Please explain the roll20 community to someone trying to find a new group

I once got an unabashed powergamer and his goon buddy from the site. First guy was terrified of his character dying even though there was zero chance. The second guy just wanted to fuck around. First guy eventually did his best to sabotage a game because he didn't want to play it.

So where is one supposed to find players if both Roll20 and Veeky Forums are dog shit?

Your actual friends.

>the_one_who_mustn't_be_named plays on roll20

Really? Do u have proof?

D&D is something to do with your real life friends. Not online with complete strangers.

Unfortunately, is right. Roll20 is a great tool, but unless you already have some cool people to play with, you're not going to get much use out of it.

That's not saying that it's completely impossible to find good players on Roll20, but they're so few and far between that you'd have to be either extremely lucky or extremely patient.

What about Mutants & Masterminds?

You realize there's no real difference in this context, right?

There is though. I found a perfectly fine group of people to play M&M on roll20 with and they aren't that guys at all

Count yourself lucky then

Roll20 used to have a good community. Used to being the key part there.

What happened is all the good players found good GMs and budded off, never to play again. There were exceptions, sure. So what remained were bad GM's, bad players, and newbies. Bad GM's teach newbies which results in bad players and more bad GM's. Occasionally the circle would break, but pigs and acorns...

Anyways, there's still some good parts of the community. The smaller, more niche, non-Exalted games tend to have a good community if you can find a game. DnD is terrible for anything resembling playing a game. WoD has also gone the same route as things have turned to shit for it, with a lot of fucking terrible GM's.

More or less, you gotta interview players and rely on dice gods for getting good players.

I've mostly played with stoners and grunts, so my roll20 experience is a lot different than a (let's say) average one.
There was a three-month period where our GM would recruit a new random each week. I don't think he ever turned anyone down. His lax attitude towards recruits was in complete opposition to his usual iron-fisted and controlling behavior when running games.
It was only then I was subjected to the full dose of roll20 weirdness. We had everything from people who refused to talk or listen to voice, people who didn't do anything the entire session, an overt furry who erp'd cuddling with another player (for hours), and a bunch of people that never showed up.
We were at a point where only 3 of the original six players stayed in the game, hoping after more than a year that the suffering was only temporary. The GM set up the perfect railroad, enabling the same scene and same encounter to happen regardless of who did what. I proceeded to fuck him over and destroy that railroad, forcing him to retcon and reset the game after I succeeded in killing the whole party for the glory of satan (repeatedly). After his best friend couldn't play anymore and I got kicked out, there was only one player present for the last session.

I count my blessings every saturday

Kek. Thank you, for making me smile

>The smaller, more niche, non-Exalted games
Is there something notable about roll20's Exalted community?

Imagine LoL community but more autistical.

That's not very accurate. There isn't a lot of namecalling on roll20

>projection of his scat fetish
what.
How?

And more polite

Pressurized shit.

Or possibly a 2D representation of a pile of feces.

I have given up now.

Nigga u wat. Can you explain this shit in further detail?

At lethal velocities

You're welcome, user.

On a side note, can we get a counselor, or at least a pretend-counselor, to analyze all the crap in this image?

>"hi-jinks"

This is a very disturbed individual. But really he seems ok if not a little desperate.

Prepare for trouble
And make it double

But really, prepare to be disappointed. Firstly, there will always be a weird culture gap. People will act different and even if they are good, its gonna feel foreign to you sometimes.

Out of 10 DM's, maybe 2 will be up to standard, or even passable. You dont have the three S's of player/DM choosing you have at an FLGS:
>Sight: Do they look orderly? Or do they keep their prep work in a mcdonalds bag and ask people bring dice and paper they can use?
>Sound: Are they a monsterous sperg lord? Meme spouting? Belching loudly at innapropriate moments and bragging about it?
>Sensibility: Can this person use reason? Does he just shut people down because DM = Boss? Can he reign in shit players or does he grant friends bonus shit?

What you get on roll20: An edited peice about the game and nothing more. You will likely sift through lots of bad games, and, lets be honest, a large portion of people are too timid to just say "Look, I'm not having fun, so I'm leaving".

You will also get the occasional "yea I posted a game, but I really wanted to play my setting and was hopeing someone would DM my fan fiction.".

I met the guy in OPs pic. He's definitely unstable. People trying to make it seem like he's just a pervert, but he actually wants to be a doctor. He told me he was a doctor and our mutual friend just silently shook his head and mouthed "not a doctor".

