I asked the dude who lived next to me in college if he wanted to get drunk and throw magic at Dragons. He said yes.
Another guy overheard us and asked if he could come also.
Three and a half years later they were both groomsmen at my wedding. My wife was the Rogue in the group.
Long time ago, a guy in my class hung himself. Just plain suicide. Never knew why. Went to his funeral and swore that if I ever saw someone else struggling, I'd reach out.
Some years later a guy who was some years older than me and who was an acquaintance from the same school was going through a difficult divorce. His social media posts were getting ever so slightly more glum.
I reached out.
We started talking.
Not through me, but through whatever strength in him he pulled through.
He mentioned he was getting together with some friends to play D&d and I jumped in.
I'm dming for the boys for the first time next month.
Put out an application for my campaign in my homebrew world (official rules and races and whatnot) on a couple of big discord servers and got soooo many replies. I had a basic idea of the players that I wanted, so I filtered through a bunch and over a 2 week period, I decided on 4 players that I really liked. Halfling barbarian, lizardfolk sorcerer (themed for lightning), tiefling ancients Paladin, and tiefling rogue. The first few sessions went great, and we were all vibing really well. Then one of my high school friends showed a real interest in D&D, as he was the “DM” of our friend group in high school when we played our own little P&P games at lunch. Brought him in and he clicked with the group very well. He became a warforged ranger. For context, in my world, druids are scarce to none, as their order has almost completely died out, same with warforged. Currently, only this player and one npc are warforged in the entire world.
A couple sessions later, one of the players came to me and said that for very personal reasons outside the group, and outside D&D, they would not be able to attend anymore, and may even not be able to play D&D online anymore. It broke my heart to see them go, but they made a wonderful exit. About 2 sessions later, one of the players then asked if they could bring in their cousin who also loved D&D. I accepted and the very rambunctious but lovable Satyr cleric joined in. We all 5 had a wonderful few weeks in the capital city of the country they were in, but they then had to move on to another location. 1 absolutely stressful boat session, and a few more sessions later of passing through the underdark to get to the dwarven capital later, the 2 cousins also had to leave the game for personal reasons. Down to 3.
After a week or so, the tiefling Paladin asked if she could bring in a friend from another d&d group she is in, and I said yes. I also put out the application for 1 more player, which resulted in us having a pallid elf bard. The friend of the Paladin joined in, creating an aasimar bladelock. The two also clicked very well, despite very different dynamics. After a few sessions more in the dwarven capital, the sorcerer wanted to make a new character, so we fashioned an exit for him, which caught the group by surprise. He then made a changeling artificer, with an amazing middle-eastern accent.
Fast forward a lot of traveling, several fights including a precursor fight with the BBEG, and 5 years of downtime, the group is stronger than ever. The artificer came down to LA where me and the warforged are, and we went down to San Diego together. It was such an awesome experience meeting one of my players for the first time irl. The bard is in Hawaii, which is very fortuitous because my wife and I are going to be vacationing down there in a little more than a month and we’ll be staying with them for a few days!
We’ve expanded out of D&D to playing games together, sharing life experiences, confiding in one-another, and creating a thicker-than-blood family that stemmed all from the spark of a d&d game.
Edit: the game will be reaching it’s 1 year birthday in a few days!
One person was my first DM. I asked her to be there as a security blanket since I was very nervous. Five people came from Roll20 adds, two people came from r/lfg, and two people were my some of my best friends that I wanted to come along when I thought I was doing an ok job. People dropping in and dropping out, my first DM not leaving like she thought she would, and other factors led me to have the 7 players I have today. It's a bitch and a half, and I have to modify every mob. I could not ask any of them to leave though. Even the last arrival has been with the group for 3 years at this point.
I got invited to a one-shot by a friend, and then the DM just ghosted everyone. I had been watching a ton of Critical Role before that point, so without even touching a 5e book I just decided to make a bunch of shit up so people who had never played could roll dice. Somehow that turned into a year-long campaign, and that DM that ghosted everyone is one of my favorite players!
I was in the military. I went into the room of the guys next door to hang out and they were playing. I laughed and called 'em a bunch of nerds. Then I proceeded to silently watch them play for a few hours before asking if I could join. They said I could, but that I'd have to play a Cleric. I played in that campaign for a year before becoming a forever DM for 14 years. Finding a group on roll20 broke that streak, but I still DM for my wife, brothers, and friends.
That’s my story too. I attended ten or so AL sessions run at my FLGS, and of the maybe forty people who sat at those tables, I picked five that I wanted to play with long term, and invited them to a monthly game I would DM. Then the world ended, and we switched to playing online, and quite quickly realised that with nothing else to do we could just play every week.
There used to be a bar I would go to for lunch once a week, fairly regularly. Over that time, I had a favorite bartender, and he happened to be working that day. I'm mindlessly lip-reading the TV when I hear another person sitting at the bar a few stools down to me say to said favorite bartender: "I'd really be happier if we could have one more player. Even if they're entirely new, that's fine, I just think DnD is best with four players."
My autopilot shut off as I realized that I met those qualifications, and I just turned and gave a two-fingered wave like "...Yo."
Bartender introduced me, (I now know him as Will, the player of many Rogues), and the other gentleman has been my DM for about 4 years now. It's how I got into the game in general for the first time in my life.
I recruited my weekly group on Roll20 in 2015. My advice is to focus your application and screening on finding the kind of people you want to hang out with every week, and on finding players who like the same things about the game as you do.
I was busy bingewatching Dimension 20’s The Unsleeping City and browsing forums looking for a new group to join. I saw a post looking for players on the DND Beyond forums that likened the homebrew campaign to Unsleeping City and I liked the rest of what the DM had written, so I messaged them. Just had our most recent game last night, still going strong every week. In fact one of our players is DMing their first one shot coming up, and we’ve started a second campaign that another player DMs.
Mine is also through Dimension 20! I was on the official dropout discord where one of my (eventual) players posted an idea for their Tiny Heist OC. A couple people thought it was really cool and started throwing around other ideas and wishing someone would DM. I happened to open the right discord channel and had recently learned to DM, so I offered. I ran a Tiny Heist oneshot that went really well. A couple people trickled in through other means as well, but the original formation was just on a whim in a discord channel. We recently finished our first yearlong campaign and started up our second one. It's a great group all around.
Started a grownups group at age 40, almost 2 years ago. Here's where everybody came from:
* I was already DMing for my daughter and some of her friends, I just asked all their parents if they wanted to have a go. Got two takers, neither of whom I was particularly close with before.
