Hop to it! They're more or less percentile. What's not to love? CoC is the easiest to learn and you have several settings to choose from: Ancient Rome, Dark Ages (1000 AD), Old West, Victorian England, 1920s, Modern, 1950s (if you choose the older edition). I love WFRP but 40K is really hot right now and the progressives haven't tampered with it yet.
Start awarding XP for social interactions and good roleplay.
I did think about that, but would I look like an asshole GM for starting to do that mid-campaign?
Not as long as you give multiple chances a session to gain it.
If it were a matter of rolling well, sure, but if it is purely interacting with the NPCs and playing the characters, that requires no rolls, hell them trying and failing a social check is good, can induce good roleplay.
No. If your players just like fighting, do more fighting. You could also tie some fighting-related things to being a little less of a lump out of combat. Being clever and whatever results in finding the Totem of Nin, and he who touches it first gets Nin's Blessing for the next 24 hours, +2 to all attacks. Something like that.
I don't have the time or attention to make a good post so have a bad one instead.
It's difficult to juggle more than two games at a time tbh. I have spent the better part of 17 years learning games but I also try to give a game at least 12 separate 3+ hour sessions before I say I "tried" it. Even shit games I have played usually get that much. The exception being anything PbtA now since they're so incredibly shallow that once you have played one you kind of played them all.
That is kind of the core issue of anything PbtA. Until writing this I completely forgot I even played Mutants and Masterminds because PbtA absolutely gets thrown in the same mental trashcan as all those various d20 games got chucked into 15 years ago.
You're sabotaging yourself before you have even started. IRL friends will always be better than some troon perma online freak who hides what they are until they are in the group. Just ask them like a normal person, it isn't like the stigma around this hobby still exists the way it did 40 years ago. Do your friends like playing video games? If so they are most of the way there already.
What kind of system or campaign setting that's less likely to attract freaks? I'd like to know what you meant by this lol
Don't know where you live, so I will speak as a French player. It's not a common hobby, but there's an association in my town dedicated to TTRPG. I joined them 6 months ago. So far, everything is good. Wokeism is not that common here, some are obviously, but so far insufferable players are mostly too young, or spergs with some social skills issues. It's easy to find a table without them.
From my short experience, D&D seems to attracts the worst peoples, and Call of Cthulhu the best ones. Freaks want to plays like their Actual Play video, so they focus Generic Fantasy settings. I also really like to play on unusual systems, freaks seems to avoid it.
Treat social interactions somewhat realistically and don't allow characters to sink into the background. I had a Shadowrun game and the party had a classic dump-stat Troll samurai character with them. If there were a ten foot killing machine standing next to you at a party would you ignore it? No, I always wanted at least some social rolls from people, I'd drag someone into conversations whether they wanted to or not and provide opportunities to fuck up. In short, I made the players imagine the actual scene so they couldn't just abstract it to one person rolling dice. Aside from helping solve the problem, it also made the game vastly more fun. Even when characters would try to absent themselves from impacting things that wasn't always necessarily going to work.
Tends to be a bit iffy, but I found that the d% games like Call of Cthulhu do a good job weeding out people who don't have the patience to learn to play. It's also decently popularish and for all the newer editions try to appeal to the clowns, its mechanics and cheap and quick death systems tend to work out. It also isn't that hard to learn IMO. Warhams Fantasy and the 40k ones also do a decentish job, since for all they reee about the IP they don't play often.
Most of my current friends don't even really play video games anymore, they used to but a lot of them became responsible adults who'll instagram their travels and going to corporate events lol. I do know some people who I probably could potentially invite as we used to play home-made RPG because we didn't know any systems back when we were younger, but I feel like a lot them just 'grew out of it'.
Funnily, Cyberpunk was the one I was looking for (although I might put it out for now, because I don't like its rules too much, then when I ask people in the official Discord group about alternate rules minmax builds, and some GM seem to get really mad at me for even asking, and most of them seems to be troons or NB, but tbh, Cyberpunk attracts troons like shit attract flies.
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