Getting game groups and keeping them

[Kyle Aaron]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I don't know where you folks find all those astonishingly bad roleplayers.

We're just lucky:)

This was a thread over at rpg.net, but it kinda tanked there, and Stoddard's comment made me think of it, so I'll give it a go here.

As I see it, the number one problem for a gamer is getting a decent game group and keeping it. Just as the number one problem for a person wanting to get fit is to get up and exercise every day, and the number one problem of the workplace is getting a job and keeping it... if that's achieved, then, and only then, can you look at other problems. A lot of talk about gaming or exercise or work has lots of good advice for what to do once you get going... but they don't tell you how to get going. To my mind, that's stupid - it's like getting driving lessons when you don't know how to start the car!


Who can you recruit?

Okay, so, recruiting gamers... as I see it, there are four types of people you can drag into your roleplaying game sessions,

• Active gamers - we'll just call these people Oldies
• Old gamers who stopped for a bit, but you bring 'em back in - we'll call these Retreads
• New gamers, people who've never gamed before, and will probably like it - we'll call these Newbies
• New gamers who think the whole thing is awful, but you persuaded them somehow - we'll call these Lost Causes

Who should you recruit?

Now, those are your four basic types of people with regard to getting them into your group. But gamers are like girlfriends and boyfriends. It's easier to get them than to keep them. How do you keep 'em? Well, you need two basic things,[list][*]They must like the people in the group, or at least not mind them.[*]They must like the game you're playing, or at least not mind it.[/list

There's quite a bit to discuss here. The first thing to mention is that when most gamers think of starting a new group, they usually focus on the Oldies. So they put a notice up at a game store, or in a forum like this. By doing that, they miss out on Newbies and Retreads. They'll get a few Retreads sometimes as Rretreads get nostalgic and occasionally wander into game stores and online forums... but mostly they miss 'em entirely.

Sometimes the lonely gamer, finding not enough Oldiers, focuses on a Lost Cause. The Gaming Spouse is the classic example of this - the boyfriend or girlfriend who really isn't interested but came along just to be polite.

So our lonely gamer is putting their effort where effort's not needed (you need very little effort to recruit Oldies), or where it's futile (Lost Cause is a lost cause, mate, sorry...). Far better to put your effort into Newbies and Retreads. I can go on at great length about how to do that, but I'd like to see other suggestions in the thread, too.

Now we come to the second bunch of things you want - that the players should like your group, and your game. This is another place people fall down a bit, I think. People get used to their little groups, and can be reluctant to try new groups. I think that this is a social and psychological question, and probably a bit too much for this thread. We should probably set it aside... Basically, some people like trying new games and groups, and some don't... perhaps an extroverted vs introverted thing? Anyway, probably more of a General Chatter topic.

And people get used to their little games, too...

I see two basic kinds of problems in terms of the game putting people off. One is that the game is perceived as childish (D&D, Hackmaster, Paranoia, etc sometimes get this reputation), the other that the game is perceived as elite or weird or obscure (Dogs in the Vineyard, Tekumel, Ars Magica, often have such a reputation).

The first one I'm not sure what we can do about. The second one has been discussed in the rpg.net forums before, because of a Tekumel game, Getting players for "difficult" settings. It didn't go really far but there's still plenty of useful stuff in there.

Okay, aside from my posting up the back 1/3 of d4-d4 here, I'm not sure what else I can say. This is me raising the questions, I'm interested to see what answers other people have come up with...

Your thoughts? Where did you find your astonishingly bad roleplayers, and did it differ from where you found your good and okay roleplayers?