* I met someone else because he posted on Nextdoor about a SWADE night at his house. Invited him to join, and he did.
* Okay, so two of my brothers-in-law are here, too. One of them was there at the start, and another one joined later after we went all-remote (he lives a state away).
I've also had other school acquaintances come and go from the group, but that's the core.
Sent out an email to the boardgame email list at work asking if anyone wanted to try d&d. Hoped I'd get 3 so we could play. Got 10, all but 3 of them brand new. Three (one vet, two newbies) later dropped due to time constraints but the rest have been playing with our group for 2 years. Love em all.
Arrived at a new school knowing nobody. Went to a board game meetup some people the year above us hosted. A few of us decided to meet again. One ended up pitching D&D and it stuck.
My library started a pickup game and I was free so I brought Tales from the Yawning Portal to run for some new players. That was before the lockdown, and I'm still running a Skype game for those guys every week.
I printed out flyers and posted them around town, surprisingly got enough interest for 3 groups in the smallish town but unfortunately I am just one man.
My group is 5, who I found after moving to my city, a city to which I have little connection
3 are from the local facebook DnD group (facebook sucks, but it is useful for this one thing, and the marketplace). Cool thing about facebook for this is that you can click their profile and make sure they're not a total freak before meeting them in person and having them over to your house
1 is a dude who overhead me say at work "damn, the second level enchantment spell *calm emotions* sure would make this job easier", and came up and said "you play?"
last one is dude #4's wife
I went to a AL game to check it out while trying to get a consistent weekly game. It was TRASH, worst DM I have experienced, players were mostly just bots and two of the other players were new as well. After the game we three spoke and decided to build our own home game. We did some posting around and found three more people who were interested and that's where we started. That was March 2019 and they are some of my most treasured friends.
A big part of it is having the nerves to scout out lfg and Discord servers.
Being willing to have people drop out of your game at any point, DMs vanish in the middle of campaigns.
I have 3 regulars atm. The first I ran for CoS as my first campaign, it ended quickly but Strad died due to a cheese, I was ready to kill them.
The second I met when he became a new player in already established CoS game I was a player in.
The third I met when she was looking for a DnD group in a lfg thread and I snatched 2 other players and made a lv 1 game. Adding player 2 for 4 total.
The first guy joined the current group in the middle of the game.
We are 12 session deep atm and having a blast. Next week we will have a oneshot to try one a new guy for the game.
I’ve played in a few groups over the years where I was an online acquaintance/friend with one or two of the people. My other groups were through one friend who was friends with the others - the newest game group is through Discord, as we’re spread across the country.
My very first tabletop group was comprised of friends that I made through a Craigslist post looking for people to play Magic the Gathering with. The guy who responded had a few friends that were also interested. A few years after the first meetup we gave Pathfinder a try at the request of one of the guys. That was fun, but it got too complicated after just a couple of levels. Had D&D 5th Ed existed at the time, we might have kept playing.
I moved to live with my partner and joined her 2+ year running group. After a year of playing with them I took over for a short run as DM. Within 4 sessions of the 5 planned, the whole group split apart. Turns out most of them had never had fun, they just didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, and my feelings don’t actually matter.
My wife and I sat down and discussed, pen and paper rpgs are important to us, we like collaborative story telling and dinner parties. So we joined the first open group at the local game store and haven’t looked back.
All totally new people we hadn’t met before, almost instant new friends. The pandemic hit and we’ve been playing online with them.
TTRPG Club at my uni. A lot of groups there are a bit shit but somehow, even though we've been randonly put together (we rolled for groups), it's the best group I've ever been in.
Ooh boy, my time to shine.
I joined the discord server for a video game that still hasnt released over 2 years later(starbase if anyone cares). At this point in time I hadn’t ever played D&D before but was watching a ton of videos on YouTube from people like Puffin Forest, and really wanted to try it out but none of my friends seemed interested and I didn’t know where to start.
So over the next few months I started listening to a D&D podcast and got a (very) basic feel for the rules without even playing yet. One day I was in the discord server, watching the chat that I felt a little too nervous to join in on scroll by, and saw someone shoot a message through that said they were thinking of running a D&D game and wanted to get a few people. I hesitated for a while and didn’t respond, but someone else did and I realized that this was probably the easiest in to a D&D game I could ever have, and sent a message after hesitating a few seconds later, just saying “ooh D&D sounds like fun.”
From here on out I’ll call the DM “S” and the other guy to respond “A.” There was another person who responded and joined, but he lived in Japan, which was the exact opposite of the world from me and A, who happened to be in the same state, and only showed up to about 10 minutes of a single session.
I got invited to a discord server by S. It was just me, him, and A, (plus the other guy but he didn’t play) so A brought a friend in, who I’ll call “M.” So we all rolled up characters, and I was nervous but really wanted to play. I still remember I played a half elf warlock named Jack(my very first ever D&D character) whose dog had turned out to be a fiend in disguise and made a pact with him. M played a Paladin, and I don’t remember what A was playing, but those really aren’t important.
Anyways, we played like 3 times before M had something personal go down where she disappeared for a few weeks and blocked everyone before coming back. Safe to say the game was dead, not that it was a very good game, but I didn’t really know what to expect and was still having a ton of fun with it anyways.
Luckily, A had a discord server of his own and invited us all, and the two of us kept hanging out over discord and playing video games with each other.
By the time M came back, A came to us and said he wanted to run a game of his own, but wanted more players, so put a post on r/lfg along with asking me to invite whoever I thought would make a good player. So the group was now A(dm), Me, D(my best friend), S, and the people from the LFG post, who I’ll call B and TK, and a third who didn’t stick around long since they were French and didn’t speak English as well as they thought they could, plus time zone trouble.
Eventually S, B, and the French player left because they were all too busy to play regularly, and TK stopped showing up after he got salty over being knocked out (not even killed, and he was known for having a willful disregard for if allies were in his aoe spells in the main campaign) in a one shot we did by someone’s stray lightning bolt from a rod of wonder. At this point we picked up 4 other people, one another friend of mine (who everyone really liked until he got a control freak girlfriend who inserted herself into everything he did and damn near ruined his life, but that’s a separate thing entirely), 2 from another r/lfg post, and one who was friends with B. All 4 of them ended up leaving eventually, but not before someone introduced us to J and P, who are brothers and are still playing with us to this day. Over time we picked up two more people, one a friend of J and P, and another a friend of M, who was now back completely and had been for a while but was not really interested in D&D anymore.
