Astro Artificer- The Problem with Finding Players
- Start with Yourself
- Build for Chemistry instead of a Checklist
- Build for Complement, not Similarity
- Casual vs. Immersion: The most important Axis
- The Framework isn't a Formula
The Problem with Finding Players
It's finally happening. After weeks of DMs, going back and forth, and finalizing your session zero, you finally find the perfect date. You have conquered D&D's final boss, scheduling your campaign. You found the perfect players, and the campaign finally begins.
The energy is electric. The jokes are flying. Goblins are too.
Something inside you feels relieved that all of the hard work has paid off.
Until that energy begins to feel off.
It's subtle at first. Players are missing their turns. Phones are coming out. Sessions start later and later. It's completely normal, you tell yourself. Completely normal for D&D.
At the end of the session, one of your beloved NPCs dies to traumatize your player characters. Some of your players are saddened. Some surprisingly don't care and move along. That's when you realized that the rift is growing, and it is only a slow, slow death to the campaign itself.
I hope this situation isn't too familiar to you. But the common experience for 37% of players is they will never finish a campaign. Around half rarely finish a campaign. Fizzling seems to be the norm, not the exception.
I know because what I described to you has happened at my own campaigns.
Scheduling isn't the killer of campaigns. It's actually misalignment.
Players stay at tables that they're unhappy at because they don't have the words to express what they want. So, they quietly disengage, which quietly kills the sessions mid-campaign.
Are we doomed to repeat this same mistake over and over again? Is there any way to build a table that doesn't just mean running a campaign over and over again with different players?
There's a way to build complementary tables. Tables that want to stick together. And it all begins with you, the GM.
Start with Yourself
You want everyone to have a good time. But by chasing that goal too hard, many DMs take all the pressure and responsibility for the players having a good time on themselves, and they lose sight of running a game they’ll have fun DMing. This is the problem of the servant DM. If you’re not careful, it can be the fastest path to DM burnout, and even falling out with your players in real life.
- Thorin, 3WiseDms
Many GMs seem to take this self-sacrificial stance on GMing. Becoming a gamemaster is a heavy burden placed on them, because their players don't want to run a campaign. I don't blame them; it is genuinely hard. But that is no reason to deny yourself the fun in a tabletop role playing GAME. You too are a player and should have fun.
As the GM, you are arguably the first place where table disengagement begins. You flavor the world. You run the sessions. And if your heart is no longer into it, your players can feel it.
The best situation is to be playing a game that both your players and YOU love.
You're valid for wanting to build a table of players that you will want to GM for. But before you can do that, you have to know what kind of game you actually want to run.
I've created the Player Astrology quiz, which you can take here. This quiz tells you two important things.
- Personality type - How do you relate to the tabletop game
- Fun Types - Why you find it enjoyable
Your personality type describes how you play, your fun type describes why you show up. Your playstyle isn't completely neutral. More importantly, as the baseline for the table, you will want to select players relative to how you make campaigns and what you find fun.
For example, a DM who loves building lore-heavy, intricate worlds will find it personally disheartening to engage with players who are constantly spontaneous and inventing new things to derail the lore of your world. On the other hand, the GM who loves tinkering with custom stat blocks and combat encounters will likely find it saddening if their players try to roleplay their way out of every encounter (and succeed).
Figure out your own wants and needs for the game first, and then find players who fit you.
Build for Chemistry instead of a Checklist
The problem with arranged marriages is that a person can be great on paper, but you find that you don't actually have a deep relationship with them. Oftentimes, most arranged marriages never develop that spark that comes from love marriages.
In that same lens, most GMs would rush immediately into matching players together by personality first. The problem with that is that even two players who should enjoy the game together on paper could actually really dislike playing together.
On paper, an Actor and a Storyteller should create an amazing game. The storyteller comes up with scenes, and the actor creates role-play flavor for those scenes. But if the storyteller likes fellowship more, and the actor cares more about pure expression, you'll end up with the Storyteller's carefully crafted group scenes getting trampled by one spotlight hog.
They both have completely different reasons for wanting to be at a table. Personality types are the ceiling of table compatibility. Fun types are the floor.
This is doubly true for the GM as well. Your players and you should have fun doing the same thing. You will find that players can enjoy the campaign in different ways, but still have fun playing the same game.
Some combinations that can cause friction:
- Submission and Challenge - One wants to just vibe with the campaign, and the other will get an aneurysm if they aren't vibing hard enough
- Challenge and Narrative - One wants a campaign that has meaningful obstacles, and the other wants obstacles with meaning attached to them.
- Expression and Fellowship - One wants to become a co-author of the story, and the other thinks that the real story was the friends made along the way. This can subtly lead to disagreements over time
Some combinations that work well together:
- Narrative and Discovery - Discovery players uncover the secrets of the world, and Narrative players give it meaning
- Fantasy and Sensory - One wants to be immersed in the fantasy, and the other is physically immersed within the game. Often, a really good pair for any themed tables
- Fellowship and Submission - Both want fun times and to be with good friends. This combo pairs easily with each other.
Once you create a table where everybody is having the same type of fun, building a campaign becomes so much easier. Not to mention, it makes your job that much easier. Have your cake and eat it too, by playing with players who enjoy the same things you do.
However, this doesn’t mean that you can only build a fun table with people who are exactly like you. Usually, it can mean the opposite, as we are about to see.
Build for Complement, not Similarity
The importance of similarity and complementarity may depend on the stage of the relationship. Similarity seems to carry considerable weight in initial attraction, while complementarity assumes importance as the relationship develops over time.
