D&D: Find Your Next Game – Five Places To Look For A Party (In Real Life)
Looking for where your next game of D&D is going to come from? There are a few different places you can try these days!
Playing D&D, if you aren’t already doing it, can be tricky. You have to find a game, make sure it’s the right fit, and then hope that it doesn’t fizzle out. But these days, more games than ever are starting up all the time. And if you know where to look, you might just find your next epic campaign!
Friendly Local Game Store
One of the best places you can look is your Friendly Local Game Store. They might have community events – I know of at least two near me that have D&D nights where you can sign up to just come and sit at a table and see where the dice fall. But even if they don’t have organized events you can join for, you might find a bulletin board or ask the employees if they know of any games looking for players. That’s how I found my very first D&D campaign that wasn’t with people I had been in school with and knew by geographic association.
LFG Forums
There are many places on the internet where you can try and dig up a game. But there are a surprising number of places actively recruiting both players and GMs. Some are still actual forums that you can just hang out on like the days before the Internet became a mistake, like RPOL or the forums for the Order of the Stick (or any other nerd-associated comic). Or you can head down to reddit (a gamble, I know) and check out r/lfg. It’s a roll of the dice, but you want to stack the odds in your favor.
Discord Servers
A newer one these days – it seems that there’s a Discord community for almost every niche. Even and especially products you can just like buy? For instance, did you know there’s a Discord server for Odyssey of the Dragonlords and a separate one for Dungeons of Drakkenheim and both are pretty well-populated at any given point?
Find one that looks promising, and join up – you can find dedicated LFG channels and, typically, you can get a good idea of how active people are from how often they’re around on the server.
Meetup
Of course sometimes you just wanna play in person. And Meetup.com can be a source of finding local events that might take you outside of the places you know. When I interviewed James Ohlen for the relaunch of Odyssey of the Dragonlords for D&D 5.5E, he told me he found two different campaigns on Meetup.com. Take it for a spin!
Trick Your Friends Into Playing With You
And of course, there’s always the option of trying to trick your friends into playing D&D with you. It’s easier than ever, because even the last people you’d ever think are probably curious about it by now. Ask your friends, ask the people whom you kind of know and like hanging around, if you are lucky enough to work at a job that doesn’t grind your soul into a thin paste, ask your co-workers; you’d be surprised at who’ll be willing to take D&D for a spin. Especially if you can pique their interest with all the related D&D media like the movie or Dimension 20 or Critical Role.
Happy adventuring!
