or wait a little bit longer to get a good applicant pool. But once you collect all those applications, the fifth thing you need to do is review them. And here's where the rubber meets the road. My general rule is, anyone who fails to put the effort into their application, or fails to put the application in the correct location, or tries to email it to you whenever you want to submit it via an online form, they should not be recruited. I mean, if they don't put any effort into their application, they're probably not going to put any effort into playing your game either, so there probably will be a disinterested player who falls off by the wayside after a few weeks. will be a disinterested player who falls off by the wayside after a few weeks.

Also, anyone who doesn't answer all of the questions at minimum should be moved to the bottom of the pile. So now you have to go through all of these applications. And that brings us to the vetting process. Your goal is to find someone you would feel comfortable interacting with for a few hours a week or every other week. Does this player want the same thing in a game that you want to provide? Does their style of play match you and the other players? Are they looking for the same type of game such as maybe you want to run a loot heavy game where the treasure is the

game? Or politics, apocalyptic, funny, serious, tactical? Determine what type of game that you want to run, put it in your description, and make sure that they would want to play in that type of game. Another thing to consider, does this player look like they're going to have the right attitude for your game? And bluntly, you're trying to identify potential problem players and weed them out before they become players in your game. We've all dealt with players that are difficult, players who can't leave politics out of the game, players who are committed to winning at the expense of everyone else,

including the other players, players who don't take the game seriously, players who actively try to derail your story, players who don't handle disagreement well. I have three primary strategies for vetting players and I've mentioned questionnaires and that's my favorite one. But the second stage I move to once I have a pool of players narrowed down. Let's say I am looking for four potential players. I'll usually narrow it down to maybe my top eight. I will try to meet with each one of them online if we're going to

play online or offline if we're going to play offline. I know it's old-fashioned, but if you're playing in person, I think it's best if you have this initial meeting, interview, if you will, with them in person. A half hour spent talking over coffee or an hour over lunch usually tells you a lot about the person. Are they on time? Can they make conversation? Do they seem like they're going to be a problem when they disagree with you? Will they mesh with your other players? I consider this almost like a session minus one, where in session zero, everybody gets together and talks about what characters they want to play, but that's after you've selected your players. This session minus one is where you're getting to know them, and they're getting to know you.

And remember what you're trying to do. Identify a player that would be a good fit for your game. Don't be afraid to interview eight people if you only need four. Don't be afraid to interview 16 people if you only need four. But just find the players that would fit with you. Let's say you go through the interview process and you have interviewed eight players and you've seen like you got about six that might be good. You could always run your four-person game with six players. Goodness knows, one of my campaigns that I'm DMing has nine players. Another one has seven. You can always run your campaigns with more players than you intended. But if you really want to get down to that four, let's say you're starting a podcast or you're doing something where you only have room for

four players. Break them up into two groups and run a couple of one-shots. Really short adventures, we get together one night, we run a one-shot adventure and see how everybody meshes and everybody works together. Can they make a character, a backstory for that character? Can they role-play appropriately to the type of campaign that you want to run? Do they shout over each other, argumentative and difficult, or do they work together as a team? Now, I've talked a lot about online games, but offline games, a lot of the process is the same.

There's some additional avenues, though. If you want to host an offline game or an in-person game, working with local gaming stores is a great first salvo. A lot of stores allow people to post upcoming game nights. Hey, I'd like to run a D&D 5th edition. We're going to go through Storm King's Thunder and I need five players. A lot of gaming stores will allow you to post that information either on their website or up in the store itself. Some gaming stores have dedicated game nights where groups can meet and form spontaneously.

In my experience, they're always looking for more DMs. So if you show that you're willing to DM and show up, once this COVID mess is over, hopefully we'll have a lot of game nights and gaming stores again, and you'll likely have people beating a path to your table. Another way you can try to find players for your in-person games is to talk to your gaming friends. If you're blessed enough to have friends who play RPGs, ask them about their game availability or people that have talked to them about joining a game where maybe they don't have room. You still need to screen the players, use questionnaires, interview them, run one-shots with them. If they work out, great, you have a potential player. If they don't, you haven't invested a lot of time and you've eliminated a problem before it could affect your

planned massive 18-month campaign. So I focused a lot on DMs finding players in this episode, but what about the reverse? How do you find a good DM as a player? I once told someone who asked me this previously that it's a lot like dating. You kind of put yourself out there and take some risks. Man, that sounded dark when I phrased it that way. But either way, you do have to put a lot of feelers out there. I'd love to say I have a lot of vastly different recommendations for players looking for DMs, but it's largely the same process with one big caveat. There are a lot of players and relatively few DMs.

Games may be hard to come by. Games that would get you excited may even be rarer. By no means am I suggesting that you blanket the world in applications to join games, because if you get accepted as a player and agree to that game, you need to be committed to that game. But this may require some work from you. Lots of looking for group posts online, Reddit, Facebook, Meetup, etc. Some of the virtual tabletop solutions have the ability to search for groups who are looking for players. You may have to make trips to your local gaming store and talk to the staff.

Attend local gaming events. Attend a gaming convention. Damn, I miss conventions. I can't wait until we can have those again. Talking to friends and friends of friends. I mean, Dungeons & Dragons has the Adventurers League, which is a standardized way to participate in one-shot adventures. Pathfinder has the Pathfinder Society and Starfinder has the Starfinder Society. They do the same thing.

But once you find a potential group, you still need to make sure you are upfront and honest about the type of game you want to be in. Other than that, the process is largely the same as DMs interviewing players. Talk to the DM. Explain to him or her exactly what you would like to do, exactly what type of game you'd like to be a part of. Find out what type of games the DM or GM is running. If it sounds like it's going to be a pretty good fit and you guys hit it off over lunch, fantastic. Join the group and have fun. But the last option I want to give players is that if you go through this process multiple times and you're having problems finding a DM, consider becoming a DM yourself. I promise you it's not as hard as it looks.

I know it seems scary and you're going to make mistakes doing it and oh my gosh, what if I screw up the rule on flanking? If you're focused on your players having fun, you're going to do great, even if you flub up the rules. you're going to do great even if you flub up the rules. I know finding new players and new DMs is nerve-wracking and becoming a member of a new group or expanding your existing group involves potential risk of dealing with new people. You might have to meet someone you don't really mesh with. You might have a really awkward as hell lunch with someone but better that than dealing with an awkward as hell 18 months of a full campaign. So take the risk. Reach out to people. Reach out to DMs.

Reach out to players. Expand your gaming world. I promise you, fun waits for you on the horizon. Thank you so much for listening. By the way, if you love the podcast, please tell your friends. The listenership has been steadily increasing, but I'd love to see it continue to grow. If you hate the podcast, thank you for listening anyway, but I'd love to see it continue to grow. If you hate the podcast, thank you for listening anyway,

but please keep that to yourself. Once again, I want to thank our sponsor, the month of March, the only month with the NCAA basketball tournament and National Nap Day. This has been episode 62, vetting players and DMs. My name is Jeremy Shelley, and I hope that your next game

is your best game.