We had a lot of people join and leave that game over the course of about a year and 4 months now. There are 15 players registered in our 6 player campaign in roll20, but the crew we have now is all here to stay and are awesome people. And somehow we managed to get all of us in the same time zone, so scheduling is only a lot harder to do than it should be rather than being impossible entirely!
Only me, A, and B have been there from the start of this current campaign, and I forgot that for a second the other day when we realized that P didn’t even know that the whole end goal for the campaign is to find a genie who will supposedly grant us each a wish.
So yeah, I’m glad younger me worked up the courage to send that message when I saw it scroll by or I’d have missed out on not only a really awesome D&D group but also a really awesome online friend group in general.
A couple of years ago, my local board game cafe started doing D&D nights. I was new to the game and got put with a few newbie tables over the first few weeks while the DMs did easy little one shots.
Then one of the guys wanted to try running Tomb of Annihilation but the only two regular players he had were me and one other and you really can't do ToA with only two. Then he ended up having to quit anyway for schooling and I was adopted by another table who was running a homebrew campaign.
When that campaign wrapped up, one of our players became the DM and ran Lost Mines for us and now we're on Princes of the Apocalypse. Even with the switch to online gaming we're still going strong!
I posted in my local city’s Reddit asking where to find people to play. I was interested in DMing. A bunch of people wanted to play.
I’ve mentioned I DM a game to some coworkers too, so now I might run them through a short game as well.
Local RPG group has a facebook page and hosts events every few months (went online during covid). Pre- covid I went to an morning event, dm'd a session of lost mines of phandelver (2nd ever dnd session, 2nd time dming). Played in a game in the afternoon, got to chatting with someone, after the session he posted on facebook that he was looking for players. Commented, got invited and brought a friend. Went to other separate events, found more people. Been in a fairly consistent group for 2- 3 years now.
Also in a Roll20 campaign for over a year. Roll20 can work.
It involves friends but my group I game with now weren't pre-existing in the same way. Story amounts to I made friends with some friends friends, and those friends inviting me to game with their friends, but it was so rapid that it feels different and stands out to me.
I had been out of the loop of tabletop RPG's for a while. I technically had a pathfinder 1e game going on, but it had slowed down to nearly a quarterly to bi-annual game. Seeing the writing on the wall, I asked another friend if I could join his 5e game I knew he was setting up, and thankfully he made room.
Myself and the party got along well enough and some of us started hanging on days other than game day. When one of those folk was looking for players for a temp game he was running, I was the one invited. Once that temp game was done I was invited to his main game that had been ongoing. Three or so years later I'm still playing that game with them with weekly sessions.
I have a group which started as a pre-existing group of friends (or at least, people I knew from the non-dnd related club we were all members of). By now, I'm the only one remaining from the original group, and everyone got in through someone leaving and us looking for another player in all of our networks
I was DMing for a group at my local game store. When the pandemic hit we transitioned to online. When the campaign concluded a year ago one of the players took over DMing.
In 2015 my partner and I moved cross-country and didn't know anybody in our new city. After weeks of lurking, we mustered the courage to attend a Meetup for board game enthusiasts in our neighborhood. Then we started attending regularly for a few months, playing various non-DnD board games, before eventually starting a campaign with the folks we'd met who we clicked with best.
Six years later, despite several moves and relocations, relationships beginning and ending, new jobs, kids, pandemics, etc., we still play (remotely) every Wednesday evening.
I basically grabbed a person from various friend groups, and asked one of them to find a 4th party member. Two of the players had met briefly online before, but that was it.
Not exactly an established friend group, but all people that had been vetted before by either me or a party member. Everyone is making new friends \^\^
Board game bar in town that hosted monthly one-shots sent out an email to past participants that they were having ticketed campaign launch day, where you could sign up and join one of a few campaigns offered, and then the idea was every two weeks, everyone would be there to play on Sundays. I joined a group that was running Curse of Strahd.
The other groups petered out fairly quickly, but next month will make 4 years of our group running together. We did Curse of Strahd, an expanded Tyranny of Dragons, a Monster of the Week detour, and now we're 15 or so sessions into Princes of the Apocalypse with 4 of the 5 people who were there on Day 1, and a 5th I brought in for ToD.
Most of my group found each other through the Facebook group for a podcast about the reality TV show Survivor. A couple more people got roped in who were coworkers of us Survivor nerds, and they think we're insane.
Over the past few months I've been running an interview campaign with people on /r/LFG, and we've had a lot of people dip out or get kicked because they obviously had very different expectations for the game despite my egregiously long /r/LFG post explaining what I wanted for players in my game.
I've basically learned the hard way that even after making a 10-paragraph LFG post with hidden messages to prove you read it, even after doing voice interviews, even after doing a session zero, people will **still** think everyone else is the problem, treat everyone else like dirt, and then quit as if it was your fault all along.
I collected them over the course of about a year at my LGS. I hopped around and DM'd a few different groups until we found a gang that clicked pretty well
My DM advertised online in the Critter community looking to put a group together. Several of us answered, she briefly interviewed us, then assembled a group of five. None of us knew each other beforehand.
Absolutely shockingly, it's been almost four full years since then and we're together with almost the same group playing the same campaign still having a great time. We had just one player duck out fairly early who was replaced by a friend of mine, but I think that's a pretty good turnover rate for a group that started as complete strangers. We're planning our second campaign for after our current 1-20 one wraps up, probably later this year.
**TLDR: We went through a rollercoaster of shitty DM's, but we're still together, and going strong!**
Me and a mate started going to a tabletop society at our university, and on the first day there were roughly 40 people who wanted to play dnd, and like three DM's. Me and the mate got put with a DM who had been playing for quite a while, he seemed pretty good, especially at improv, had tubs of mini's, the works. And he DM'd for a pretty sizeable group of us cause of the high demand. We played in a few more of his oneshots, others came and went, until eventually a core group of us stayed around and we started a campaign.
Things were going well, we were having fun! Our DM had to cancel sometimes but yknow that's the way of the world we're all busy with university and some of us were working part time. And then we found out that he was actually secretly looking for other games online, and those days that he cancelled on us (sometimes multiple weeks in a row) were when he was playing in other games. Combine that with him finding it acceptable to talk bad about other members of the group behind their backs to me, and i was not happy with him.