He seems like a decent but ineloquent guy who has personal problems related to his self-esteem and is a bit too caught between not understanding internet culture at all and catching all the worst parts of it. Like emoticons, which always bug me if they're written in a non-chat format.

>I've been a gamer for 31 years
>I am a roleplay virgin

Probably vidya.

Pretty misleading to say you're a "gamer for 31 years" when it's a site dedicated to RPGs, almost as if it could easily be confused. (Only massive tools call themselves "gamers" though)

They use that cringy shit all the time with 'only true gamers will know'. I will beat my child viciously if he ends up like that.

All of this seems completely fine. A somewhat inexperienced player with a positive attitude, B+, would game with.

It took me a few times but I have found a great Only War group on roll20. Pretty solid. Into RP, pre-planned combats last damn near half a session and happen every other/every three sessions. Very fun.

I've now come to realize that the only successful, ongoing Roll20 game I've played outside a few nice one-shots is a game I was personally invited to by a friend I already knew to a group that already had been around for a while and wasn't taking outside applications, which probably speaks a lot to the quality of the randos on the site

Not him, but the asshat does in fact play there, he still posts here too, had a huge autism streak last week.
He has a Tumblr and reposts his "wisdom" for the landwhales to see.

Who the hell dreams of being a gynecologist though?

It wouldn't surprise me, I've dreamed about becoming an anesthesiologist, but never followed through.

The warning sign (yellow flag?) is that he's probably in his 40s.
>gamer for 31 years
>minimum age to really be playing games is about 7, but more likely 10 when he could start understanding them
>on the plus side, his first game could have been Gauntlet or Bard's Tale

If you've never dealt with old men on the internet, they tend to be a bit odd. At best, they're some Papa user type who've read too many books and wanted someone to talk to, even though they usually just end up going on a monologue in VOIP. At worst, they spend thousands of dollars on a single video game, then justify the waste by comparing total spent versus time played, then comparing their current $1/hr cost to the $1.25/hr they were going through in the arcades of their youth.

I give it a C for Caution. Would game with, but would want to vet the guy more if possible. He could be one of those assholes with a $300 Magic deck, or an army of five Knights/Riptides plus the new eldar list he's collecting.

Oh wait.
>I'm 34
Never mind.

I just use roll20 for games with friends that are too far away for in-person games. I was blissfully unaware of everyone else who used it.

Was.

Link to Tumblr? I'm new to Veeky Forums, so Virt's like a mythical autistic creature to me.

>rules-lawyer kitsune fetishists
those are the guys who try to turn the game into rules lite erp and curse at the gm when he corrects them on anything.

cant really be a rules-lawyer when you barely know the rules.

virtualoptim.tumblr.com/

"enjoy"

Welcome to hell newfriend, just google search "Virtualoptim, " should be the first result.

Almost forget, he has a youtube channel as well, not sure if he still uploads anything, but goddamn.
youtube.com/channel/UCeTAzGS_0VSIbHh8i5fhKxQ

Roll20's community is a massive fucking shitpile.

On the other hand, you can look at a player's profile and see what they've done, and immediately see if they're a titanic sperg.

If you plan to GM for randoms on roll20, there's some things you can do to filter out both the weirdos and the flakes to a reasonable degree.

Additionally, the more obscure systems tend to have better players from my experience.

Thank God he's on the other side of the pond. I'd hate to run into him in-game.

virtualoptim.tumblr, etc.

be advised, virt is somewhere between a genuine nutcase and a troll with Christian-Bale-in-The-Prestige-tier dedication to the character he's built himself into. He's also got a gift for typing something up that will hit all the right buttons to at once be biting with a ring to truth to it.

If I'm interpreting him right, a solid 95% of what he does is shitpost. The remaining 5% is accurate information, but crudely expressed and not as deep or profound as it seems. That doesn't make it wrong, however.

If you're familiar with The Angry GM, Virt is that, but more caustic and less intelligent.

Heh, I still remember his rant about his hatred of pdfs.

Poor college chad:
"Bro, sometimes a $50 handbook isn't worth it just for fun."
>Well get rich you stupid autistic gym rat
Richfag game store owner:
"Why give my gamers books when I can hand each of them a tablet? It's a hobby anyway."
>Get poorer so you can buy the fucking books asshole

Fuck no. You have a chance of finding a good D&D game on roll20 by virtue of sheer probability alone. I guarantee you it's nigh impossible to find any other decent game.

