Troll20

I give up on trying to find people through Roll20.

Why is it that 90% of people who play roleplaying games are shit-eatingly insane?

- Sane
- Normal
- Non-edgelord
- No magical realms

Is it so much to ask?

Seriously, people complain about the lack of DMs but when you think about, it "that guy" is a good chunk of the player base.

No wonder nobody wants to DM for a bunch of shits with 0 social appeal who want to play dragon lolis.

>reminder that almost everyone who uses randoms on roll 20 have probably gave up finding a real group because they where shit in one way or another.

Yes.

Makes sense.

Still doesn't answer the question of why so many people who are fucking nuts like Tabletop RPGs.

I mean how do you honestly decide you not only want to make a half-japanese elf ninja named Sakura Kuro-Fang who speaks in third person japanglish, but then want to show it off?

What happens in the RPG process that blocks the brain's natural shame receptor?

>implying normal people play tabletop rpg

theres your problem

Crazy I know, but they exist! They're just really blurry, like bigfoot.

Dude, finding players on Roll20 is like finding a lover through online dating. Four out of five times, that person was single for a reason.

Worse still, the decent people on there will find a group that fits them where they will stay. Making it even harder to find them for your group.

As a great user once said, wondering why randoms with no group are weirdos is like answering personal ads on craigslist and wondering why they're all freaks.

I use roll 20 as a way to connect with my friends who live 2000 miles away to play some D&D.
It's a great tool to talking to friends and shit.
Random are always a crap shoot, and usually really awful odds of finding decent people.

Its less the RPG and more an anonymity of the internet that frees them from shame, kinda like how people on Veeky Forums post the darnedest things. if we could meet this people face to face at their local game shop, i;m positive that most of their characters wouldn't be so cringe worthy, though there would still be one or two freaks who just don't give a shit period.

i'm pretty normal i think, and i play.

>cue everyone telling me i'm a freak and i have a scewed perception of myself.

>no capital letters
You're definitely a freak.

I've formed some successful groups on r20. Had a few games go for 6-7 months with r20 randos, and a few of them have become good friends. I also find a lot of shitty games, which I usually just end up trolling until I leave.

well at least you had a reason.

>>reminder that almost everyone who uses randoms on roll 20 have probably gave up finding a real group because they where shit in one way or another.

Not really true. You know how many times I tried to find an IRL RPG group? None. Because I don't know anyone anymore. I'm not in college, all my old friends moved away, and I'm not really in the habit of wandering around and attempting to find (random) people to potentially form a gaming group out of.

I mean, if you don't ALREADY have a group of friends who are awesome people and already playing RPGs, how exactly is Roll20 any different than trying to find an IRL group? It's still random people, it's still shooting in the dark and hoping to find someone who will waste their time with you, the only difference is you can be more selective, and you can communicate with people you would never otherwise meet.

90% of the fanbase of ANYTHING is shit, especially on the internet, and especially in communities with no membership requirements or form of quality-control.

Have you considered National Socialism?

Considering the alternatives are Hillary or Trump, yes.

I plan on trying roll20 randoms after finishing my current first game on a forum.
Trials by fire and all that jazz.

Why does everyone always forget about anarcho-eco-socialism?

I mean I get it, there's no organization or figureheads to join/follow and wearing burlap or rough handspun wool isn't for everyone, but at least recognize it's an available option...

>What happens in the RPG process that blocks the brain's natural shame receptor?
Well, shame is a learned behavior. You learn to be ashamed of things through social interaction. People who play rpgs are more often than not social outcasts, and largely have been since puberty, if not earlier. They've spent only a small fraction of the time most people have in social situations, and they've usually been ignored and isolated even when they were around other people. So they literally haven't had the opportunity to develop the social skills, a healthy amount of shame at one's own stupidity being one of them, that other people have. Poor socialization is actually very damaging to people, the emotional equivalent of malnutrition, and it has a detrimental effect on them for the rest of their lives.

Also, in the modern era, most nerds who get into tabletop stuff are big consumers of anime, manga, jrpgs, and Japanese/Otaku culture in general. That's a culture and narrative style that is, first of all, based on a radically different culture than ours, and secondly, portrays behavior which is largely awkward and aberrant even from its own social norms.