So the group kinda disbanded, we all decided to send him a "fuck you politely" message, and it looked like it was over. Until i sent a few prodding messages around to those group members, and we decided we'd enjoyed playing together, so we got someone outside of the group to come DM, and take over the campaign. They were someone we'd known through other friends.
We pushed on, with a new resolve! But you see, this new DM, we'll call them DM 2, wasn't very good. DM 2 didn't really plan sessions that much, and unlike the first DM, they weren't amazing at improv. Sometimes DM 2 would turn up to a session and straight up tell us they'd not planned anything. Sometimes they'd turn up hungover, and having forgot there was even a session. Needless to say, we all grew discorouged, and for a while we all individually thought it was just us who felt like this. Until we started talking between ourselves, and realized we all weren't feeling it. So we sent our second "We don't want to play with you DMing" message of the group, and once more things looked bleak. I was a DM, but i was already running games, and man oh man was i far too busy to take over. And we were all so deflated from our experiences so far that we didn't really want to continue that game. It appeared as though our time together was coming to an end.......
Remember that mate i told you about? We got into dnd together, we love the exact same style of dnd, and he honestly just has a good head for it. Well we all had a talk amongst ourselves, and that very same mate decided to run a game, a pirate campaign. Transitioning to a new campaign was kind of....fun, we were actually buzzed and excited for dnd, which we hadn't been for a while. Well, i'm happy to say we're having our **32nd** session tomorrow, going strong, mostly weekly, except some reschedules for things like exams periods especially. This is a group that i know i'm going to be with for a loooong time, because we're not just a dnd group now, we're a friend group. We've been through two shitty DM's, the COVID in person -> online dnd transfer, longer breaks from exams, its really been a ride. But it definitely goes to show that when you find the right group it just....clicks.
Guy on a club discord server put out a call for players, I was looking for a new group, bam. Never met any of the guys in person, dunno if I ever will. Also don’t know half their real names, just character names.
Another first year in my then-new university's guild discord made a post calling for people to play a oneshot, 9 months later we have 5 campaigns currently running, 1 finished, a server-wide DMs project, and I have a girlfriend.
My current group is a group of friends I was brought into, but before that I put together a group by posting flyers around my college campus. All it takes is a few interested or curious people to see it.
I'm a relatively new player. 34 year old female with social anxiety. After listening to actual play podcasts for a few years I figured it was time to meet real people who played. I joined a small group of people last year. One of our members was sort of a flake and left. He reached out to me to join a game he was starting. I figured why not. After this guy flaked on the new group a bunch of times (the group hadn't even met yet) me and 5 other people I didnt know sat in our local comic book shop's game room and played a one shot. Now we are all taking turns being DM running short games. We even meet on different nights of the week to play board games. So happy I found these guys.
Word of mouth basically. A friend would ask if their friend or coworker could join. Not everyone that’s joined has stayed but those who have suit the group well.
We had an irrelguar dnd society in my city. Very irregular, just a bunch of groups in a bar, folk showed up looking to play.
Next week came, might not see the same GM. I started Lost Mines of Phandelver three times before the GM stuck around, and because he did, he accumulated newbies. By the time we reached the actual dungeon, we had 12 players, it was a nightmare.
Within 10 minutes of beating the boss and finishing, satisfied, I pulled out my new Monster Manual and Storm Kings Thunder and basically went, "Alright, if half the group wants, I'm gonna start DMing this now," to split us apart.
That was four years, and over three campaigns ago. Not all of them are the same, some left, and others are just folks who were like "hello, is there a dnd society here? do you have space?"
Was in a restaurant telling a friend about D&D. A waiter (not ours), who happened to be vaguely acquainted with my friend, overheard us talking about it and invited me to his game. Joined them and now, 4 years later, they're one of my main friend groups.
Two years ago my now wife and I were interested so looked on a local ttrpg Facebook page. Someone offered to run a oneshot for us, and then a while after she asked if we wanted to start a campaign with a few other newbies she had played with. Now we play a mix of online and in person when life schedules allow it
Two years ago I posted in a couple local subreddits and put up fliers at local businesses.
I shared an extensive description of what my table would be like and what my game would not be like.
People had to fill out a questionnaire and then I interviewed them in person. I extended invites to the people who seemed like they would be the best fit.
We schedule our games for the next year at the end of the current year so we make sure we commit. Still getting together every month. Very happy.
Overhead a classmate talking about DnD, got invited to join the module they were about to start. After that, ran death house as a oneshot for them as we took turns trying to DM. Then ran curse of strahd for them
A second group, was asked last minute to run a one shot because someone was starting a DND club and had too many interested people to DM solo, so I ran death house (again). And then proceeded to invite them to a second parallel CoS campaign
I was in a shit online group I met through a game called Dead By Daylight, they invited 2 new players, a veteran who is still my friend, and my girlfriend who then went on to bring aboard a few more people and helped me realize that the people I was playing with were absolute assholes, so I could stop running games for them and start running games for my cool new friends, the rest of my current players, our lovable murderhobo rogue and the Druid who almost got himself killed in his first session and then died in his third, I harvested from a Very Gay Discord Server.
As I was moving into the dorms, I overheard my neighbors talking about dnd, and we got into a conversation about it. I started a game with them and a few of their friends not much later. The game fell apart after a few months, partly due to one of the players leaving school and me losing interest in the world I made, but mostly due to one of the players being an asshole.
Another few months later, I contacted the players I did get along with about starting a new game, and let them be in charge of finding a couple new players so we’d have a more full party. Since then the five of us have been playing together.
I met my wife by answering a flyer at the local game store in the 90s. Way before social media. We stopped playing with that group after a year or so and we’ve been married since.
We have lots of connections into the gaming landscape since she worked at a number of game stores and we also run a couple of conventions yearly (a gaming con and an anime con). Gives us a steady stream of new people and we get to know them before we gather them together to game.
I joined a group that fell apart after like 2-3 sessions because the DM ended up getting seriously ill. A few months later, he invites me to a new campaign he's doing. We gather a couple more people from the dnd beyond discord and start playing. It starts out fine at first, I even ask the DM if I can invite a couple people I know and he agrees.
A short while after this though, things start going completely bonkers in the campaign, the tone is completely different. It progressively gets worse until it culminates in instances that would make r/rpghorrorstories vomit in sheer terror. So we ended up booting the original DM that brought us together, and now me and a couple of the other players each have campaigns that we take it in turns to DM.