- - Catherin Lutz et al., Perceived Similarity and Relationship Success among Dating Couples: An Idiographic Approach
Online dating is difficult. You think that having the same hobbies and interests would be enough. However, as anybody who has gone to a geek-themed speed dating event would know, it couldn't be further from the truth. In reality, we are initially attracted to people who are like us, but we form deeper relationships with people who don't act the same way as we do.
The same goes for tables. Players benefit from having the same reason to be there (similar fun profiles), but benefit more from the range of different personalities.
You want players that will give moments emotional depth, create momentum at the table, ground the mechanical reality of the game, and are able to support others in the social fabric.
Think of party composition. A team of all melee martial classes will flounder when the enemy lich casts a force cage. A team of all spell casters may fall over to a gust of wind. A team of all bards would fall for the same tavern wench. Lack of diversity in party composition can be deadly.
The same applies to players. On paper, a table of just actors would seem to make sense. But then you get a bunch of players who are all competing for the spotlight. A table of optimizers all solve combat efficiently, with no narrative weight behind them. A table of explorers could spend an entire session investigating a door instead of just knocking. A healthy balance creates a varied experience for all players at the table.
Every table needs four roles. An engine, an anchor, glue, and a frame.
- The Momentum Engine - Without this, sessions stall. These are players who make decisions, push into rooms, and create consequences. They don't wait to see what happens; they make things happen. If nobody at the table fills this role, the GM ends up dragging the party through every scene by the collar. Archetypes that naturally fill this: Fighter, Instigator, Actor, Storyteller (when they're running a character arc they care about).
- The Reality Anchor - Somebody has to track initiative, know the rules well enough to not break immersion, and manage the mechanical scaffolding that makes the world feel like it has consistent logic. Without this, the game starts to feel arbitrary. This doesn't have to be a rules lawyer; it can just be a player who takes the game seriously as a game and gives the GM structural support. Archetypes that naturally fill this: Strategist, Thinker, Optimizer, Rules Lawyer, Supporter (in a quieter way).
- The Social Glue - This is the real-life function, not just the in-character one. It's the player who checks in, who diffuses tension, who makes sure everyone gets a moment, who remembers that five people need to be enjoying themselves, not just one. Mechanically, they might play a support class. Personally they're the reason the group chat stays warm between sessions. Archetypes that naturally fill this: Socializer, Supporter, and, to some extent, the Observer (who attends to others' emotional experience quietly).
- The Meaning Frame - This is the player whose investment gives the campaign emotional weight. They're the ones who remember what happened three sessions ago, who notice when a theme is building, who feel the stakes. Without this role, campaigns become a sequence of fun events that don't accumulate into anything. They're not always the loudest voice, but when they're absent, the table feels hollow in a way nobody can name. Archetypes that naturally fill this: Writer, Observer, Muse, Storyteller, Improviser (at their best).
Build a functional table, not one where people just happen to show up. At the end of the day, you probably wouldn't create a campaign with just monks.
Casual vs. Immersion: The most important Axis
My GM and I had been carefully crafting my character’s narrative arc for multiple sessions at this point. They had the driver’s seat, but I was providing the fuel with NPCs, motivations, plot hooks, and unresolved character pains. The final arc had arrived. It came, and then didn’t really go anywhere. I finished that session with my character’s arc done, but the journey never happened.
Why did I find my character's arc being cut short so personally insulting, when others had the same thing happen to them? Why did I seem to pour myself into a campaign where people were there just for fun? The difference is subtle, and almost nobody talks about it.
The emotional investment was different.
To some players, a game is just a game at the end of the day. For others, it is personally woven into their psyche. The axis that causes a lot of misalignment between people at the end of the day is this.
Casual players are not wrong for wanting to enjoy their game. Immersive players are not wrong for tying the game to their personal identity. But it can quickly feel wrong when both of those players are sitting at the right table. Stakes are inherently different. Reactions may be dramatic or not dramatic enough. Almost certainly, most of the disagreement is caused around this axis.
Session zeros try to catch this with questions about logistics, but almost none of those surface why players care about world continuity, how they define stakes in the campaign, and why they relate to the game emotionally.
It is far easier to run a game for all casual players or all immersed players. But a mixed table needs an honest discussion about what players really care about. How players will treat NPC depth. How much of the game do they want to be tied to their personal investment?
Don't ignore the casual/immersive axis. That is one of the most valuable data points for whether or not a player will become disengaged at your table. What's worse than having your character die? Having nobody who cares, or conversely, having somebody who cares a little bit too much.
Once your players are given that language to explain how they care about a campaign, the mismatch seems to fade away. Because emotional stakes and our relation to them are important to everybody, at the end of the day.
The Framework isn't a Formula
Relationships are more art than they are science. The same goes for creating a D&D table. Nobody has truly cracked it. If they had, disengagement wouldn't be as common as it is within TTRPGs.
The TTRPG Astrology Framework finally gives words to that disengagement that I have been feeling. I finally understood myself and what I secretly wanted from a campaign, but could never articulate. Now, I have the vocabulary to explain what my ideal game looks like.
But personalities and preferences change over time. People do seek different experiences, can grow bored with the same things, or just want to try new things. Players are fluid. They are constantly leveling up. In many long-term campaigns, it is quite normal for a character to change as the arcs pile on. Humans are the same.
These frameworks give a strong starting point for building a table that lasts. But relationships are entropic; they take work to maintain. Checking in with your players and communicating how our needs from the game changes is vital to creating a sustainable table.
Creating a table of players who are aligned on wanting to make the game as fun as possible for each other is how you get campaigns to thrive, and not fizzle. It all hinges on your intentional decisions to curate your tables, instead of leaving it up to chance. If you want to begin building the table that you have been waiting for, take the Player Astrology Quiz here.
Until Next Time,
— Astro