First, let's rule out things that are not good ways to have the players cater to the GM. We don't want submissive drones who follow our stories exactly as imagined--that robs the players of agency, and it makes stories more boring without the element of surprise. We also don't want players who don't push boundaries narratively or within roleplay. As often as it might complicate GMing, the most beautiful moments in a game comes from players who are going beyond the obvious steps of a story. And we also don't want players who do and say what they think the GM wants--that removes the personality and agency of the player characters, reducing them to shadows of themselves.
Instead, we're going to investigate the strategy of choosing players who will naturally fit with your GM style, and that means knowing what to look for in a player. This is, however, a complicated matter. What you do as a GM informs the kind of players you'll want to look for. That means that there's a broad answer for everyone as well as a more personal answer for each GM. Let's review them together.
Firstly, your player should approach the game with the same emphasis you do. If you are running a silly antics game, you want players who enjoy and play along with silly antics campaigns. The same goes for a combat focus--if you want to offer strategic challenges and tough combat, you'd be best served by players itching for a fight. And if like me, you're looking for storytelling and roleplaying, you want players who are looking for the same thing. This may sound obvious, but I can't tell you how many times I've had player/tone mismatches in my games and games I've been around--if you just want to hang out with friends, this idea might matter less to you, but if you're looking to maximize your tabletop game experience, you need to be able to maintain style across the group.
This is a hard lesson to learn, to be honest. I think we have to divide things: these campaigns are for hanging out with friends (if that's something you enjoy), and these campaigns are for getting the most out of the game (if that's something you enjoy). If you enjoy both, the division is necessary, or else you end up with a strong possibility of being let down by your experience--let me tell you about my experience with that.
Many years ago now, I ran a Western-themed campaign on a little desert island. The setting was like a child to me--I'd painstakingly mapped a dozen cities and the sprawling island, I'd developed NPCs and politics everywhere on the map, and I'd come up with a handful of storylines to offer my party. They opted for the silliest antics campaign I have ever been a part of. They were banned from almost every town. They committed almost every crime known to humanity while purporting to be a "good" party. They ignored (and sometimes mocked) so many things about my setting. It was, in a word, a nightmare.
The thing is, the party was my best friends at the time. It was a combination of old college friends and work buddies that got along great. Everybody came to play excited and left thrilled. Friendships were forged. It was socially an incredible game. But for me as the DM, the person responsible for guiding the game, I was always frustrated or overwhelmed. I learned a lesson from that. I needed to be more selective about parties when I was looking to maximize my game experience instead of socializing with friends.
After that, I was very careful about selecting players. The campaign that followed was initially composed of my three best work friends and my girlfriend at the time. But crucially, my three best work friends were intelligent, somewhat reserved and very thoughtful, and eager to try something a little experimental. My girlfriend at the time did not necessarily have those qualities, and our inevitable break-up ended her time in the campaign, leaving a party that learned to work within how I GM (lots of narration and roleplaying with radical player freedom). After that, I stuck with the same party, and with a good chemistry as a group and me with refined GM skills, our party was incredibly rewarding for me. I was spending time with friends, but the way we were spending our time was pushing the boundaries of our favorite games.
And that led me to a radical choice. For my most recent campaign, I cut a member of the trio I had been gaming with off and on for a decade. We're still friends--I attended his wedding not that long ago--so it wasn't a social factor. It was a gaming factor. This player, who we'll call Wilkes, was and remains a terrific improviser. Few can out-roleplay Wilkes, and he's always able to add a poignant note here and there. But the thing about Wilkes was that he was very competitive. He would bully NPCs. He would powergame, destroying a lot of narrative moments with (admittedly clever) solutions, frequently derived from metagaming knowledge. And he would challenge me as the GM, deliberately throwing difficult situations at me with a wry smile. It didn't ruin my experience, but it definitely deflated my enjoyment a bit.