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Jim Bob

Okay, so, recruiting gamers... as I see it, there are four types of people you can drag into your roleplaying game sessions,

• Active gamers - we'll just call these people Oldies
• Old gamers who stopped for a bit, but you bring 'em back in - we'll call these Retreads
• New gamers, people who've never gamed before, and will probably like it - we'll call these Newbies
• New gamers who think the whole thing is awful, but you persuaded them somehow - we'll call these Lost Causes

This set of categories seems well thought out, though I think some of my new recruits have been kind of marginal. There were people who had gamed before, a little, long, long ago, but had given it up so thoroughly that they might as well have never done it at all. And there were people who were brought into my campaigns by their significant others, who were introducing them to gaming, but in whom it actually took. They seem to be sort of marginal in between your categories.

But I think you're right about focusing efforts on Retreads and Newbies. When I initiate bringing someone in, it's been in those categories, and it's worked well for me.

The one thing I question is your focus on getting people who will fit well into a group. If you're recruiting Retreads and Newbies, you don't need to have a group for them to fit into. You can invite people who know each other in some other way and get along, or who you think might like each other, and maybe add a couple of Oldies for spice, without bringing along all the baggage of a whole group of Oldies.

Your thoughts? Where did you find your astonishingly bad roleplayers, and did it differ from where you found your good and okay roleplayers?

I had one couple who were an Oldie and a Lost Cause. She did no roleplaying at all. Then they both stopped showing up, and ignored my e-mails. He hadn't gamed with me before, and he kind of pleaded; I think he was getting a bit desperate to find anyone who would game with him.

I had one Oldie who became persona non grata after repeated clashes with other players; basically, if his character was in a group or team situation and the team leader was played by a woman, he would be a pain in the rear—I saw this happen twice. Now most of my women players, and some of the men, won't game with him.

[Kyle Aaron]

Firstly, a response to one of whswhs' comments in the Cross-Gender Characters thread, which comment and response fits better here,

Originally Posted by whswhs

I'm not sure that I recognize the concept of a good player who is a bad roleplayer, at least in the kind of games I run. What are you doing other than roleplaying that is sufficiently important in your games to compensate for that lack?

The distinction I make between good "roleplaying," and good "playing" is this:

• A good player is someone who contributes to the fun of the group, the other players. They show up on time, bring munchies, are friendly and polite, give people a laugh and don't hog the spotlight, etc.
• A good roleplayer is someone who, you know what traits their character has without looking at their sheet. A good roleplayer shouldn't have to tell you their character is Honest, a Coward, and so on. Of course, this doesn't apply to things like high strength, etc...

It's quite possible to be good at one and bad at the other.

For example, a character has the GURPS Disadvantage, "Loner." The player has the character walk away from the group, and refuse to join in the events of the adventure. That person is a good roleplayer, since they're clear about their character's role. But they're a bad player, because one of three things then happens: the group of characters has to do without their input, or they have to spend their time chasing after the Loner to bring them back, or the GM has to step aside with the player of the Loner to roleplay their separate adventure, while everyone else sits waiting doing nothing. Good roleplayer, bad player.

Or you could have someone who always shows up on time, brings lots of munchies and shares them, knows the rules and setting and helps newbies create characters, gives everyone a laugh, helps clean up after themselves... but their characters are boring and lifeless, nothing more than a sword or spellbook with legs. Bad roleplayer, good player.

So when getting a game group and trying to keep it, obviously it's ideal that everyone is a good roleplayer and a good player both. But if you have to choose, you'll choose a good player/bad roleplayer over a bad player/good roleplayer - because you have to spend hours with these people, so you don't want to have to strangle anyone!;)

Game books never talk about it (except mine, of course!), but this is why you should know new players, or get to know them. To find out if they're going to be a good player. In the end, roleplaying games are just a bunch of rules for sitting around telling tall stories - it's a social activity. It has to be people you can get along with. It's obvious when you say it, but let's face it, many of us haven't followed it, we've been so desperate for a game that we game with people we're not very keen on, or even who annoy us.

