I have learned through many years and many tears that it is better to find people who want to play RPGs and make friends with them than it is to try to make your friends play RPGs.

RPGs are a bigger commitment than many people realize. It’s more like joining a sports team than playing a board game. Most of them require you to show up several times a month, learn some rules, and remember what happened last time. That’s too much for some people, but your friends are more likely to over extend themselves because they want to be nice to you. So you get the perennial scheduling problems. It should surprise no one that people who didn’t go out of their way to find the game are less reliable than people who did.

So my greatest successes have been playing with strangers who became friends. One pandemic crew were from a band’s fan discord. One was put together from the reddit /lfg post. Another was from a fan discord for the specific game I wanted to play.

It also doesn’t help that D&D is so mega popular it sucks the air out of the room for everyone else. For a long time I wanted to play Fate, but I couldn’t find players and trying to convert D&D players was an uphill battle. I would go directly to a fate fan site or discord if I wanted to do a game of it now.

So, this gaming group started a Me, My Wife, Friend A, Friend B, and a couple that friend B met more recently.

For various reasons, Friend B dropped out about the time I started running a new game for the group. A little later we decided we wanted to slowly increase our numbers to buffer the ability to play if someone was missing.

I picked up a player from Reddit who had never had a chance to get into a PF2E game, all his attempts had met with DOA groups and I wanted to improve his experience. Later on, I picked up another player from Royal Road, she and I both publish serials there and follow each other’s stories, and started chatting.

Edit: Oh, and all this is online, excepting the couples none of us live within convenient distance from each other. Though ironically, the other couple moved last year and are now only two hours away from us.

The first campaign I’ve ever played advertised on a community related to a play podcast, tangentially related to D&D, and It was incredibly fun! It fizzled out, but it opened a whole new world for me.

I invited the GM and some players from that campaign, my best friend and advertised it on the same community. That campaign I started like 3 months after I first played TTRPGs, and is the longest campaign I’ve played, over 2 and a half years long! Very invested players

I’ve directed a campaign by responding to a group looking for GM but it fizzled out because I didn’t prep as much as I’d want, though mostly because players realised they didn’t have enough time to play. All others I’ve directed have been with the same people, or extended group related to the first campaign I’ve gm.

Looking for them was a bit harder, and I I used any and all tools; roll20, internet forums, discord, Reddit, you name it, I’ve probably used it. My most played was in like 2021-2022 with a different game every day, gm every Saturday and other Sunday, and player all days minus Sunday (yup, double dipping).

I had a lot of fun but I don’t think it was that healthy in hindsight because I was dealing with depression and It was my main way of socialising, and it drained me playing so much yet I always wanted more. Now I have a much more healthy and casual relationship, which I’m happy with

WHEW THAT WAS QUITE LONG TL;DR: I’ve used everything I could to find games as a player, but as a GM it has been very easy and with my usual friend group.