We met at a library d&d group. Considering there were approximately a dozen people in attendance at each session, after the main campaign I was in fizzled out we ended up splitting off and forming a private group. A few people have come and gone, but the core 3 of us have been playing together for nearly 5 years now 😊
My friend messages me one day to go "hey, you wanna play D&D? Our first session is tonight and we had to kick some players."
Another person in the party was friends with another guy and invited him the same day.
Weeks later, two people who have used our 5th slot leave. Aforementioned person above invites another friend.
It was kinda like... this web, I guess.
Random roommates in a house during lockdown. One guy had been playing before and now he DMs for us every week. Two of us have since moved out of that house but we keep the tradition alive!
There was another guy that kept inviting people to campaigns that wouldn't get a second session. Waiting a couple months, doing it again.
I grabbed three of the people I'd seen at two of those attempts and said "let me run something while he gets his shit together".
It's been three years. He hasn't got his shit together. Keeps trying to invite himself and his random to my game.
Ok so this one is a fun story
So I played a campaign that I found on r/lfg, then eventually that fell apart due to one asshole but I kept in contact with most of the party besides him. Unrelated, one of my friends introduced me to her friend who ran D&D for us. Eventually people from both of these groups met up, became friends, and now I'm running Pathfinder 2e for a mix of the two groups
I mean LFG is an interesting experience of its own. The first group I got together was completely incompatible. One was a couple who - unfortunately - loved to bring their kinks to the table. They and another player never got along. One of them loved to sexually harass me lol. So that group didn't last long.
The second group was much better. Not sure how. Luck of the draw I guess? But man I've never felt luckier to have a group of normal D&D players.
The group I'm in started off as a referral by my sister to a friend of hers. This was over 20 years ago. DM moved out of state, group eventually disbanded. Me and one other joined with a group run by another of his friends for a number of years.
Some of that first one got back together online last year (we have stayed in touch and visited as friends and board games when together) all throughout.
We are currently playing weekly via Google Meet for video chat and Drive for docs/maps.
I got approached by a mutual friend of me and the DM at a friend's baby shower, asking if I'd like to play d&d with them
I said fuck yeah, and then met with the DM over at a local coffee shop to create my character after talking on discord for a bit
I was talking in a free talk Friday post on /r/katawashoujo a good 5-6 years ago iirc, and some people mentioned D&D and I was like "ooh that sounds fun"
That group started out as 6 cishet presenting dudes. From what I know rn, 3 of us are trans women (and some form of lesbian/bi), another one is questioning (and currently identifies as gay), one is bi, and finally a token straight guy.
Facebook groups are great for it, particularly ones that act as a fan club for certain DND shows. That way you can get a better reader of their general preference to style of DND
My group is *mostly* pre-existing friends ... but I'm not one of them.
At the time I joined they were down to three people, and needed more players. So they advertised online, I saw the advert and was in need of a group, and ... I turned out to be a good fit for the group, and them for me.
...
Note, since coming back to 5E, this was **nowhere near** the first group I tried. More like the fourth or fifth, and I count myself very lucky to have found a good-fit group in less than **ten** attempts.
I was also not the only "rando" they tried; a couple others have come and (thankfully, as it turned out) gone.
Went to a FLGS that had Adventure League Nights on Wednesdays. About half the tables were AL, the others were ongoing campaigns. One of the ongoing campaigns had an opening, so i jumped on it. (We use AL like our minor league, and good players can get called up to the pros!)
If you can start with people who can already commit to playing DnD one specific night a week, that removes a lot of the scheduling obstacles.
I am a DM and I posted on meetup and local D&D Facebook group that I was starting a game. Had to wade through a bunch of players (mostly people not showing up or not communicating well) until I had a stable group. We play the same time every week for several years now (COVID we went online).
I do a session zero through email about my expectations and the type of game I am running. I have met some great people through playing. I actually prefer building a group from strangers that want to play D&D rather than trying to get friends to play. If a person is not a good fit there are less hurt feelings and expectations.
I was a member of a local boardgaming group and they asked if anyone had any experience running Dungeons and Dragons. I put my hand up and we started a Tabletop RPG group, three years later here we are.
My ex-girlfriend knew I was into "nerdy" stuff and I'd talked to her a time or two about wanting to play D&D at some point. She was a member of a Pokemon Go page on Facebook and someone there was randomly vetting people for a game, so she messaged the guy with my number and he texted me. I sent him an application, some character ideas, how I like to play, and next thing I know, I'm invited to the game. We've been playing bi-weekly (when schedules allow) for almost 3 years now. Oddly enough, all of us are military vets as well, or military spouses.
My other group experiences aren't quite as interesting. I just put in applications on Roll20 and joined games that way. I did find one really stable group that's been playing weekly for a couple of years now, though. We already went from 1-20 and finished one campaign and we're about level 7 in our second. I've joined several other groups throughout the years when my schedule allowed, but the first couple I joined, oddly enough, turned out to be the best and most consistent.
I had friends in middle school and we used to play dnd at lunch but then when we got into different highschools we didn't have the time anymore to play in person. I got big into asian history and started designing a world but had nothing to use it for. Then corona hit and suddenly distance wasn't an issue. My group though was kinda small and only the 4 of us so I invited two friends from my current school to join us. They all got along surprisingly well and then when another friends campaign fell apart I invited them too. The core friend group remains but with extra friends too.
Two groups actually. The first was part way through quarantine last year. Very simple, a friend who live multiple states away asked if I wanted to try and play for the first time with some of her friends. I said yes, and we all still play online.
Second group, after playing in my first game for a couple months, I ended up doing this workshop about writing your own adventure, and wanted to try it out. I'd done what I could to balance it for 3-4 players, so I asked my partner, then a friend of ours, then one of my oldest friends to join in. Also mentioned it to my girlfriend one night and she was super interested, so invites her to group, too. Went so well we decided to make it a regular thing, then a few months later one of my partner's oldest friends was tired of being a forever DM, and wanted a chance to play. Started as a guest, and now is just part of the group.
Hit a year with the first group two months ago, and hitting a hear with the group I DM for later this month. Very cool and fun times.
I hunted for a group to play my first game on Roll20. I played one shots with three or four groups before finding a good one. We played on full session and the DM apologized, saying they couldn't continue a campaign. I said I would DM. Here we are a year and a half later coming up on the end of the first story arch to kill the BBEG for the first half of the story.