Whenever you have any character trait, the good player can be a good roleplayer, and still be true to that character trait. The guy with the Loner could say, "he's a Loner, so he walks away from the group" - good roleplayer, bad player. Or he could say, "he's a Loner, but he's lonely, too, and he's trying to overcome being a Loner" - ie, "I will spend earned CP to get rid of the trait," - "and anyway even when in the group he'll tend to hang back a bit from the group discussions, and if there's a chance of solo action, like scouting out a rooftop or researching in a library, he'll volunteer for it" - good roleplaying, and good playing, too.

The same goes for adventure, too. I've often told people that the essence of roleplaying is to have adventures. I say, "you know how in the horror movies, you sit there saying to the screen, don't go back into the dark old house! Well, in a roleplaying game or movie, they always go back into the dark old house. Because otherwise there's no story."

You can interpret traits in a way which takes you towards the party and the adventure, or away from the party and the adventure. A good roleplayer will do whatever seems appropriate for their character; a good player will always have their character stick with the party and chase the adventure. A good player will always have their character go back into the dark old house.

It's an important distinction, player vs roleplayer, because it lets us focus on the things which to us and our game group make a "good player", instead of mixing it all up with the stuff which makes someone a "good roleplayer."

[Kyle Aaron]

Originally Posted by whswhs

But I think you're right about focusing efforts on Retreads and Newbies. When I initiate bringing someone in, it's been in those categories, and it's worked well for me.

I've found this, too. And like you, many haven't fit neatly into the categories. Just think of it as like one of those political or personality tests - if you try to fit the enormous diversity of human personality and affect into four or sixteen categories, you're going to get some dodgy results. It's just a first-glance approximation. Just intended to point out that many gamers, when trying to recruit, put their efforts into areas which are either futile (Lost Causes) or which don't really require much effort (Oldies).

I think gamers do this because often they're shy, and lazy. I don't mean that as a "oh no, they're terrible people!" I just mean, normally shy and lazy. To find Retreads you have to be willing to talk to people at work and parties and among non-gaming friends of yours about your gaming hobby - it's amazing how often someone will say, "oh yeah, I roleplayed a few times, that was fun." But you never expect it. And to get someone who knows nothing about gaming, but who's had similar interests (like Myst, or Choose Your Own Adventure books, or scifi and fantasy tv series), and tell them all about gaming, it's hard work. You have to have quite some confidence and willpower. Much less of a challenge going for the Oldies and Lost Causes.

The one thing I question is your focus on getting people who will fit well into a group.

That's because, as we've noted upthread, you've had less experience with godawful players and roleplayers. Many of us have met some really dreadful roleplayers, and dreadful players. Part of being lazy and shy, at just a normal everyday level of laziness and shyness, is that you're scared of meeting some complete lunatic or dork, and then getting stuck with them. Easier to just get the Oldies and Lost Causes - the Lost Cause, remember, usually being some spouse or friend... "at least I know he's not a loon..."

I also mention getting people who'll fit well together because many people when forming a group simply don't think of it. "They all like D&D, so they'll all get along fine!" Well, maybe, maybe not. When I was a kid I had this idea that if you were basically nice to people, they'd all like you, and if you were nasty to them, they'd all hate you. Then of course I grew up and found that someone people will like or dislike you regardless of how nice or nasty you are to them;) Ain't no accountin' for taste, and all that. That doesn't mean I think these people are childish. It's just that if you don't really think about something or discuss it, you have these unconscious assumptions in your head which you follow. Naivete. "They all like D&D, so they'll all get along fine!"

Again, it's the kind of stuff that's obvious once you say it, but which you wouldn't necessarily think of yourself. Like when I first realised D&D wasn't a realistic system... my first girlfriend was playing a barbarian slaying an umberhulk, he struck a blow on her, then her next blow did one hit point's damage and he dropped. "He had just 1HP left and he still hurt me bad? How?" Of course, nothing in the rules said otherwise... it'd never occurred to me to question them until she did:) "That's obvious! Um, now that you said it..."

