How do you find a Dungeons and Dragons game? Where to look and what to find.
So you’ve seen my previous article about playing D&D and you want to play, but no-one in your friends group seems interested or they’re too scared to start.
Well I have good news for you. There are solutions. Both online and IRL. All it takes is a bit of confidence and patience.
In Person Games
In person games are often hard to come by since you actually either have to know people in your area who play, or you have to find people online who live near you and discover if they need another player. The easiest way to do this is usually a Facebook group or a subreddit dedicated to your area. But here are some other ways you can find a local game:
Join a Local Adventurers League Game — For those of you who don’t know, and that’s probably you, these are games where you create a character that you play across any Adventurer’s League game. It allows your character to travel from one game table to another–across the world and even through digital play–all while keeping your character’s progress and loot intact.
Find a Game Store Near You — This really does depend on the city you are currently in, but most major cities will have a TTRPG shop or board game store that runs D&D games. So go visit one and see if you can get a seat at a table.
Put out a Craigs List Ad — Or whatever the equivalent is in your area, it could be Gumtree or Facebook or the local newspaper. Just be careful not to host games with strangers in your house. There are some weirdos out there.
Ask Your Friends, They Probably WANT To Play Too — You’d honestly be surprised how many people you already know who secretly want to play D&D. When I first started playing suddenly all these people I knew or met played D&D too, for years before I did it.
Online Games
While most people prefer to play at a physical table with all the fanciness of dice towers and hand painted maps that your DM spent 3 weeks painting because they secretly just really want to impress their players and shower them with unnatural amounts of painstaking love; not all of us can actually achieve that. We are busy and getting 3 or more adults into one room for more than 4 hours at a time seems to be an impossibility these days. So your next best option is to find something online. And here are some great options:
StartPlaying— Yes. This is my shameless plug. I am a DM on StartPlaying and you can find me here. But you can also find a huge collection of other groups, games, systems and DM’s that could get you started on your journey.
DnDBeyond Forums — DnDBeyond has become the number one forum outside of Reddit to find yourself free and paid for games.
Looking for Games Subreddit — r/lfg has to be one of the oldest subreddits for finding a group. But be careful which listings you go for. Unlike StartPlaying, that has a DM rating system, you can’t be too sure of what you are going to get on Reddit.
Roll20 LFG Page — Roll20 has a pretty big community of players on it’s servers already so it makes sense that there forum is very busy with people looking for games.
No matter what you end up choosing just remember that there are plenty of games out there, don’t settle for a table that doesn’t seem right. Playing table top games is a big undertaking and you are going to be spending one night a week or every few weeks with these people. You should like them and the story they are telling.
Good luck and have fun!