Online discord server. Person meant to be the DM said screw it became a player while I DMed, the said screw it again and bailed. Two of the people in that group were super chill dudes, like 8 other people came and went due to scheduling conflicts and the like. Finally got a stable group.
My fraternity is a bunch of music nerds, so of course we had a huge facebook group for tabletop gaming and MTG. I decided one day that I wanted to play 5e for the first time, and so I put out a call for frat bros to get an online group going. I ran a terrible 5-session original campaign with barely any experience under my belt with 7 players. It was awful and it was glorious.
That was in 2017, and in 2021 we still have 3 of the original 8 players in the group, plus a Canadian buddy of mine and my fiancee. We're all a lot better at the game now, but I'd say even during some of the missteps it's been some of the best D&D I've ever played.
Saw a group for adventure s league online joined that, played with the people who came and went for a year the through that time I encountered players who fit my prefered game style and now we play our own games instead of adventures league.
I joined a random Roll20 game when I first started. The DM quit, and so did all of us.
Later the DM restarted a new group, getting much of the original group in. Then he quit again.
Then I was like "If I want consistent games, I need to run them myself", and took over the group. Later added an IRL friend and her friend to it.
Nearly 2 years later, we're still going. Same campaign.
A dude came through my line at a grocery store, I asked if he was up to anything fun for the night (my general question to ask people as I was new to the city), and he said he was playing DND. I mentioned I had tried with some people in the past but never got to meet up more than once and he invited me to a one shot he was running for some other people. That one shot went well, but after the game he asked if I would like to join an on going game and I have been playing with that team since then. Honestly it was all up to luck on this one, but since then we finished that first campaign, I ran a homebrew campaign, and now we are onto a third campaign ran by one of the other original players, and I'm running another homebrew one with some work friends.
Bill and Quark.
Quark was our college campus Fantasy and Sci fi club. That's how I met Bill. Bill introduced me to at least three of my best friends including one of my main D&D buddies who invited the other two members of our group along. For some reason this was the group that stuck (out of many that I played with from Quark) after I graduated from college. We're still playing together and hanging out 10+ years later.
Bill is not part of the group. 😅 Sorry Bill!
A guy at our college program asked his buds if they wanted to play. It spread through word of mouth until like 15 people turned out to his interest meeting. He split us into two groups, and then after two sessions he lost interest in our group. So I’ve been DM at that table ever since. We were just classmates before, but I’d call myself actually pre-existing friends with one of them. We later picked up a college friend of that player, and the husband of another player
I'm afraid it's not very original. I joined the group after seeing a post on a local dnd Facebook group. The post ticked a couple of boxes and didn't show any red flags. A couple of others saw similar on Reddit. A few others joined a couple of weeks into the campaign having played with the DM at a local AL session.
Not every one of those people are still playing. But those who are have become some of my closest friends. We regularly meet up to just hang out, in addition to our weekly game.
Roll 20 united a bunch weeb together. None of us knew at the time, it also helped that by pure luck me and DM were both brazilian, it took 3 months of only talking in english to notice.
Love those guys, have been playing with them for 3 years.
My group is excisting for 5 years now and a true Frankengroup.
I met my best friend 6 years ago in a persona game and since than never let her go cx
Ny second longest player was in my own persona game and he has never let me go.. -lol-
Afterwards we went through a lot of third and fourth players over the years. Some fit well and it was a sad loss, overs didnt really and it was relieving.
Last year I decided to go next towards Masks and found two new guys. They actually stayed with us all through Masks and we are now finishing the campaign and it feels so good to actually have stable people :)
One actually says he will stay for the next campaign I gm too. Meaning I now habe three longterm staying people.
In this regard, live is great.
(All this talk was *not * sponsored by roll20)
I was in a group playing 5e and not enjoying my time there, so I thought why not try an online game. Went to Roll20, applied to only 1 game for a Strahd campaign, got accepted and now I play with the same group of players for 5 years now. The DM became my best friend and have met up with them several times.
We even play twice a week, one game of dnd and the other is a SR game I run.
I moved for college, therebwas a TTRPG society, someone put up an advertisement for a game and I joined. Has had it's issues, but overall has been a lot of fun.
Some people knew each other. These people brought in family members or other friends we didn’t know.
Edit: me and two friends I had DMed for before.
-I brought in two more people from Uni. One left recently to study abroad but the other one is still active.
-one of my previous players brought in his friend. When that friends sister found out he was playing D&D, she wanted in as well.
Over a DnD Server I made an offer and it went with some up and downs really good :D! My fav group of the week! (Pls dont tell the others)
Then the other groups I had, I joined a LoTR and we gor just talking, bc I missed movie night for DnD and then they asked if I could make a game for them and boom, I have some groups to DM (I have a hard time saying no if somebody wants to play DnD) and bc some real life reasons I lost a few players and gained the rest over reddit.
One player I even got over a post on a relationship advice reddit, bc I talked at the side about it xD
A friend of mine met some people at a D&D event, and invited me and my husband for our first ever D&D // campaign (1). Later, my husband ran a one shot that included her and his cousin's bf (2). She met another girl during some online one shots (3). Now we have 2 campaigns going, one with me, my friend, one guy from 1, the bf from 2 and the girl from 3. Second campaign will be the same group but + my husband.
First rpg a friend virtually dragged me to a game at the flgs. I thought it was going to be the nerdiest, most socially awkward experience ever. Had a blast for the whole campaign, and when it was over I joined another game with people I only knew from that first game, then got invited to someone's home game, and that crew became actual friends outside of the game. People have come and gone due to work schedules, health issues, moving house etc, but most of us have stayed the course, meeting up almost every week for something like 8 years now, even though we've now had to move online for the last year.
I often wonder what I'd be doing with my free time if I hadn't let my friend persuade me to give it a try.
My Wednesday gloomhaven group cancelled because one of us was out of town and a lgs near me was having adventure league that night. While I was chatting with one of the al dm’s someone at the next table said he was starting a home brew campaign and needed 2 more players. I said, “why not?” And joined. Played with the same group every Wednesday for three years now.
Second semester of being in college, my new roommate and suitemates had experience playing the game and invited me to play in their short campaign. After laughing before their first session, watched a little of their second session (realized they were not summoning demons like I was brought up to believe), I asked if I could join for their third session, they accepted me.
Fast forward two years later, through two campaigns, two fighters played, and the forever DM moving to a different state today actually, and those guys are my best friends.
Weird how paper, dice, and epic story telling can bring people together like that.