If you're recruiting Retreads and Newbies, you don't need to have a group for them to fit into. You can invite people who know each other in some other way and get along, or who you think might like each other, and maybe add a couple of Oldies for spice, without bringing along all the baggage of a whole group of Oldies.

Certainly. But I think that many gamers grew up with D&D, and with the ideas of gaming presented there. I mean that gamers often dream of having a Grand Epic Campaign which goes from 1st to 20th level, with the same players and the same GM and the same characters, once a week, every week except Christmas and Easter, for ten years. Many games are designed with this type of play in mind, an open-ended campaign which in principle may never end. That's what a lot of gamers dream of.

So they search for that, and that's another reason they focus on Oldies. "A Newbie, who knows if they'll stay, they might not like it after a while. And a Retread, well, she left gaming once, she might again! But that Oldie, wow, look at his gaming book collection, that's a guy who's going to still be at the table eight years from now, I mean he carries his dice with him everywhere he goes..."

I should note here that it's one thing I've picked up from you, whswhs, the notion of closed-ended campaigns. It's an impression I've got - probably wrong, but there you go - that you've planned them for X sessions, and that's that. I think that's very good, because many groups, hoping for the Grand Epic Campaign, are planned as open-ended, and often they fizzle out as players lose interest, getting interested in some other setting, or the group breaks up when someone moves town, etc. So players are left unsatisfied, like a tv show they liked cancelled in mid-season.

In practice, the Grand Epic Campaign is pretty rare and unusual. More common is setting the GEC up, then it tanks after a few sessions because someone doesn't like someone or stops showing up or buys a new book and wants to run a different game. It's why I designed my own game specifically to work well for 1-12 sessions, which I've found is all many gamers get out of a particular campaign. The other approach is to simply plan the campaign to be closed-ended. "When this happens, the campaign will be over, but the group will stay together and we'll play something else." (push Prospectus forward on the table).

I had one couple who were an Oldie and a Lost Cause. She did no roleplaying at all. Then they both stopped showing up, and ignored my e-mails.

I had a couple like that, whom I've mentioned before on these boards. The bloke who wanted to run the game by committee, everything had to be discussed... I like to think of GMs as like old Captain Picard... ask everyone what they think, then make your decision based on their comments, and stick to that decision.

I had one Oldie who became persona non grata after repeated clashes with other players

I've had plenty of those guys:) Sometimes, I've found myself becoming that guy, so I just left the group to save them the trouble.

But HEY! This is me giving answers. This thread was meant to be me getting answers. So, what does everyone have to say about getting a good game group, and keeping it? What did you do that found you good people, and was it different to what found you bad people?

[Toadkiller_Dog]

Originally Posted by Jim Bob

• A good player is someone who contributes to the fun of the group, the other players. They show up on time, bring munchies, are friendly and polite, give people a laugh and don't hog the spotlight, etc.
• A good roleplayer is someone who, you know what traits their character has without looking at their sheet. A good roleplayer shouldn't have to tell you their character is Honest, a Coward, and so on. Of course, this doesn't apply to things like high strength, etc...

It's quite possible to be good at one and bad at the other.

I think this is a good distinction. I'd always take the good player over the good roleplayer. I'd rather have my current group - a mixed bag of good roleplayers and not so good ones, but all good players - than add a few more good roleplayers that just aren't such great people. It's no mistake that I invite my gamers to nearly ALL of my social occasions. They're my close friends so I game with them because that's what I like to do.

I think that's almost like the cardinal rule for getting game groups and keeping them - game with your friends, not with gamers. If you can't describe someone as your friend, why are you spending your leisure time with them? I think you can have activities where not everyone is a friend but I don't think gaming is one of them.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Jim Bob

Firstly, a response to one of whswhs' comments in the Cross-Gender Characters thread, which comment and response fits better here,

The distinction I make between good "roleplaying," and good "playing" is this:

• A good player is someone who contributes to the fun of the group, the other players. They show up on time, bring munchies, are friendly and polite, give people a laugh and don't hog the spotlight, etc.
• A good roleplayer is someone who, you know what traits their character has without looking at their sheet. A good roleplayer shouldn't have to tell you their character is Honest, a Coward, and so on. Of course, this doesn't apply to things like high strength, etc...

