I’m getting ready to start a long-term 4E campaign using Fantasy Grounds 2 software and thought I might share a few tips and ideas about how to successfully set-up and run a game online. I’ll start the series of articles with a two-part article about the issue of player recruitment.
It’s a jungle out there…
Finding players is one of the most frustrating parts of any role-playing game and it’s doubly so for online games. Player attrition for an online game is incredibly high: Most of my PBeM games typically lose 50% of the initial players within a month of starting up. For a VTT game it’s not quite as bad but it’s still pretty high. My general rule of thumb is to recruit 25% more players than I actually can handle because inevitably a quarter of your new recruits will discover they don’t have time, run into software problems (including discovering they can’t use a cracked version to play), decide the game isn’t for them, prove completely unreliable, or simply flake out and not show up. It’s the two types that’s the most frustrating to deal with because as a GM you can invest an enormous amount of time in getting a player set-up only to have them disappear off the face of the Earth.
Why is player recruitment and retention so difficult? Part of it may be the impersonal nature of the internet and the lack of player investment in a game. It’s easy to sign up for a dozen games and then simply dump the ones you don’t like, even if it leaves those groups high and dry. It’s also virtually painless: There’s no uncomfortable phone call to make, no chance you’re going to run into the person in the game store, and almost no chance you’re even going to hear from the group again.
This is compounded by the fact that in many cases it’s the GM who is doing the recruitment by posting messages on forums and site bulletin boards. Potential players have little investment and little to lose by responding to ads – it practically effortless. Unfrotunately it’s also effortless to drop out of a game – in my experience, most online players don’t even offer the group the courtesy of informing them. Instead, they simply stop showing up, leaving the GM wondering if they’re just late or ran into an emergency. I’ve strung along a missing player’s character for multiple sessions before finally giving up on the player. That simply sucks.
Solutions to the problem
Unfortunately I don’t have any solutions for this problem. As I mentioned earlier, one of my safe-guards against this is to over-recruit for my groups. In general I find 4-5 players for an online VTT game optimal. Any more and the sessions run very slowly and combat gets incredibly laborious. It also can be really difficult for a GM to keep up with more players since conversation online is much slower, even if you’re using VoIP. So for a group of 5, I typically will recruit 7 or 8 players, knowing fully that 1/4 of them will never make it past session one.
My latest VTT game, which is a 4E Scales of War campaign, is a good example of this: I wanted 5 players for the group and after several weeks of advertising ended up with 9 people who were interested. We start this Sunday and how many players do I have starting on Sunday? Four. What happened to the other 5?
- One stopped replying after our first exchange of emails.
- One discovered that a cracked version of the software wasn’t going to work.
- One discovered that the times I had posted wouldn’t actually fit with his work schedule.
- One joined and then started trying to convince us that we should play 3.5 instead, and then disappeared when we wouldn’t change.
- One never managed to complete the character generation process.
The good news is that I have one more player waiting in the wings, who baring any last minute problems, should join the group during session 2.
One of the other methods I’ve begun using to weed out potential problem players before we start playing is to make the character creation process a more drawn-out, group process. I get players involved via a forum or group (I use Google Groups almost exclusively nowadays) and get everyone working on their characters together. We do this over a week or two, including a short online session to see who can actually connect. The advantages I’ve found are three-fold: First, it makes players commit up front to making their character and actively participating in creation of the setting. This tends to invest them much more heavily in the game right from the beginning. It also makes my job as a GM a lot easier because the players give me lots of plot hooks and antagonist possibilities during the process. Second, players who are not reliable usually reveal their nature quickly – they then disappear before the game starts. Finally, it irons out potential playstyle incompatibilities out of game rather than in the middle of a session. Thus the player who really wants to play Savage Worlds or who wants to play a half-ogre fighter/paladin/ranger is quickly identified and can be dealt with instead of wasting a lot of precious game time on such issues.
In the 2nd part of this post I’ll look at places where you can recuit players and some strategies on how to attract people to your game, so stay tuned.
