The Gaming Den

When looking for players as a GM, what are your most common or most frustrating issues? These can be barriers to starting a game, or what derails a running game.

Feel free to comment with more info or standout stories, esp if some factors prevent games starting while others cause an established gaming group to implode.

My main problem is a mix between one and two
I have three players.
I can GM on Friday afternoon and Evening, Saturday evening, and Sunday afternoon and evening
one of them can't on Fridays, another can't on Saturday evening and the third can't on Sundays (regularly at least). So at least one third of my players would be missing, no matter when I run.
And with two of them that also affects where I can run it.

So now my difficulty is in

1. Finding some more players
2. Finding players who can play when I can
3. Deciding which player will not be able to play/Deciding how to make it so that no player misses too much
4. Based on that decide where to run it

Personality conflicts. My current group is composed of people kicked out of every other group in the area. Most gamers can't handle our assorted bullshit.

My eternal problem has been finding people who can game on a weekly basis. About a year ago I stopped DMing for a group and formed a new one (carrying only one player) and I haven't had that problem anymore.

All the other items on the poll can be sorted out/negotiated, but if the players can't consistently make it to the agreed upon day/time I just go nuts.

Finding people who aren't dicks/are dicks in the correct ways who can game weekly. So both personality and time.

It's too easy to have a game die because one or two people flake out or have schedule changes.

Voted for #1 (and again, finding groups PERIOD, but I'm sure that my crippling social anxiety doesn't help with that), but #3 would be an issue for me if I was in a position to be picky, which as I alluded to in my post in the other poll...I am not.

EDIT:

If I had to pick "Other" in either poll, it would be finding players that don't take issue with my cannabis use. You don't need to smoke with me, just don't give me the stinkeye for smoking pot while playing D&D (obviously, if someone else were hosting, and smoking IN GENERAL were an issue, I'd do the polite thing and step outside to smoke, or more likely, use my vape pen which is virtually odorless and produces no actual smoke; another option would just be eating or drinking a bunch of cannabis before the game session and just slowly growing stoned during it, seemingly from nothing, as edibles take 2-3 hours to effect me).

My entire circle of gamer friends previous were all stoners or stoner friendly. There were practically as many bongs and pipes on the table as there were books, as many nugs and piles of ground up bud as there were dice. I have always despised the archetype of the tee-totaling nerd who scorns other nerds that drink or do drugs, and that's the type I'm scared of butting up against. If you don't drink, or do drugs, unless you have a VERY good reason, I am highly suspicious of you from the jump. I feel even moreso about people that don't fucking curse.

Thankfully I'm in one of the many US states where marijuana is entirely legal, so hopefully that should help somewhat.

The major problem with finding local players for me is that I'm living in a backwater place with about 100k people in town (which is a large number but doesn't work out that well), of which very few are even aware of tabletop RPGs (I used to be one of the few kids in school who knew what D&D even was, actually), and probably even fewer people who care enough to invest their time into the systems I like.

In the end, I scraped together maybe 4 people from my online social circle, which is vastly larger than my IRL one, and even then I have to DM, because no one else has enough drive or system knowledge to run 3.5 or PF. I'm probably not going to ever run real-life games unless I move four timezones westward.

i went to high school in a town of 6000. Wiki says 6,2XX per 2010 census.

I had my DND group, plus there was at least 2 other groups I knew about but didn't play with.

100k is top 300 cities in the us. Greenbay has a football team and sits at 108k. Did you add a 0? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U ... population

I feel like maybe you are doing something else wrong.

Krusk wrote:i went to high school in a town of 6000. Wiki says 6,2XX per 2010 census.

I had my DND group, plus there was at least 2 other groups I knew about but didn't play with.

100k is top 300 cities in the us. Greenbay has a football team and sits at 108k. Did you add a 0? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U ... population

I feel like maybe you are doing something else wrong.

Maybe not living in the US, sure. Awareness of D&D is basically non-existent in the Siberian parts of Russia outside of my generation (as in, 20-something people and younger), at least outside of large metropoles, which means around 500k or more here.

Actually, I'm not even sure any bookshops carry PHBs of any D&D edition here (nor any other tabletop RPGs) - last time I looked, there weren't any. I'd have to mail-order them from Moscow, probably, if I wanted to have a physical copy.

Living in Siberia may qualify as doing something else wrong.

Well fuck me. Siberia sounds like a good reason