It's quite possible to be good at one and bad at the other.

Okay, I see that distinction.

For example, a character has the GURPS Disadvantage, "Loner." The player has the character walk away from the group, and refuse to join in the events of the adventure. That person is a good roleplayer, since they're clear about their character's role. But they're a bad player, because one of three things then happens: the group of characters has to do without their input, or they have to spend their time chasing after the Loner to bring them back, or the GM has to step aside with the player of the Loner to roleplay their separate adventure, while everyone else sits waiting doing nothing. Good roleplayer, bad player.

There you're assuming things about the GM's play style that need not be true. My campaigns routinely include sequences where one or two PCs are off on their own, pursuing their own threads. Commonly enough they only all come together for the big focal events like major battles; I've run one campaign where this happened only in the final two episodes. So a Loner trait would not be that much of a problem. I'd just play out the Loner's separate activities in front of all the other players, and rely on their ability to keep player knowledge and character knowledge separate.

More generally, the way to deal with this sort of thing is to vet the character sheet before the first play session. If the campaign requires the PCs to do things as a team, the GM is within their rights to say, "You can't take Loner." Every campaign has a mission statement, and the characters have to be compatible with that mission statement.

So when getting a game group and trying to keep it, obviously it's ideal that everyone is a good roleplayer and a good player both. But if you have to choose, you'll choose a good player/bad roleplayer over a bad player/good roleplayer - because you have to spend hours with these people, so you don't want to have to strangle anyone!;)

Game books never talk about it (except mine, of course!), but this is why you should know new players, or get to know them. To find out if they're going to be a good player. In the end, roleplaying games are just a bunch of rules for sitting around telling tall stories - it's a social activity. It has to be people you can get along with. It's obvious when you say it, but let's face it, many of us haven't followed it, we've been so desperate for a game that we game with people we're not very keen on, or even who annoy us.

Whenever you have any character trait, the good player can be a good roleplayer, and still be true to that character trait. The guy with the Loner could say, "he's a Loner, so he walks away from the group" - good roleplayer, bad player. Or he could say, "he's a Loner, but he's lonely, too, and he's trying to overcome being a Loner" - ie, "I will spend earned CP to get rid of the trait," - "and anyway even when in the group he'll tend to hang back a bit from the group discussions, and if there's a chance of solo action, like scouting out a rooftop or researching in a library, he'll volunteer for it" - good roleplaying, and good playing, too.

It's an important distinction, player vs roleplayer, because it lets us focus on the things which to us and our game group make a "good player", instead of mixing it all up with the stuff which makes someone a "good roleplayer."

I don't think I would view it as a straightforward prioritization like that, though. In practice, I think there is a sufficiently low level on either trait so that I would not want to game with the person; but above that, there is a tradeoff, so that scoring high on either can somewhat compensate for scoring low on the other.

For example, one of the campaigns where I'm a player is a present-day supers game. One of the other players, introduced midway into the campaign, created a character who was a superhumanly accurate marksman, and fairly good in combat. But the player did no social interaction of his character with the other characters, paid little attention to what was happening outside of combat scenes, and sometimes literally left the room when the fight was over. I would never invite him into one of my games, because I consider him an active detriment to roleplaying: not only did he not roleplay, but he took up play time when the rest of us could have done so.

On the other hand, several of the players I won't invite back committed the offense of repeatedly not showing up for scheduled games, and not phoning or e-mailing to say that they couldn't make it, or, in some cases, responding to e-mailed queries or reminders.

