D&D General New Players?

You could run one of the box sets like Icespire Peak. It is designed for new players and can be run with AL. Each quest in the game could be played with one or two meetings and eventually you may get a good group that plays through the final parts. Then you can move on to something larger once you have good players.
 

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This happened to me last year. Moved to a new state for work, found there's an active community through Meetup and Discord in my area and a strong demand for DMs. I found many people were wandering from 1-shot to 1-shot, finding a hodge-podge of good and bad DMs, good and bad players.

So, my first step was to screen players. It didn't take much. I simply asked for players ages 30+ that could make Sunday afternoons. Experience didn't matter. If it worked out, these people might be invited into my home and we'd run actual campaigns. So, I'm screening out kids, teens, and college students. I wanted to increase the chances people would click. That's generally not happening when you put a 50yo at a table with a 15yo. There were some DMs that simply ran 1-shots for strangers over and over, no desire for a campaign or the same players each week. Not my bag, but glad they're introducing people to the game.

I got a ton of responses. I winnowed those people down to a schedule I could make (Sunday afternoons). Then, I ran some 1-shots. I struck gold early in that one group of 4 immediately clicked. Until Covid, we have had a pretty consistent campaign going. And, having heard their stories about going table to table in 1-shots with problem players and bad DMs, feel even more fortunate we all met when we did.

So, depending on your community size, I'd recommend Meetup (ours linked to their Discord), then an ad to shrink the pool to similarly situated people. From there, just a matter of finding people that click and talking about forming a longer-term group. I used non AL one-shots with pre-gen characters and plenty of time for humor and role play for this.

Kind if how I ended up with 3 players I have. They're early to mid 20s, I'm 41:).

I avoided the problems the other tables had hence running the longest game.
 

You could run one of the box sets like Icespire Peak. It is designed for new players and can be run with AL. Each quest in the game could be played with one or two meetings and eventually you may get a good group that plays through the final parts. Then you can move on to something larger once you have good players.

Yeah I got it for Christmas, haven't run it yet.
 

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