Quote from: Zachary The First;742735Easy, overall. Finding quality players? A bit harder, but we have a larger gaming circle (20+), which means there's a pretty deep player pool overall. For example, right now, in our larger gaming circle, there are games of RuneQuest 6, Hackmaster, a couple of Pathfinder games, and an on-again/off-again Castles & Crusades campaign. Having Gen Con here in Indy, it sort of helps us all network and find additional gamers. It's weird, though--all of us live just NE of Indy for the most part, but the overall gaming scene here is fractured into a lot of little groups. There are a lot of gamers, but not a lot of them actively search out other gamers. Whether that's an extension of just being happy with their group or something else, I don't know.

EDIT: I will say, there are a lot of lawncrappers out there. Having a wider gaming circle, a lot of times those folks simply don't make it past someone's one-shot adventure, where it becomes clear they aren't going to be welcome company, unfortunately.

For conventions, I usually run The Cheesegrater. It is an open table dungeon crawl using Basic D&D/Labyrinth Lord, you play until you die and then just grab another pre-gen. The lawncrappers really show themselves quick. Unfortunately, they do tend to turn off the potential casual Players who just showed up to try gaming.

Quote from: RPGPundit;742724Its been stupidly easy for me to find players, the whole time I've been living here.  I've never needed to lift more than a finger to get a group together for pretty well any game I actually wanted to run.  This is because there's proportionally a lot of gamers in this city, and also they are very well-connected in way that in a lot of North American cities it just doesn't seem to happen.  I think most north american cities I've been too are chock-full of little groups of 4-8 people playing RPGs that rarely or never interact with anyone else in the hobby there.  They find new players by putting up notices or searching calls for players or whatever.  
Here, it seems like just about every gamer at least peripherally knows about just about every other gamer with maybe one degree of separation; and we're talking about a community of hundreds and hundreds of people.  So if you're in that network, its stupidly simple to find people who'll want to play what you want, when and where you want.

The network you describe matches my own experience with the boardgaming scene in my Canadian city. Gamers know other other games, and it's not hard to reach out to someone you played with once at a convention once, or ask someone to bring a friend.

RPGs, however, are a very different beast than boardgames.

* There's something more intimate and potentially awkward about roleplaying in front of strangers.
 
* Committing to a single boardgame session is one thing. Committing to a multi-session campaign is another thing entirely. Even on the boardgame front, if I propose a game that will take more than one session - even just two sessions  - the number of interested players drops dramatically.

* There's a greater variety of ways people play RPGs. My sense is fewer than half of people who play D&D would like the way I run my game, and vice-versa. I don't have that problem with Puerto Rico or Small World.

* A greater proportion of the RPGers I've met are weirdos. Only about 5 per cent of the boardgamers I've played with over the years have off-putting demeanors. With roleplayers, it's more than a third.
 
So I'm quite content to play RPGs with my group of close friends. We're not short of members, and we get along well. The only problem is time commitment. Modern families typically don't have a lot of free time in large blocks. If you live in a large city where people commute, a weeknight gaming session is hardly worth the effort. And free time on the weekends is at a premium.

Quote from: Warthur;742734How tolerant is that network of lawncrappers, compared to those in North America?

Considerably less tolerant; I would suspect precisely because gamers are not in these tiny insular groups.  

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