The statement that gaming is a social activity is true, but incomplete. Gaming is a social activity in the same sense that going to an art museum is a social activity, or holding a book discussion group. You want people who have a serious commitment to doing whatever the activity is, not just people who come along to hang out with their friends. Compatibility is needed, but the common commitment to the activity itself can be a sufficient basis for the relationship.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Jim Bob

Certainly. But I think that many gamers grew up with D&D, and with the ideas of gaming presented there. I mean that gamers often dream of having a Grand Epic Campaign which goes from 1st to 20th level, with the same players and the same GM and the same characters, once a week, every week except Christmas and Easter, for ten years. Many games are designed with this type of play in mind, an open-ended campaign which in principle may never end. That's what a lot of gamers dream of.

So they search for that, and that's another reason they focus on Oldies. "A Newbie, who knows if they'll stay, they might not like it after a while. And a Retread, well, she left gaming once, she might again! But that Oldie, wow, look at his gaming book collection, that's a guy who's going to still be at the table eight years from now, I mean he carries his dice with him everywhere he goes..."

I should note here that it's one thing I've picked up from you, whswhs, the notion of closed-ended campaigns. It's an impression I've got - probably wrong, but there you go - that you've planned them for X sessions, and that's that. I think that's very good, because many groups, hoping for the Grand Epic Campaign, are planned as open-ended, and often they fizzle out as players lose interest, getting interested in some other setting, or the group breaks up when someone moves town, etc. So players are left unsatisfied, like a tv show they liked cancelled in mid-season.

In practice, the Grand Epic Campaign is pretty rare and unusual. More common is setting the GEC up, then it tanks after a few sessions because someone doesn't like someone or stops showing up or buys a new book and wants to run a different game. It's why I designed my own game specifically to work well for 1-12 sessions, which I've found is all many gamers get out of a particular campaign. The other approach is to simply plan the campaign to be closed-ended. "When this happens, the campaign will be over, but the group will stay together and we'll play something else." (push Prospectus forward on the table).

As a general rule, I plan to run a campaign for two years of monthly sessions, or 24 sessions. I'm making an exception this time around; after the first 12 sessions, I offered the players the option of extending into a third year, and they went for it. But I'm still not going on indefinitely—I never had any intention of doing that. Instead I have it in mind to build up to a big climactic storyline and stop when that's resolved. Sometimes the climax is inherent in the premise—for example, when I sent five British teenagers off to Faerie, the campaign logically ended when they got home again. But if not, I'll look for a good finish and run it.

A few months before that, I'll hand around the prospectus for the next round of campaigns. That gives me time to analyze which groups will work for which campaigns, set them up, and do the pre-session and the chargen, so that when the month after the end of the old campaigns shows up, we're ready to start the new ones.

One difference in my practice is that I don't bring together the same groups in the new campaigns. There can be a lot of swapping around. This last time, for example, not one of the three new campaigns had a majority of players from any one of the three previous campaigns. Players get to try a variety of premises and play styles, without being constrained by the preferences of the other players in their group.

[jdavidb]

Well, there's the approach I've discovered:

Marry someone who always dreamed of having a large family. Game with your spouse, and then game with your kids.

Phase II would be encourage your kids to plan large families also, and then one day you can game with your grandkids. Grandpa gets to be GM! :)

[yam]

For me this is not always that effective, but most of the time it works...

Networking. You know gamers, you play with them. A few at least will know other gamers that you don't know, and so on and so forth. When extra players are required just branch out.

It's a strategy with problems. Most gamers already have a group and aren't looking for another one, since they've got a lot of stuff going on. Maybe some one here or there knows a retread, so that works sometimes.

Newbies and lost causes are difficult for me to seperate out at first. I know lots of people who have never roleplayed, and I tell them what I'm doing on Sunday (which always comes down to "have you ever played dungeons and dragons.... mergh....") and occasionally I'll tell a funny story or whatever to conclude, and after hearing about dragons and light sabers and pirates and rednecks in space for a while some people want to try it out.

