Uncommon Preferences & Finding Your Group

[Micah Sweet]

When I read the OP, you popped to mind - I expect your taste for simulationism probably qualifies.

You're probably right. I find the best way to find players that suit your tastes is to make them. Provide a good introduction to your interests, focusing on the positives without ignoring the negatives. It helps if you'd rather be the GM than the player anyway. It also helps if you're willing to be flexible in practice and engage with their preferences sometimes as well. Most folks in my experience are willing to return the favor.

 

[Pedantic]

I should expand further about what I actually do like: my preferred kind of gameplay is presenting a difficult, open-ended situation (ideally several such nested situations, maybe starting at a strategic or political level, and narrowing down to a tactical scope) and then letting players with discrete, specific abilities find some way to string those together to find a way through it. My ideal game is essentially repeated heist planning, with the occasional mistake calling for improvisation during execution.

My players mostly like picking a character game and then playing it repeatedly. They want a variety of environments and situations in which to showcase the thing that their little guy does.

 

[GrimCo]

My tastes run to shorter campaigns, 8 to 12 weeks, not multi-year epics.
I like PCs to be heroes from the start.
I like steady small advancement.
And I still need to have a group where everyone can stand each other.

More or less this.

6-10, max 12 sessions and done. With scheduling conflicts, those 12 sessions can and do strech to 6-8 months of irl time.
Not heroes necessary, but at least capable enough. I also prefer horizontal growth, not only vertical.

I'll run mostly R rated games, and i prefer more grayscale morality and antiheroes or flawed heroes than boyscouts.

Also, i don't play or run games online. In person only, so regular use of water, soap and deodorant is condicio sine qua non (unfortunately, i played with some people who have let's say irregular hygienic habits). And since we are playing in person, there needs to be friendly vibe and some friendly chemistry between people in the group. They need to be people i want to genuinely hang out.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Whether a person has common preferences (say, wants to run D&D) or uncommon (wants to only be a part of GM-less games), I think the key to getting a solid gaming group is persistence. It took me years to form two stable gaming groups that have good players that get along with each other and consistently show up. Along the road, people left the group, or got booted. Sometimes I got frustrated. But I kept going through it all. I kept running my games according to schedule, without fail (unless I was sick or on vacation).