Deciding what to do was hard. On the one hand, Wilkes had been a close friend for a decade. We'd played some of the gaming I'm most proud of together. The trio Wilkes was a part of had been playing with me for a long time. On the other, Wilkes was making me enjoy the game less and especially making it harder for me to do what I wanted to do, what I needed to do, and what I enjoy. And for campaigns meant to entertain a group of players, I have always excused those things because I make player fun a priority over my own. But what I had planned next--Of Gods and Dragons--was not an average campaign meant to entertain; it was my attempt to at once experiment with the scope of my storytelling while also exploring the most arcane of lore in my homebrew setting.
When it came time to pick a party for this campaign, I reflected. Wilkes posed problems in that powergaming, metagaming, and GM opposition would be very serious problems with what I had planned. I chose to move forward with the other two members of the party, who would become Brokk and Lethanin because I felt I had no reason to change what had been a historically fruitful and harmonious gaming relationship until then with them. For my third, I picked the woman who is now my wife. She is brilliant, creative, highly experienced with tabletop games, strategic while respecting the story and world, and generally an exciting player to watch, evidenced nowhere better than in her work as Aurora. I chose as carefully as I knew how, and the result is something I couldn't have been happier with.
And the thing of all that is that I didn't chose to play without being with friends. The players of Brokk and Lethanin are my real life best friends who I happened to find I have good tabletop game chemistry with. I hope it goes without saying that I enjoy spending time with my wife, especially since she's learned to play my individual style of game. I got the best of both worlds, and so can you.
So you've chosen your broad style: are you a storytelling, roleplaying GM with a world to explore; are you a strategic, tactical GM whose enemies are fearsome; or are you a GM who wants to laugh with your friends, using tabletop games as a way to hang out? Knowing this is really the first step, but it can be taken further. Let's further define the storytelling, roleplaying GM archetype. Within it are storytellers who focus on story, roleplayers whose acting and improv is the star of the show, worldbuilders whose creations take center stage, or combinations of these. And we can go further still. Our storyteller might present open prompts and respond to player action; they might guide player action through the world; they might railroad their players along a storyline; they may balance these in some way. Only now are we getting a really clear picture of an individual GM. I describe myself (as I did above) as a storyteller, specifically with lots of narration and roleplaying with radical player freedom. This is what a game at my table looks like: I am going to be describing NPCs and the world, I am going to be roleplaying as NPCs, and I am otherwise sitting back and letting the players lead.
And that's a style that some people don't like. Some people don't seem to understand it. Some people think I'm not really playing tabletop games so much as adding dice to a collaborative story. All of that is fair. And knowing that people don't like it helps me. When I meet someone who says they play tabletop games, I ask them to tell me about their favorite moment from their experience. This question tells you a lot. I really struggle to connect to the combat style of play, and when I'm talking to someone who describes a cool battle moment as their favorite, I know I am unlikely to appreciate a game in the same way as them. So now I get to avoid playing with them and having a bad experience.
There are other ways to gauge how people will fit into your style before you play with them. Ask them what they're looking for in a campaign. It's always okay to say that you have something already planned that doesn't really incorporate that style. Describe your ideas for campaigns or ideas about how tabletop games are played and see how people respond. You may get some opposition or polite dismissal, but the people who agree with you will be great gaming partners. And one tactic that has worked for me is directly asking players what they do and don't like as a player. If their don't list sounds like what I do, I accept it's a bad match and move on; if we sound compatible, I have a new player.
Of course, all of the screening in the world will not prevent a surprise in a group of players. Wilkes was someone who was great on paper and whose only trespass was not fitting the tone of an experimental project, but screening didn't catch him. I've played campaigns with significant others who brought down the game before, and my judgment was too biased to meaningfully screen her. Someone can always be agreeable when spoken to and quite different at the table. There are no guarantees you can find the perfect candidate every time. You do eventually have to give people a try to know how it will go.
While GMing, watch the player in question. How do they respond to your GMing? Are they connecting with you/the story/the party? Do you enjoy the things they do? These questions are not meant to judge the player as a person--by no means is this a reflection on the individual. But the point of tabletop games is to have fun, and you the GM deserve that fun, and if a player is deflating your fun, you can do something about it.
Cutting a player loose is hard. It's a messy thing, and it never plays out well. I suggest starting with an intro session to most campaigns--if you use one, you can get rid of a bad fit before the party ever meets. By a similar token, you can play a one-shot or briefer campaign to get a sense of a player and how they fit in with the rest of the group before plunging into a longer campaign with an unknown.