And then there's the girlfriends. Somehow or other all of them enjoyed the games I ran, although they don't stick around after the breakup usually.

As far as GECs, mostly I run a game that's been going on since 1994 when my friends and I started high school. Players come and go, everyone has had multiple characters, there was a few years when we didn't play at all, but it's gone from 100 pts 3e to 500-1000 pts (god was I surprised when I totalled up one of my player's characters the other day .... 1000 pts! damn, I thought they were all under 800.) in 4e. I find that losing players and gaining new ones is never much of a problem, since I try to give every character their own subplot, and as long as there's always 3-6 fairly regulars, it works fine.

I am willing to have characters seperate and run 'storytelling' style solo-quests where the rules step out for a while and me and a player will just make up a story about the intervening events. Works great when someone has to miss a few adventures.

Even seperating up during adventures is common, we just go around the table and do a few seconds/minutes/hours whatever per character, then go to the next.

[Kyle Aaron]

Originally Posted by Toadkiller_Dog

If you can't describe someone as your friend, why are you spending your leisure time with them? I think you can have activities where not everyone is a friend but I don't think gaming is one of them.

Well, here's another Jim Bob Distinction for you: there are friends, and there are acquaintances.

• An acquaintance is someone you do just one thing with, whether it be work, game, a sport, go to bars, or whatever. If that activity ends - if you stop gaming or playing sport or change jobs - the acquaintanceship (is that a word? It is now!) ends. What you have in common is the activity.
• A friend is someone you do several things with. Your work with them and game with them, play sports and have weekly brunches, etc. If one activity ends, the friendship continues because your relationship goes beyond that activity. It doesn't matter too much exactly what you're doing with them.

Now, you can be friendly with acquaintances - polite, warm, joking - but not friends with them. An acquaintance can of course develop into a friend. But they don't begin as that. When you first meet someone, you need some reason to meet them again - either some kind of attraction (and I don't mean just sexual, I mean the person interests you in some way), or some activity which you're both interested in.

Not all acquaintances develop into friends. They couldn't, there are too many, what with everyone you know at work and in your hobbies and through your spouse and so on. So I don't require that the people I game with all be my friends; it's okay if our only shared interest is gaming. Of course, they often develop into friends, much more so than people I've met at work or through other hobbies. I think that roleplaying - genuine roleplaying, not just Diablo on a tabletop - encourages friendship, because friendship is formed by people knowing one another as individuals, and a person's roleplaying will often reveal a lot about them. But it's not inevitable or certain.

So I can be quite happy gaming with acquaintances, just as I can be quite happy working or sporting with 'em.

And it can be the case that some people are good as an acquaintance in one area, but not in another; or they can be your friends, but not if you share some activity. I know a guy at work who's a great fellow chef, I'm very happy to be working with him - and he has an interest in gaming, but when he sits down to game he's terrible, sees his character as just a piece of paper, doesn't care; he's a good work acquaintance, but a terrible gaming acquaintance. But then I also have a friend, we see movies together, discuss history together, talk about gaming and our personal lives - and I used to game with him, but left his group because it bored me stupid, and he's not a very good player, either. Also, I wouldn't want to work with him because he's lazy. I left his game group, but the friendship continued, because our relationship went beyond that common activity - it wasn't just an acquaintance. We're friends.

Many people are scared of leaving game groups they don't enjoy, or kicking out players who aren't good players and who are hurting others' fun, because they're scared they'll lose a "friend." To which I say: if they're truly your friend, you'll still see them, just doing other things; if without the gaming you have nothing to say to each-other, they weren't your friend anyway, so no loss. (All this with the thing of course that you stop gaming with them without any shouting or swearing to offend them...)

I don't have to be friends with the people I game with, just friendly. They begin as acquaintances, and if they become friends, great! If not, that's okay, too.