... but it might not be a terrible idea to approach it like you're the hiring manager interviewing job applicants.
Anyone have any strategies on how to do exactly this without making it look like you are doing exactly this? I'd love to vet potential players through one on one interviews, but in a game played for fun it just seems like that's too 'out there.'
Thing is, in a game you bring forward to allow anyone at all in the General Populace to join with an open invite, you probably should curate the applicants exactly like a hiring manager. Or else you’re going to get some not-so-fun games stocked with a bunch of the people you say you don’t want to be gaming with.
I don’t have a clue what area you’re in, but the folks saying these players are only present on Twitter and you’re not likely to have many show up seem either way out of touch or located in an area where they aren’t going to see many of these types of folks to begin with. I thought I was in that type of area, too. I was dead wrong.
The gaming store I was about to start getting paid to run games at seemed like a great idea when I first joined up. But within a few weeks, all of the other GMs were talking about promoting a number of women-only and LGBTQ-only games to be inclusive and provide a safe space in the store, making blanket statement trash talk about cis het men frequently in their group chat, and generally making themselves seem very non-inclusive.
All of this is happening in a small rural Texas town. So I doubt there are as many places around as people might think that the folks they are saying don’t actually play TTRPGs outside of talking about them on Twitter are not represented heavily in their community.
As far as I can tell so far in 20+ years of gaming in the same area, that probably isn’t based upon anything more than the fact that most people tend to find groups with like minded gamers and stick with them for a long while, only to become a little oblivious about the larger gaming community outside of their established group. Over the past seven years, any time we’ve attempted to recruit new players, they have been of an extreme leftist, politically charged philosphy, and did not mesh well with our group.
Another thing I find very telling is that any games the store has scheduled thus far have been cancelled if they did not deal with WotC specific D&D settings and adventures (esp. nu-Ravenloft, Strixhaven, and Witchlight) or anthropomorphic character-based games. Because nobody is signing up for games like Shadowrun, Cyberpunk, Vampire, Star Wars d6, DCC, Shadow of the Demon Lord, or any version of D&D except 5E. And all games are to include safety tools of some sort by recommendation of the GM Manager.
/shrug although it sounds great at first glance to get paid to GM, I’m really too busy right now to do too much of it anyway. And I don’t feel like running any game that’s a hostage to current politics.