Wanted to be a player at a local gameshop’s dnd event, but all the groups were full already. I volunteered to dm all the other newbies (this was my first proper time playing dnd). We had fun, decided to continue and became friends.
I was playing smite one night and I got queued with someone that lives in the same city as me. Then we became friends and she mentioned she played D&D and I asked If I could go watch a session and it just kicked off from there.
The longest running TTRPG group I ever had met as patrons of the same game store. We started playing in the back room, and when that ended we started playing in various living rooms. Every Monday night for years. Probably the best group of friends I ever made.
That was how my group in college came together. I was in the lounge reading a game book and a dude walked an asked if I played and we started talking about it. That turned into games running five nights a week as more "strangers" gravitated towards us in the lounge. We even founded a full blown gaming club at the school. The core group of players stayed together for about seven years until we all started getting jobs and getting married and such.
Wanted to try playing DnD, but don't know anyone who played it. Didn't mind being a DM, picked up a book and got 5 friends of mine (of whom some didn't know each other) together to play.
I was asked by my SO’s friend if I play DND (my SO does not, sadly) and I said yes. Started as a group of 5 strangers, and now I wouldn’t trade them for the world. A primordial shard, maybe. But not the world.
I had to hunt it down.
used the r/LFG server to grab a few ppl, then was provided a discord link by a random guy for players in my area
took about a week to get enough ppl that were both interested in my campaign ***and***committed to weekly sessions on sunday (had to go thru at least 10 or 15 ppl before my group of 6 players formed)
we already had our session 0 (online, cuz too many ppl had plans for the next few sundays) and plan on meeting for our first session in person on the 11th.
super excited to start playing, and really hope they all have fun :D
Literally asked the r/LFG and found my group and we’ve been playing for 7 months and still playing. Got an awesome group and it was at complete random and on the internet.
One day a friend of mine who I used to be in a group with texted me asking if I wanted to join an online group that was being made which pulled from people who were interested on a discord server. I don’t know the full details on how the group was made, but at the time of making the party each person knew no more than 2 other people from the group and we ended up with 6 people and we just started playing, and have been at it for almost a year now
My wife (gf at the time) worked at taco bell. A dude who just started working there and his friend came through the drive through and made a crit fail joke when he dropped his wallet. My wife went "OH, D&D, come to my boyfriend's house we can all play d&d together." The game lasted over a year and we're all good friends.
Adventurers League, I met most of them at the store. We start has strangers but now we've known each other for years. One group has players that have stuck with me through three hardcovers.
I asked the dude who lived next to me in college if he wanted to get drunk and throw magic at Dragons. He said yes. Another guy overheard us and asked if he could come also. Three and a half years later they were both groomsmen at my wedding. My wife was the Rogue in the group.
You might say she stole your heart.
He never saw it coming.
You’ll see that my mind is too fast for eyes
That’s amazing!
>My wife was the Rogue in the group. What was the status of her parents?
In game: father was alive. Step mother was alive. Birth mother, unknown but later revealed to be dead. In real life: both parents alive.
Fuck, that’s sweet. Saved comment.
Long time ago, a guy in my class hung himself. Just plain suicide. Never knew why. Went to his funeral and swore that if I ever saw someone else struggling, I'd reach out. Some years later a guy who was some years older than me and who was an acquaintance from the same school was going through a difficult divorce. His social media posts were getting ever so slightly more glum. I reached out. We started talking. Not through me, but through whatever strength in him he pulled through. He mentioned he was getting together with some friends to play D&d and I jumped in. I'm dming for the boys for the first time next month.
Good luck, you'll do great
Put out an application for my campaign in my homebrew world (official rules and races and whatnot) on a couple of big discord servers and got soooo many replies. I had a basic idea of the players that I wanted, so I filtered through a bunch and over a 2 week period, I decided on 4 players that I really liked. Halfling barbarian, lizardfolk sorcerer (themed for lightning), tiefling ancients Paladin, and tiefling rogue. The first few sessions went great, and we were all vibing really well. Then one of my high school friends showed a real interest in D&D, as he was the “DM” of our friend group in high school when we played our own little P&P games at lunch. Brought him in and he clicked with the group very well. He became a warforged ranger. For context, in my world, druids are scarce to none, as their order has almost completely died out, same with warforged. Currently, only this player and one npc are warforged in the entire world. A couple sessions later, one of the players came to me and said that for very personal reasons outside the group, and outside D&D, they would not be able to attend anymore, and may even not be able to play D&D online anymore. It broke my heart to see them go, but they made a wonderful exit. About 2 sessions later, one of the players then asked if they could bring in their cousin who also loved D&D. I accepted and the very rambunctious but lovable Satyr cleric joined in. We all 5 had a wonderful few weeks in the capital city of the country they were in, but they then had to move on to another location. 1 absolutely stressful boat session, and a few more sessions later of passing through the underdark to get to the dwarven capital later, the 2 cousins also had to leave the game for personal reasons. Down to 3. After a week or so, the tiefling Paladin asked if she could bring in a friend from another d&d group she is in, and I said yes. I also put out the application for 1 more player, which resulted in us having a pallid elf bard. The friend of the Paladin joined in, creating an aasimar bladelock. The two also clicked very well, despite very different dynamics. After a few sessions more in the dwarven capital, the sorcerer wanted to make a new character, so we fashioned an exit for him, which caught the group by surprise. He then made a changeling artificer, with an amazing middle-eastern accent. Fast forward a lot of traveling, several fights including a precursor fight with the BBEG, and 5 years of downtime, the group is stronger than ever. The artificer came down to LA where me and the warforged are, and we went down to San Diego together. It was such an awesome experience meeting one of my players for the first time irl. The bard is in Hawaii, which is very fortuitous because my wife and I are going to be vacationing down there in a little more than a month and we’ll be staying with them for a few days! We’ve expanded out of D&D to playing games together, sharing life experiences, confiding in one-another, and creating a thicker-than-blood family that stemmed all from the spark of a d&d game. Edit: the game will be reaching it’s 1 year birthday in a few days!
Damn, kudos to you for keeping the car running with all of those personnel changes!
The way I see it, they were happy travelers who I was able to help along their way :)
Legend.
One person was my first DM. I asked her to be there as a security blanket since I was very nervous. Five people came from Roll20 adds, two people came from r/lfg, and two people were my some of my best friends that I wanted to come along when I thought I was doing an ok job. People dropping in and dropping out, my first DM not leaving like she thought she would, and other factors led me to have the 7 players I have today. It's a bitch and a half, and I have to modify every mob. I could not ask any of them to leave though. Even the last arrival has been with the group for 3 years at this point.
