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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Argyle King" data-source="post: 5958871" data-attributes="member: 58416">I've had the complete opposite experience as that of the OP.  I've found it rather easy to find groups and/or new players.  I've had to cut down on the amount of gaming I was doing because I was starting to get concerned that maybe I was gaming too much.If I can be completely blunt, sometimes I think one of the biggest obstacles to getting new people to try rpgs is the community which currently games.  I feel that there are still too many people who act as though gaming is some sort of sin and/or secret underground rite.  Painting your own hobby as something negative doesn't exactly do wonders for recruiting other players.  Likewise, there seem to be a lot of threads here and on various other fora which talk about topics such as "how do I game with girls"; "how can I game with minorities," and other such things.  While I do understand that not everyone communicates the same way and that taking a look at some of these topics may be helpful, the bottom line is that people are people.  I tend to believe that actually talking to someone (and doing so in a normal and non-awkward way) will deliver results far more often than joining an online discussion about how to talk to someone.For me, I do not force my hobbies upon anyone.  However, if they ask (or it comes up in conversation,) I talk to them about gaming just like I would talk to them about any of my other hobbies.  Sometimes they seem open to giving it a shot; sometimes they don't, and sometimes the people who have said they would in no way be interested have turned out to be the people I've been gaming with the longest.  As for complexity, I'm not sure that I agree with the argument that complexity necessarily scares away new players.  I think that is highly dependent upon the person, and I can honestly say I've had experiences in which someone who was interested was turned away by a game not being engaging enough.  This is not to suggest that uber-complexity is the way to go, but only that 'streamlining' and 'simplicity' isn't always the best route to take either.  RPGs are a game of the mind and a mental activity; I'd like to think using my brain is part of that process.  I can only speak for myself, but -if something like Essentials or the current version of 5E- had been the D&D I was introduced to, I'm not sure I would have been engaged enough to get involved in rpgs.  I became interested in rpgs (and still play them now) precisely because I want that deeper engagement.  There are far different reasons behind why I sit down to roll some dice for a tabletop campaign than there are behind why I sit down to play through Castle Crashers on XBox Live.  I do not expect this to be true for everyone, but I do suspect it's true for enough people that I'm not alone in wanting a more engaging tabletop experience than a game such as something like Descent can give me.  <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent:_Journeys_in_the_Dark" target="_blank">Descent: Journeys in the Dark - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia</a>Something else to consider is that people may be interested in rpgs, but that may not mean they are necessarily interested in the rpg you want to play.  In one of the towns nearby where I live, you'd be very hard pressed to find a D&D campaign.  I'm not sure if it's some sort of cultural oddity unique to the local area, but the most common groups you'll find will be those who play Rogue Trader (<a href="http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_minisite.asp?eidm=78" target="_blank">Fantasy Flight Games [Rogue Trader] - Leading publisher of board, card, and roleplaying games.</a> ), GURPS (which is nice for me because I also play) (<a href="http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/" target="_blank">GURPS: Generic Universal RolePlaying System</a> ), and Pathfinder (which I recently learned to play) (<a href="http://paizo.com/pathfinder" target="_blank">http://paizo.com/pathfinder</a> ).  This also applies to those who have not gamed before; different people get interested in rpgs for different reasons, and not every game approaches the process in the same way, so a different game might speak to someone on a level that catches their interest.</blockquote>

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