[quote=@Mercenary Lord] or at least honest ones its a little disheartening when your rp gets a sudden spurt of interest every so often and you bend over backward to adjust a story for them, and suddenly they disappear. its even MORE irritating when these people have their online status thing hidden, so you really have no idea if they're just ignoring you or if they got hit by a bus irl [/quote] Just check their recent activity. If they're posting everywhere BUT your RP, they're probably flaking. My rule of thumb is assume off the hop at least a quarter of my players will drop in the first two months and only be concerned about keeping the core group happy. Overall, people are joining your game, so you shouldn't have to bend over to accomodate everyone and everything. That's not to say not listening to suggestions or being inflexible, it's more like putting your foot down on the rules and lore-related stuff while being flexible about mechanics and player agency. Right now in an RP I've been co-GMing, we're currently trying to find an effective method of adding risk of failure to combat scenarios that are fair but add an element of uncertainty and danger, so we're playing around with ideas related to character skills and needing X number of characters on a task to succeed as opposed to straight up dice rolling, since we found that the randomness could be really unfair and if we were strict with it, we had characters that should have been fine in some situations become incapacitated and by the third stage of a mission, maybe 2-3 of 7-8 characters who started are still able to fight. Sorry about the tangent, it was to illustrate my point that you can still change things up late in the game if you find it's not working out, especially if it keeps the core players happy.