So you take nerds who have been denied proper socialization, and have been indoctrinated with ideas about storytelling and social behavior from anime, and you end up with people who are extremely strange to interact with. They're socially immature, and have unrealistic ideas about both what is normal social behavior and what is normal narrative structure.

I've known people like this in real life, and I've actually felt sorry for some of them because they are nice people, really, but they are sort of ten years behind. Twenty year old men who have the emotional and social development of a ten year old. Unfortunately, the bad ones are so obnoxious, they never get a chance to improve, because no one normal will tolerate them.

>Hillary
>Alternative to Nazism
But user, she's literally Hitler.

How hard is it actually to find good players on there? Every game I saw on there had like 100 applicants, surely you can find 4 decent ones. The one time I used it to test out a homebrew system, I got 3 pretty decent players, though I didn't try to make a whole campaign out of it

>how exactly is Roll20 any different than trying to find an IRL group?

By the same logic, how is an internet forum any different from a room full of people discussing things? But you don't see people randomly yelling "HORSECOCK" and "desudesudesu" while discussing the finer points of their vore fetish. It's because the internet removes most people's inhibitions.

Honestly I find "anime' to be a less destructive force on the RPG community than Videogames.

Like... I GM'd on a forum community for awhile, and I would occasionally get the idiot that wanted to play a kitsune or a schoolgirl with dual-katanas... but those people were easy to recognize, ignore, and in some cases underage ban.
Far ore commonly though, what ended up ruining games was players with what I call the "Skyrim mentality", who literally treated the game world like a sandbox that existed for them to fuck around in. They didn't consider the weight of their choices even when it came to things like killing people, wouldn't follow the plots or storylines presented to them beyond being slapped in the face with their next "quest-marker" was, and thought that 100% of their character development came from becoming more badass at combat. To them, the idea that a game could be roleplaying, that they could play real characters, characters with personalities and flaws and wants and needs... seemed to be an idea they had never considered before, and when presented with that idea they had no idea what to actually do with it aside from copying tropes they'e seen done in popular games. Unfortunately popular games tend to be comfortable power-fantasies, rather than anything that encourages tough, immersive, or creative thinking.

>How hard is it actually to find good players on there?
I haven't used it a lot, but I've found a pretty good mix of "basically contributes nothing" and "so annoying I might never come back". I haven't met anyone I'd call a "good" player, or a "good" GM, but none that were totally horrible.

I never ask to join any game that is going to be using Dungeons and Dragons, though, which is like 90% of all games, so that might have something to do with it. I learned back when I was in a gaming club that if you avoid DnD and LARPs, it filters out most of the worst players.

>I find "anime' to be a less destructive force on the RPG community than Videogames

I don't know if one is more "destructive" than the other. I've seen good and bad players come out of both. I do think anime fans are more socially awkward, though.

When you have a guy who tries to join a superhero game with
>I want to play a super-intelligent guy, but he's too smart to just put himself in danger, so he makes hundreds of spy drones and trades information to highest bidder. Oh and he's nowhere near the city, he's comfortably living in his dorm in Cambridge.
is it animes or is it videogames?

Again I've found the opposite to be true. I haven't known many anime fans who were unable to keep their shit to themselves when interacting with other people. However I've known gamers who won't shut the fuck up about League of Legends or tiers in Smash Bros, in REAL LIFE, even when everyone else present says they don't really know about it and don't really care.

Maybe I'm just lucky. I don't think I've ever met a serious otaku over the age of 20.

I call those bunker players. I've had a lot of trouble with them for some reason. I think it is partially a behavior born out of video games. The people I've known who do it are usually people who only play games where they can put in a ton of cheat codes. Or Nintendo fans.

Wasn't that like two or three days ago?

Illusive Man. Vidya.

>I haven't known many anime fans who were unable to keep their shit to themselves
Well, I've known a couple, but it's less that they talk about anime non-stop, and more that they are just unable to judge what is and what is not appropriate behavior for the setting, or when other people are rolling their eyes at them, like what the OP was saying about people having no shame. I've known pure video gamers who were the same way, and were not as bad about it.