The best way to find a group on Roll20 is the Looking For Group listing. All games can be listed on it, and each listing comes with its own place for describing what the game is about and a forum for posting applications or whatever.

Recently I ran a game with about a page long game description and asked for contact info, schedule, and level of RPG experience in any applications.

50% of the people that posted applications clearly did not read what the game was about, so I threw them in the trash. 50% of the people with good applications that I contacted didn't make it past an interview (most often they vanished and stopped responding to me). Of those that played at least once, 5 out of 8 are still playing.

So, overall, I'd say that if you're content to burn through around 4 times more players than you expect to need, Roll20's community is serviceable. If you expect to be a player... well, you have less control, but I guess you can always leave shitty games.

(For comparison, half the people from Veeky Forums gamefinder disappeared during interviews, but everyone who played at least once has been playing ever since.)

Nah.
blog.roll20.net/post/143493281735/the-orr-group-industry-report-q1-2016
Looking through a list of 16302 games trying to find the 5% that's good is a far more difficult task than looking through the 39 Paranoia games being run looking for the two good ones

Moreover, the "95% is shit" assumption is going to break down once you start looking at small enough populations.

I can't imagine why no one has filled out this game's application...

Only red flags are
>Do things such as sex, rape, kink, and other such subjects bother you, even when handled maturely?
>The Specialist: The one who always plays a . Ninja and Drizzt clones are popular

Then again, the whole thing reads like an interview. Interviews can use leading questions such that the responder thinks he's among like-minded individuals when he's not, such that he drops something normally kept secret.
Or it could be the opposite, and the game is rape fetishists running around with Drizzt clones. It's impossible to tell.

Also, sex and kinks can be core to WoD. WoD itself is a warning sign honestly. Within that context, only the rape bit raised an eyebrow. Even though Drac could be counted as a rapist in a sense, that's still not territory worth threading outside of closed narratives like literature and film.

They are people who you would never want to hang out with in real life, much less play a game with. I wouldn't recommend using the gamefinder feature unless you have no other options and are willing to interview each potential player.

The gamefinder threads here aren't much better. While the individuals aren't that bad (I have only had one furry weaboo white supremacist try to join my game when it was listed) they are often going to be people who do not give a shit about your game, and will suddenbly stop showing up after a couple of sessions for no explained reason.

Never play RPGs with people who you would never hang out with in real life. If your actual buds aren't interested in RPGs, then you will have to take the dive into Roll20.

It's the Internet, so you have to sift thru the shit.

What we did was open a general setting room for One Shots. Those that weren't complete asshats got invited to a Skype group. From there we pull players for campaigns. From those campaigns we invite the good players to another Skype group and the GM's to another. It's only taken 3 years, but we now have a group of about 20 solid people and occasionally add another to the core group. Those 20 join other games and invite players and GMs they meet. Sometimes a turd or two leaks thru, but for the most part we keep the shitbirds at bay.

That's a fucking 1000+ word application process.

You don't ever need that much shit in an application. A GM will rarely get many people applying with one that long.

Bread and butter one is:
Name
Skype
Experience
Character concept

Making someone spend an hour filling out something that they will more than likely not get into is just retarded. Same with GM's that want a finished character for the application.

I think the red flag is the absurd length and detail. If you frontload all of your player-driven story game methods questions like that you're going to scare people off, even people who like WoD and that kind of collaborative acting space stuff.

>spent a year doing this instead of dropping it on day 1
>ended by ruining some poor mongoloid's game
>came to Veeky Forums thinking this was worth gloating about

This is why you're scraping the bottom of the barrel on Roll20

It's a bit over a page long. I've had longer applications to fill out for work.

Moreover, this is roll20 we're talking about. Failing to vet players properly means getting weirdos worse than what you'll find at a Magic tournament.
I have no doubt that the lengthy application is intended to scare off troublesome players. No one who takes the time to fill something like that out is going to flake out on you.

Vetting players is quicker with a voice chat. You can instantly figure out a lot about players with a few quick questions and just their general demeanor.

Quicker yes, but then you've got scheduling to work out, where paperwork means the player can apply and you can review the application both on your own time. Either method is valid.

Look, I don't know why people don't fill out front-loaded applications, but that's just what I've noticed. Most people will fill out a longer application overall if it's spaced out over multiple stages.

I think it's probably the same reason people would prefer to read more stuff broken up effectively by white space or pictures than less stuff that's just in a big block of text.

