Let me begin by being perfectly clear; at this stage of our return, the problems that happened were entirely on us.  

The truth was that we had gotten so used to only playing with one another, we struggled to adjust to play with other people.  We knew what each other wanted and knew the cheat codes to get there.  It was part of the reason we were looking for more players!  Because we just knew how things were going to go with one another.  But we would start a game with new people and we'd make assumptions about what they wanted and how they were going to take the things we did to try to give them what we thought they wanted.  

The lesson that came to us pretty quickly was that players don't communicate the way we do with one another, they don't necessarily want the things we want and they don't respond the way we're expecting them to.  Good lessons!  And when I lay it out that way, I see how obvious that is to any reasonable person, right?  We were so clueless in that first wave of efforts.  

We went to RPOL and set up a game based loosely on Westworld.  Instead of the androids existing in a wild west setting, we set it in a Steampunk setting because we wanted to introduce more fantasy elements.  Also because Steampunk has a lot of colonial overtones that fit well with the themes of slavery and colonialism in the setting.  It's... an unnecessarily complex set of themes for a group of new players you don't know.  Just the sort of game we'd explore together but not for a general campaign, especially with new people, like I said.

We were looking to explore themes of personhood, what does it mean to be sentient? What happens when AI becomes self-aware?  And the people who came to the game were like ... there to play a steampunk game.  And we should have known not to do it this way, and it was so frustrating for us!  We felt like we'd been clear about our (unnecessarily convoluted) premise and that they were disregarding our desires for the game and trying to twist it without regard for what we wanted. We wound up shutting down the game, but with some distance and perspective, we saw that no one was trying to be difficult.  They were pretty great, actually.  We were the ones being difficult.  We needed to learn how to play in open games again.

We had two games going at that time.  The other one was a deconstructed superhero game set during the post-WWII cold war.  It wsa a better game design than the steampunk/Westworld game, but we got a ton of people who were looking to be very socially aggressive with the GMs' characters.  We've never been PvP players, so that didn't work out.  Now we know to be up front about the fact that we don't want PvP.  This means this type of player won't try to join.  And not all games are for all players.  I know that lots of people enjoy PvP and that's fine for them.  I'm not saying it's wrongbadfun, just that it was frustrating for us.  Anotehr lesson:  Be clear with players about your expectations.  Now we have a section in the application that requires player to say things they find unacceptable in play.  People are responsible for knowing one another's limits (It's listed in their mini-profile, visible during all scenes with the person) and we can communicate our dislike of PvP this way.

Next up.... we discovered Jcink!