I think it to do more with demographics than settings, based on my experience with Veeky Forums meetups and Veeky Forums pickup games. Channers tend to be meme spewing retards whatever the venue, but they're orders of magnitude more informed than the general population. I've met 15 year old bus riders that know more about cars than any ``Honda mechanic.''

I think it has more to do with the fact they don't read many good books and only watch blockbusters (if they even watch movies or read books). I've known a few people who were normally socially awkward but quite good players once they sat at the table. When I had problems with players it seemed to be because they didn't really understood how a story was supposed to work. Like ignoring (voluntarily or not) obvious hooks, and like said totally forgetting their actions could have consequences. I don't really get why that kind of people want to play RPGs. I mean, an RPG is made of two halves: the role-playing part and the game part. Both are about making significant choices: either choices with a narrative importance or choices with a strategic importance. How can you gain anything from an RPG when you go through the game like a fucking rabid elephant though a gingerbread house?

Was meant for , not

I've gotten some of my best players from game finder threads and roll20, but also some of the worst. Keep at it, OP. Develop a vetting process.

>I don't really get why that kind of people want to play RPGs

You answered your own question. They don't know what RPGs are supposed to be like.

Or just devoid of easy access to groups for one reason or another because they're all That Guys, even.

>Normal
If you play TTRPGS with strangers over the Internet then yore not normal. All the other requirements are reasonable at worst.

Nah, I never bothered in the first place.

As I'm sure others have pointed out, Roll20 is where people go when they can't find anyone else to roleplay with. So they're either people who don't have any friends, people who have alienated all their friends, or people who live in rural Alaska. Which of those groups do you think is likely to be sane and normal?

The first two have equal potential. Circumstances can be a bitch, yo.

Never use their finder for games or players, every experience has been terrible. Use /r/lfg if you don't hate reddit or the game finder here.

I've never had an issue with non D&D games.

I would specify non 3.pf games, but I have not tried for 5e.

That's a shame. I've been with a great group for nearly 2 years now, and I met them by playing a one shot one of them was running. Never would have found it without the LFG board.

Join the pic related

>the game finder here
Yeah because flaky weebs and monstergirl fetishists are top gamer candidates.

>just joined my first roll20 game
>DM is a ponyfag
We'll see how this turns out.

I've found a lot of good groups on roll20. Out of the ~17 games I've played/GM'd over the past 4 years12 have been positive. I can only remember 2 that I really disliked. The rest died due to scheduling conflicts. A few of the groups still hang out even though we don't play ttrpgs anymore.

Maybe the reason is due to my selection of games and effort put into recruitment. Only ran one 5e game and the rest of the games have been non-DnD.

Don't drag me into this

>mfw i'm in a great roll20 Exalted group
>mfw the ST knows at least one of the players personally and just went on roll20 to get a few more
>mfw i'm the only one who's made every session

I think the problem is that people start hearing one thing. For instance
>Anime is creepy perv stuff
>Video games are murder simulators
And that cycles through groups. Then when an anime person mentions their hobby, they get the top recited to them. They're thus pushed out of the main group an into their little clan. none of them know how to meaningfully interact with anyone else because nobody wants to have anything to do with them. Thus they don't have many things to discuss aside from anime. The same problem happens to gamers in this scenario, although it can be any group. I've noted that it seems to be FPS, LoL and Elder scrolls groups that suffer this most. Where I live the Anime people are far better, but I attribute that more to the high density of FLGS here, and thus the frequent interaction between the Weiss/FoW and Infinity/Malifaux players, as well as the overlap between the groups. The above gamer groups don't tend to appear during Game Days and are somewhat unpleasant when they do. That's all just observations though.

>Not really true. You know how many times I tried to find an IRL RPG group? None. Because I don't know anyone anymore. I'm not in college, all my old friends moved away, and I'm not really in the habit of wandering around and attempting to find (random) people to potentially form a gaming group out of.

This, but also married.

/r/lfg is *much* worse. The only advantage it has is that you can look through comment history and see how nutso some people are.

we are all normal in my irl party

That is a very cogent and coherent assessment of the causes of immaturity of many roleplayers. Bravo, sir.