How Do You Find Players?

[Jacob Lewis]

I surf the forums here and when I see an excellent poster, I send out a kidnapping team.

Please don't. It's so...Excellent!

 

[John Dallman]

My latest recruit came from a convention I wasn't at. She was playing in a friend's GURPS demo game, and was clearly talented. He asked where she lived, and when she turned out to be local, asked me if he could invite her to the game he was running at my place. I trusted his judgement, and she's now a regular.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

For my open table at a gaming cafe, I just see who shows up - I generally don't have to worry about attendance there. In my experience, if you hang your hat out for a public D&D game, people will just show up.

For my home group, it's different. I've generally relied on heavily filtered Facebook posts (filtering out people I don't want to game with and people that I used to game with but don't for a number of reasons). There's no world where I would just invite a stranger to my house, though there have been some friends of a friends over the years.

 

[uzirath]

Family and friends are a good resource for recruiting. Friends who may not show an interest in RPGs normally may surprise you if you invite them.

I would echo this. I've had surprising success with recruiting players through my existing social and work networks. I got back into gaming just a few years ago after a ten year hiatus and a move to a new state. I thought I would have a hard time interesting anyone in a GURPS campaign, but a shocking number of my coworkers and friends (using the term broadly... I'm still relatively new here) were curious enough to give it a shot. Now we have multiple groups playing and a long list of people who are interested in joining—a bit of an embarrassment of riches.

I very intentionally run games that are friendly to non-gamers. I'm happy to build characters with new players (or give them pregens) and I don't expect people to buy or even read the rules. All they need to do is show up and collaborate on an adventure with the rest of the group. I explain the rules as they are needed and people absorb the important ones pretty quickly.

 

[Celebrim]

Generally speaking, you want to recruit friends and friends of friends. If you have a nerd friendly work place, there are almost certainly players without groups that you could recruit from if you do a little social networking. The biggest problem you'll run into going this route is that finding players over the age of 30
(to say nothing of 40) is hard just because people are busy. Be prepared to bring in younger blood.

If you try to recruit from the general public or by advertising, what you'll get is mostly players that have been kicked out of other groups because they were too problematic in some fashion.

If you can't recruit from friends, I'll echo what a lot of others are saying that the second best option is to run an open public game at your local fantasy gaming store, and hope that you form a friendship with whatever regular players you end up with. This gives you much better ability to monitor player quality and filter out undesirables.

 

[darjr]

Have you tried Big Bang comics? Their Facebook talks about Sunday games.

also AL sunday at 3
Monday Wednesday Thursday at 6

 

[Retreater]

Have you tried Big Bang comics? Their Facebook talks about Sunday games.

also AL sunday at 3
Monday Wednesday Thursday at 6

I haven't been there in years. I used to run games for them until the owner got mad at me for missing a session I was running for free (and finding an alternate DM) because my real job took me out of town for a week and banned me from running games.
Last I heard they had killed off all their games and no one came anymore because of the terrible customer service. But maybe I could go look?

 

[iserith]

This is how I build a group on Roll20:

I run a number of one-shots on the day and time that I would like to run a regular game. I invite the best players of those groups to future one-shots. My criteria is that they play well, get along with each other, sometimes DM for others, have decent tech/skills, and are, most importantly, funny. Then once I've built up around 8 to 10 people, I offer to run a regular game for 5 PCs at a particular interval and leave sign-ups open to all, first come, first served. As long as we get 4 PCs from the player pool to commit, we play (which means we almost never have a cancelled session). Then I just run the occasional one-shot after that and, if I see someone really stellar, I invite them to the player pool.

Running and playing D&D online is not quite the same as running in person, but it has many advantages. You have a larger population of gamers from which to build your ideal group. In the particular setup I describe above, as long as the DM can run a game, there's almost always a game (which is sweet for me as I usually DM). Scheduling headaches and cancellations are almost nonexistent since you have more players than seats. And I also feel that without the distractions that can come with a table and faster play through dice rollers and the like, we get a lot more done in a given session without sacrificing on the fun. (For in-person games, I still use Roll20.)

Anyway, it's worth a shot and you can likely include your remaining players into that player pool - unless you just want to clean house.

 

[Blue]

The pool of friends who are players is larger then the amount of games being run. So if I need more players I reach out to friends who are looking for games. If that's insufficient I have gamed with a lot of people at my FLGS(-ish) when I did that, of whom some I would invite to a home game.

We're mostly adults with jobs and family, so the biggest thing stopping more games is time. Lack of people willing to GM and lack of a meeting space also place a significant role in more games getting started.

 

[Li Shenron]

We're playing a family game nowadays. We gave birth to our little players.