First session is a few days to a week out. You, the other players, and the GM are all in communication via a chatroom, whether your game is going to be online or irl and just partially organized online.
What are the red flags that tell you this game is going to be awful, Veeky Forums?
More then one person spends an excessive amount of time talking about their builds. Number 1 red flag, at least for most systems that uses d20 as the core mechanic.
Stealth archers.
Anyones backstory involves being a fallen god.
>Player driven world building
Now don't get me wrong. Literally every game has this to a certain degree. As a consequence of backstory, whether it's describing their hometown or whatever, there's always going to be aspects of the setting influenced by player design before the game starts.
What I'm talking about is when the GM says "players, build the setting!" and has them name all the stupid fucking towns and shit. Those games are invariably pure shit, because the GM does not give a singular shit about anything he's responsible for.
The players play pcs, but the GM plays the world. It's like one of the other players asking you to make his character for you.
>for you
For him*
>the DM didn't build a world and Exotica borders Generica
It felt good though being a first time player who had come up with a world hundreds of times bigger thinking that GMs often had franchise-scale worlds
>one of the players posts anime pictures on Veeky Forums
>one of the players posts on Veeky Forums
When the gm is clearly winging it, and has no long term goal. Throwing a game together on the fly is good for a oneshot, or even the occasional session where half your players are there and you dont want to move the main story forward. Winging it every session is usually a sign of poor modivation, and I've played too many shit games to stick around hoping the gm "snaps out of it".
DM did that in the first game I played (ForeverDM here). Taught me quickly that I never want to be a PC ever again