Once, when I ran my western campaign, a player showed up with a complete stranger to me who he insisted was also going to be in the campaign. I don't think he realized that this would likely take a year or longer, and I later came to believe that he didn't really know the stranger well either. The stranger, who I'll call Leif, turned out to make everyone else pretty uncomfortable. Down moments were filled with rants (often political), NPCs were irrationally slain, and conversation was not relaxed around the table. I felt awkward cutting Leif off--he told me every week that it was the high point of his week, and he was obviously lonely. In the end, I don't know what would have been for the best, or if there was a "best" in this case. But I do know that if I had run an intro session or a one-shot first, I would have had a chance to nip this in the bud.
You may be saying, "this all sounds pretty mercenary. You're just cutting players off because you don't like them?" And yes and no is my response. Yes, I am deliberately choosing to include or not include the people who exist in my leisure activities and hobbies. And no, it's not because I don't like them. As I said about, Wilkes is still a close friend, and I have no ill will or judgment for Leif. But when I was honest with myself, my enjoyment of the game would improve with a different arrangement, and I have a right to pursue that.
So what do I look for in a player?
I like players who have some kind of intelligence. It can be knowledge or wisdom or cleverness or whatever breed it takes on in the individual. I am myself a pretty intelligent person who likes telling complicated, nuanced stories, and I want my players to be able to appreciate everything that's going on and be able to respond in a meaningful way. It also helps that I tend to get along best with intelligent people, so the social component of the game is helped in this way too.
I also want a player who's willing to experiment a bit. Every major campaign I've ever run has ended up being in experiment in something--an experiment in following a party split to a massive conclusion, experiments in how the game is written, experiments in what the player experience is like--and not every player wants that. I've played with a lot of people who want a traditional experience (and there's nothing wrong with that) who would not enjoy my experiments. We need to be on the same page. Speaking of which . . .
I need my players to be willing and able to roleplay and lead the game at times. This can be sticky for some players. Not everyone wants to roleplay a story when there's faeries and dragons and magic and adventure to explore and meet and slay. Not everyone wants to (or is able to) lead a scene with improvisation in a way that feels satisfying. I'm asking a high level of performance from my players, and that can be a complicated thing. I don't want anyone to walk away frustrated, so I choose players who I think are up to the challenge of some complicated gaming.
The results speak for themselves. Of Gods and Dragons is, in my estimation, a work of art within the context of tabletop games. I gave three talented players (two of whom knew my world quite well) free rein to change my world as they pleased. Over the course of the campaign and the three epilogues we did covering 100 years of post-campaign life for Brokk, Aurora, and Lethanin, my players systematically set about improving my homebrew world. They eliminated sources of violence and oppression, they established themselves as forces of good, and they systematically improved life for common people. Those epilogues are collectively about 50 pages of text, and most of it is directly focused on being selfless and heroic. I set out to see what happened when I gave massive control to my players, and they wrote a love letter to my world. I never would have gotten that response--the love from my players and the satisfaction that I did something interesting--with the group that destroyed my Western setting. I needed to pick the right group to get what I was looking for.
This is, of course, all a spectrum. You're not going to go out and recruit pro gamers you don't know. Tabletop games are games, and the point of games is to have fun--we should be playing with people we like. But we also want to aim for the middle of the Venn diagram on this--people who we like who also fit our style as GMs. That's not a radical thing to ask for, especially when we consider GM satisfaction, which matters.
At the end of the day, it's all abstract anyway. How you enjoy something in concert with someone else when you're both adding creative ideas to a collective--that's a delicate thing. Creative groups like bands break up over stuff like that all the time. If it doesn't feel right, don't feel obligated to keep doing it. Keep the mantra in mind: this is for fun. This is for fun. Pick yourself a good party, and I promise you'll see it's worth the effort in being selective.
That's all for now. Coming soon: how to design and improvise NPCs and groups of NPCs, a guide to the planes, and what perfect GMing looks like. Until next time, happy gaming!
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