> I have no doubt that the lengthy application is intended to scare off troublesome players.

Absolutely. I don't doubt the purpose, and that it's a good one, I just doubt the format. People like being drip-fed things a lot more than they like a wall of text. You'll screen more players with a wall of text, sure, but you'll also screen more players you actually want in your game by mistake, I think.

I'm not advocating for less vetting (although some of these criteria are a little weird), I'm just saying he probably shouldn't do it all upfront.

The Exalted community in general is filled to the brim with ERPing That Guys.

>Vampire: The Masquerade
First red flag, which also happens to be the only one you will ever need. V:tM and related shit are pure cancer, even hardcore PF-only fags are more tolerable on average.

>Plagiarism of any sort will not ve tolerated.
Dude, it's fucking VtM, how can you not plagiarize something vampire related? Unless of course everyone is playing special snowflakes.

All the Veeky Forums memes about roll20 are completely irrelevant and stupid. People don't magically get access to a game. If you see someone you don't want in your game, you don't let them in and the problem's over before it began. If you are a player and don't like the people in a group, you don't play in that group. If you don't like a game, you don't play that fucking game. It's that easy.

I dinnae, I only play there with retards I knew previously.

From experience it's everyone who can't find a group to play with in real life because they've been kicked out of them all. Which considering the average quality of gamers you find IRL says a scarily awful lot.

Never again.

...

>the man, the myth, the fucking legend

Indeed.

And? I remember the days when you could find places where "Character concept" was a bare minimum 2000 words, and if you didn't break the 4000 word territory you were probably going to get passed off as lazy.

VTM is one of those games that should really only be played face to face with people you know. It doesn't help that most of the roll 20 gms are terrible and most players are edy mcdarkblades.

It's kinda sad that White Wolf roll20 games get such a horrible reputation since the first time I really wanted to try tabletop I got recommended Geist and really enjoyed the splat book.

>this is not the character you want to play!
>this is a test of how well you can create a character background

Why play games with a beefy rulebook if you can't even read a few sentences correctly?

Look up "projection" on wikipedia, user.

Also, the concept of a projectile weapon.

It's not just the roll20 games that have the negative reputation. Turns out, a system based on the idea of the players being the monsters of myth and legend, dropped into a modern setting where they partake in the seediest parts of the nightlife, is going to attract the weirdos.

I wish I could get a decent group for it
this man was my hero

Roll20 is great if you're playing online with friends.

The community on the other hand...

I understood what he meant immediately after I posted, it was a shame because I was hoping for the guy to give the story about how that guy managed to make an even more magical realm character.

>The best way to find a group on Roll20 is the Looking For Group listing.

Well in my defense I obviously didn't know how a campaign is supposed to look like before I got some experience. I thought suck and self-depreciacion were part of the deal, like metal or goth music.

Imagine you put up a poster advertising a game

Imagine you then have to sort through 30 chucklefucks and autists to find maybe one good player, two if you are extremely lucky.

I run a game on there, mostly with people I knew before it even went live, and I have ventured into the LFG but once. I found one decent player and I still get messages to this day from a pony-loving sperglord rules lawyer who won't leave me alone no matter how often I tell him to stop messaging me.

Not really. All Exalted communities are basically people attempting to play out their ERP power fantasies. It's kind of what the system was designed for, even.

Remember when White Wolf published a book of erotica with prominent characters from the Vampire metaplot?

These are the "normal" admins of Roll20... yea.

Luckily, for my game, I posted looking for players on Veeky Forums. Out of the six players I got, two were autostart who either flaked out day 1 (how do you misread a time zone? )or flaked at appropriate times (player of an put of theme cowardly character actually flaked out at a pivotal big hero moment in game. Coincidence? )

GrimWyrd has been hella-fun GURPS goodness the entire 6 months I've been running it.

Imagine chat roulette but instead of finding people instantly spamming or jacking off, you first join a game with them, spend time making a character, and find them jerking off hours later and realizing how much time you wasted.

>Reading about all this shit

I must have gotten really lucky then, cause my players are a great bunch of guys. While we all have our flaws (and who doesn't), none of them are even within spitting distance of this behavior. The closest I think is one of players has only played "slightly quirky" girl characters, but it's not a big problem.

You really shouldn't worry too much, it will take time to find people that really fit the game, and aren't psychopaths in disguise. I had to kick a few people myself before I found myself with the lads I have today. Just keep your wits about you, and try not to assume everyone and everything is shit.

But that's Veeky Forums user.