Creating an RPG group
The vision, the hope, and the reality.

You’ve been struck with inspiration! A world has unfurled beneath your fingertips! A fantastic realm rich with wonders, within which your god-mind will weave the greatest tales ever told! Now to find a group of players who will appreciate your creation, rather than swiftly subverting and perverting it until it becomes an abomination too loathsome for you to ever look at again.

Step 1: Create a campaign.
Step 2: Pitch the campaign concept
Step 3: Put together a party
Step 4: Collaborate and compromise

You are the creator. The initial inspiration, setting and core campaign concepts are yours. It may not appeal to everyone, but that’s okay. Find the players who it will appeal to.

Pitch your concept clearly, making sure to minimize potential misunderstanding. You may decide that advertising a mature adult game may cut down on incessant Monty Python and Princess Bride quotes. But you may need to be more specific, to avoid finding yourself with a slobber-grampus eagerly nudging an erotic rules supplement across the table toward you with its sex flippers.

You may have a network of gamer friends already. If not, then local stores. Or at the very least, the internet, with resources like Meetup or NearbyGamers for finding suitable local players. If you’re lamenting the lack of local players because you live in East Bufu and your nearest neighbor is thirty miles away lurking in a fallout shelter, that’s probably your own fault. Play online.

It’s unlikely that you’ll ever form the ideal group. (My ideal group would consist of players currently on two continents, in three different countries and time zones, and separated by about six thousand miles.) But you can still build a successful group. Vet your players. Get to know their gaming styles, quirks and expectations. Run one-shot modules to recruit suitable players before committing to the campaign.

You can’t tailor the campaign to suit everyone perfectly. But you can use player input to give yourself the best chance possible. Consider using a questionnaire to chart player preferences:

Campaign Preferences:
Atmosphere: 1 (Comic) – 10 (Dark)
Difficulty: 1 (Easy) – 10 (Hard)
Combat: 1 (Infrequent) – 10 (Frequent)
Rewards: 1 (Scarce) – 10 (Plentiful)
Advancement Pace: 1 (Crawl) – 10 (Swift)
Inversely:
Role-playing: 1 (Involved) – 10 (Functional)
Plot: 1 (Complex) – 10 (Linear)

Other factors worth considering include terrain preferences, technology level, magic rarity, and the balance between static home base-building and broader travel and exploration. But it’s okay if some of these are integral, non-negotiable aspects of the original campaign pitch. If a player agrees to your Arthurian setting but then wants an airship and an arquebus, you can say no. You don’t even need to be polite about it. Tell Guinevere to pack those gears and goggles away or GTFO.