Places on the internet to look for players

Role-playing games
#1

Hi everyone,
I moved to a new town (and country) and I would like to look for new RPG friends, to have some contacts for that glorious day when playing in person is allowed again around here.

I have posted something on reddit (r/lfg/ , r/lfgmisc/ , r/LFG_Europe and r/DNDNL) managing to find a few potentially interested, I have posted on RPG.net, and on a local meetup.com group, but I wonder if there are other websites that could work for this. I found a few others, but they are other specific for the US or for DnD, or both.

Do you have any experience with this and any advice? Thanks!

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#2

My experience is that this is much easier if you’re specific about what you want to play, where and when. Using a forum that’s specific to the kind of game you’re interested in helps. Offering to run something helps a lot.

Presumably, you’re currently looking to play online in some way?

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#3

Hey, thanks!

Well, back in Berlin I hsted this regular one shot night in which we played a new game almost every time with whoever was interested and available, and that’s what I’m trying to recreate here in Utrecht.
You have a good point with specific forums there, but being adamantly non specific about the game I want to play is my entire jam :slight_smile:
I do like a certain style of play, but I tend to change game very, very often, also for series/campaigns.

No, I am not really looking to play online right now, I have my old group for that and a trusty public discord server. At the moment I am really looking for getting in touch with people interested indie RPGs and story games for future in person games.

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#4

You have some problems there:

  • Many gamers like the weekly session with ongoing characters.
  • Some gamers are extremely unreliable, prone to vanishing, failing to turn up for sessions, and so on.

Somebody unfamiliar showing up, wanting to form a group for playing in an unfamiliar style, at some ill-defined future time, is thus liable to be ignored. The odds of payback on engaging with them look quite poor.

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#5

There are different styles of play, different people looking for different experiences, and game designed for all of these audiences, including a wealth of games that are designed for one shots.
I am fully aware I play stuff that is a niche of niche hobby, and that looking for players for that can be daunting (putting together my old group was a long process), but I succeed in the past - and enjoyed the results immensely- and I’ll see if I can do it again this time around.

#6

I think the trick will be to lay it out explicitly: lots of different short games in different systems. So players who maybe don’t want to commit to a new regular session, but would be happy to drop in from time to time, may be interested in that.

Maybe worth looking at rpggeek (part of boardgamegeek); it doesn’t have region-specific fora the way BGG does but I think people who are active there tend not to overlap much with other RPG places.

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#7

Thanks. Yes, in the places where I posted I have a description stating what I want to do and what I look in a game.

I’ll give RPGgeek a shot, I had completely forgotten about that!

#8

Roll20.net is the place to go. There are lots of games to search for though the most popular is DnD 5e.
You’ll be able to easily find a group there.

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#9

I tried using http://nearbygamers.com a few years ago, and had little success because I live in a roleplaying desert. I don’t know how much activity there is there now, but it might be worth your finding your area on the map and seeing whether there is a swarm of markers.

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#10

I’m not even in much of a desert, but all I met on nearbygamers were D&Ders who had no interest in moving beyond the dungeon. Which is clearly fine for them, but they weren’t what I was looking for, and vice versa.

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#11

Speaking of getting swamped by dungeon-crawling D&D when you are only looking for something else, there is a Discord server (called “Aus RPG”) for finding and recruiting players of any RPG except Pathfinder and the latest edition of D&D, in Australia, New Zealand, and the corresponding time zones. The organisers say they have nothing against D&D, wish D&Ders all good fortune, but want a recruiting and discussion space that isn’t so flooded with D&D posts that nothing else is easy to find.

Perhaps there is something similar for the Netherlands. I wouldn’t know how to find it if there were.

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#12

I tried advertising on Aus RPG (the Discord server I mentioned above) and found it surprising effective.

I wanted to find an extra two or three players for a game to be played over the Internet on Saturday nights, using an obscure old RPG and and in an obscure subgenre of SF, and starting in mid-to-late January. So I expected my ad to languish for weeks attracting few replies. And so I didn’t mind when the ad dropped, but posted it as 23:22 on the 23rd of December. Evidently I write better ad copy than I thought, because I got a very enthusiastic reply (“Fuck yeah, I’m in”) at 23:28. I had three keen players by 08:30. Within 24 hours I also had five people saying that they wanted to play but were sadly unable to do so on Saturday nights.

If there are not similar Discord channels for other time-zones, someone ought to set them up quick-smart.

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#13

NICE!

For online games via Discord, if anyone is into small press RPGs/storygames I cannot recommend “Online RPG Players” enough, both for the games they play and the “table culture” they cultivate. One of the moderators is a friend of mine and in my old RPG group, so I might be biassed…

For the situation I was describing above, I think the challenge is the in person part. Never mind that the terrible timing -we are again in lock down now around here- but this also limits the chances of finding people wanting to try something a bit different, in particular in smaller towns.
Still, I have some contacts, nobody has run away when I told them that I regard Good Society as one of my best games, when I told them I want to play Kaleidoscope again, or when I proposed For the Queen as our first game. There’s hope, I just need to wait for things with the pandemic to get better.

#14

For the convenience of anyone who wants to check out AUS RPG, here is a link:

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