Wow, you actually will run full on sessions/games with randos? Incredible. Do you find it usually works out? I get nervous just thinking about the absolute maladjusted weirdos that I'd see at the comic shop for Friday night magic and release days and then dial that up to 11 for strangers on the internet.
I haven't for a year or two, but yes. And never, ever more than a one-shot until you get to know them a bit because it makes for a zero-drama way to remove the non-hackers - just don't invite them to the next thing you do.
Depends on what you mean by "works out"; I think the longest stable group I maintained with pure internet weirdos was just short of a year. Life happens; people find meat-space groups, move, jobs, kids, school, etc. And as are also an internet weirdo to them, internet weirdo D&D is the first thing to get cut from someone's "free time budget".
For avoiding maladjusted weirdos, if you phrase your request correctly, and require minimal effort from prospective players to filter out the laziest, that tends to filter out the worse of them (or makes them easy to spot so you can filter them). Honestly just mentioning that animal races are banned, or doing something like 4e where they don't exist (other than minotaurs/shifters) keeps out the furries, and those are 95% of your problem players.
I think my issue personally is that these campaigns for the most part are run as usually very light-hearted and borderline cartoony fantasy scenarios with regard to morality and behaviour. I'm just as bad for it as anyone but when the campaign is run in a vaguely wacky world with weak consequences or a schism between player action and game reaction, it kind of devolves into an abstract sense of dice chucking, light RPing, and going 'lol who cares let's just have fun' which in turn leads to murder hoboing, trying to seduce everything in sight etc.
Writing this though I wonder if it's a group problem or a DM/writing problem that people just aren't invested in the world so it's treated as an ID sandbox.
I get that you (maybe) don't want to have some constant uber serious grimdark experience where you throw someone out for being goofy but at the same time there's a severe disconnect between the story and world that's being built when the evil party member slaughters a family of begging goblins while laughing and pissing on their corpses. I guess I'm not ballsy enough or no one else cares to kind of say 'knock it off with the edgelord gross out crap' because it would probably create a schism in the group but I guess a simple non-confrontational conversation outside of the game later could most likely solve this type of situation.
In my experience, its a feedback loop - if they aren't invested in their characters, they treat the game as a wacky-zany fun house because they don't care what happens to them and no one/nothing they care about, so they never get invested, so don't care about the consequences of their actions, and when their actions do start to have consequences they don't have fun anymore and leave so they can go monkey cheese something else. And that's provided they don't devolve into slap fighting between the people who don't want monkey cheese murderhoboing, the die-hard monkeycheese murder hobos, and the people who don't care they just hate the squabbling.
And I mean, I run Kobolds Ate My Baby, I'm not against lolwacky fun times. But KAMB is one-shot for a reason.
Usually i just tell people "You want to be funny out of character, that's not a problem, we can make jokes, we're supposed to be having fun. But your character is going to be treated like they are interacting with real people. if you treat them like shit, they'll remember. Gossip spreads faster than you travel and your reputations will proceed you."
Basically make sure the monkey cheese has a kill switch when its time to get serious.
Not Ghostse, but I have been running games with randos for a few months now and while its not completely bad, it does have its peculiarities. Its very easy to find players and tables in the run of the mill tabletop discords of life, the hard part is finding people that stick around. Ghosting is incredibly common, my main table right now is a Lancer campaign that has been going on for about 12+ sessions with 3 very good very solid players and about 4-5 guys that joined in, played about 1-2 sessions, and then left without saying anything. Same thing happened in a SW campaign I was in, about 3 guys ghosted the DM after session 1 and he had to look for new ones.
Basically, you just have to give it enough shots until you land some and then stick with the ones you hit. I also haven't run into any weirdos, which actually kinda surprises me, but other guys in my table have had some really bad player horror stories (they make it seem like Vampire: The Masquarade has the worst players of any system, I still believe that to be 5e).
I don't mind people dropping but holy fucking shit do the folks just ghosting without a word piss me off. just say you are dropping, its fine.
The edgest of edgelords I dealt with were PF1e munchkins, but that was in the early 5e days and I hadn't learned to filter them, and I never ran VtM but I can see how that would attract some real specimens.
