How hard is it to find players?

[awayfarer]

My group plays online and while it's not very hard to find gamers, it's hard to find competent gamers who will show up for every session.

 

[NewJeffCT]

Pretty easy for me

I moved from east of Hartford Connecticut to a bit west of Hartford earlier this year. I finally was able to be stable enough with my job, my wife's job and my daughter's life where I could game semi-regularly.

So, I put an ad here and on the wizards website and was pleasantly surprised at how many people responded. And, most of them seem to be stable mature adults with families.

 

[Li Shenron]

I'd like to get a general indication of how easy ENworlders find it to recruit people to their group.

Personally I never had to "recreiut" players among strangers. When I started DMing, I asked my friends if they were interested, and to bring friends' friends along. During the years I always added players from more friends.

I do know that in my area there's an active RPG and LARP scene, only I do not hang around clubs, conventions and stuff. One of the other DM in our group has put announcements a couple of times on the clubs' online messageboard and always found new players within a week... So my guess is that around here is quite easy to find interested people.

 

[Creamsteak]

Finding gamers is easy enough. If you set bait in some way, they will come.

The challenge is more oriented towards finding people that want to play the game you want to play, the way you want to play it, on the days your available to play it, as often as you want to play, ad nauseum. So finding the "right" group is far more difficult depending on what you want. It's really easy to find some players if you say you're going to run some well known adventure. Most people in my area are not big on the role-playing part of the game, from what I've seen.

 

[Hussar]

My group plays online and while it's not very hard to find gamers, it's hard to find competent gamers who will show up for every session.

QFMFT

I'm absolutely stunned by the level of knuck dragging, mouth breathing social troglodytes out there. Finding gamers online is a breeze. Finding ones I'd actually want to play with is difficult. It's taken me years to build the core that I have (Hi guys) and I love them to pieces.

 

[Oryan77]

It's pretty easy to find players around here.

Finding players that have similar playstyles as you do is the hard part....or finding "normal" people to game with is pretty tough in general.

 

[the Jester]

It's very easy. I'm running two groups, each about eight players strong with no overlap, and I have a waiting list still.

Of course, I also tend to make new players a lot- I plan to start a game for my housemates, for instance.

 

[Merkuri]

I'm absolutely stunned by the level of knuck dragging, mouth breathing social troglodytes out there. Finding gamers online is a breeze. Finding ones I'd actually want to play with is difficult. It's taken me years to build the core that I have (Hi guys) and I love them to pieces.

Yeah, I'm in the same game as Hussar and Awayfarer, and it seems like there are only a few kinds of people who want to play online: those who should be playing WoW (powergamers who aren't interested in plot and just want to kill things and level), those who ARE playing WoW (while the game is going on, leaving the rest of us waiting ages whenever their initiative number comes up), those who show up for a few sessions then disappear (into WoW?), and those who are actually interested in an old-fashioned tabletop-turned-online game of D&D. The later are seriously outnumbered by the other three categories.

By the way, I have nothing against WoW... I play it myself. It was just a convenient example, and it stuns me how many people want to get the same experience out of D&D when D&D lends itself much better to other methods of play, IMO.

 

[Agamon]

These days, pretty easy. I game in 3 different groups that have little do with each other in a relatively small town (50k), 3 hours from anything that resembles a city (Calgary). And there are quite a few others that I know of, but there's a good number of those that don't really match my style.

 

[+5 Keyboard!]

Put me in the difficult category, or least the area I live in. I've tried to do meet & greets, ads on my FLGS's online forums, and paper ads pinned to the bulletin board of another LGS. Maybe people just move in and move out too quick. I don't know. It seems like the gaming groups in Vegas are kind of holed up in isolated little gaming cells of close friends/associates. There's really not much reaching out to meet others in the gaming community here.

On the other hand, I've had times when I've had to beat gamers back with a stick because my group was too full (8 is my limit - 6-7 the perfect number). Then months and months of no responses to ads I've put out.