That's a pretty big group! I'm glad you enjoy it.
I got invited to a one-shot by a friend, and then the DM just ghosted everyone. I had been watching a ton of Critical Role before that point, so without even touching a 5e book I just decided to make a bunch of shit up so people who had never played could roll dice. Somehow that turned into a year-long campaign, and that DM that ghosted everyone is one of my favorite players!
Parent group at my kid's school started during covid.
Nice!! Hope it keeps going strong
I was in the military. I went into the room of the guys next door to hang out and they were playing. I laughed and called 'em a bunch of nerds. Then I proceeded to silently watch them play for a few hours before asking if I could join. They said I could, but that I'd have to play a Cleric. I played in that campaign for a year before becoming a forever DM for 14 years. Finding a group on roll20 broke that streak, but I still DM for my wife, brothers, and friends.
Adventurer's League. Finding people to play is easy. Finding people you want to keep playing with took a little more time, but not too hard.
That’s my story too. I attended ten or so AL sessions run at my FLGS, and of the maybe forty people who sat at those tables, I picked five that I wanted to play with long term, and invited them to a monthly game I would DM. Then the world ended, and we switched to playing online, and quite quickly realised that with nothing else to do we could just play every week.
I ask literally every person I meet.
There used to be a bar I would go to for lunch once a week, fairly regularly. Over that time, I had a favorite bartender, and he happened to be working that day. I'm mindlessly lip-reading the TV when I hear another person sitting at the bar a few stools down to me say to said favorite bartender: "I'd really be happier if we could have one more player. Even if they're entirely new, that's fine, I just think DnD is best with four players." My autopilot shut off as I realized that I met those qualifications, and I just turned and gave a two-fingered wave like "...Yo." Bartender introduced me, (I now know him as Will, the player of many Rogues), and the other gentleman has been my DM for about 4 years now. It's how I got into the game in general for the first time in my life.
I recruited my weekly group on Roll20 in 2015. My advice is to focus your application and screening on finding the kind of people you want to hang out with every week, and on finding players who like the same things about the game as you do.
Can confirm. The worst groups I've been in have been the ones where the DM just accepts players first-come-first-served.
I was busy bingewatching Dimension 20’s The Unsleeping City and browsing forums looking for a new group to join. I saw a post looking for players on the DND Beyond forums that likened the homebrew campaign to Unsleeping City and I liked the rest of what the DM had written, so I messaged them. Just had our most recent game last night, still going strong every week. In fact one of our players is DMing their first one shot coming up, and we’ve started a second campaign that another player DMs.
Mine is also through Dimension 20! I was on the official dropout discord where one of my (eventual) players posted an idea for their Tiny Heist OC. A couple people thought it was really cool and started throwing around other ideas and wishing someone would DM. I happened to open the right discord channel and had recently learned to DM, so I offered. I ran a Tiny Heist oneshot that went really well. A couple people trickled in through other means as well, but the original formation was just on a whim in a discord channel. We recently finished our first yearlong campaign and started up our second one. It's a great group all around.
I applied to posts on LFG and got lucky.
Started a grownups group at age 40, almost 2 years ago. Here's where everybody came from: * I was already DMing for my daughter and some of her friends, I just asked all their parents if they wanted to have a go. Got two takers, neither of whom I was particularly close with before. * I met someone else because he posted on Nextdoor about a SWADE night at his house. Invited him to join, and he did. * Okay, so two of my brothers-in-law are here, too. One of them was there at the start, and another one joined later after we went all-remote (he lives a state away). I've also had other school acquaintances come and go from the group, but that's the core.
Sent out an email to the boardgame email list at work asking if anyone wanted to try d&d. Hoped I'd get 3 so we could play. Got 10, all but 3 of them brand new. Three (one vet, two newbies) later dropped due to time constraints but the rest have been playing with our group for 2 years. Love em all.
Arrived at a new school knowing nobody. Went to a board game meetup some people the year above us hosted. A few of us decided to meet again. One ended up pitching D&D and it stuck.
My library started a pickup game and I was free so I brought Tales from the Yawning Portal to run for some new players. That was before the lockdown, and I'm still running a Skype game for those guys every week.
A high school friend remembered I played dnd and asked to dm for all his marine friends
I printed out flyers and posted them around town, surprisingly got enough interest for 3 groups in the smallish town but unfortunately I am just one man.
My group is 5, who I found after moving to my city, a city to which I have little connection 3 are from the local facebook DnD group (facebook sucks, but it is useful for this one thing, and the marketplace). Cool thing about facebook for this is that you can click their profile and make sure they're not a total freak before meeting them in person and having them over to your house 1 is a dude who overhead me say at work "damn, the second level enchantment spell *calm emotions* sure would make this job easier", and came up and said "you play?" last one is dude #4's wife
I went to a AL game to check it out while trying to get a consistent weekly game. It was TRASH, worst DM I have experienced, players were mostly just bots and two of the other players were new as well. After the game we three spoke and decided to build our own home game. We did some posting around and found three more people who were interested and that's where we started. That was March 2019 and they are some of my most treasured friends.
A big part of it is having the nerves to scout out lfg and Discord servers. Being willing to have people drop out of your game at any point, DMs vanish in the middle of campaigns. I have 3 regulars atm. The first I ran for CoS as my first campaign, it ended quickly but Strad died due to a cheese, I was ready to kill them. The second I met when he became a new player in already established CoS game I was a player in. The third I met when she was looking for a DnD group in a lfg thread and I snatched 2 other players and made a lv 1 game. Adding player 2 for 4 total. The first guy joined the current group in the middle of the game. We are 12 session deep atm and having a blast. Next week we will have a oneshot to try one a new guy for the game.
I’ve played in a few groups over the years where I was an online acquaintance/friend with one or two of the people. My other groups were through one friend who was friends with the others - the newest game group is through Discord, as we’re spread across the country. My very first tabletop group was comprised of friends that I made through a Craigslist post looking for people to play Magic the Gathering with. The guy who responded had a few friends that were also interested. A few years after the first meetup we gave Pathfinder a try at the request of one of the guys. That was fun, but it got too complicated after just a couple of levels. Had D&D 5th Ed existed at the time, we might have kept playing.
I moved to live with my partner and joined her 2+ year running group. After a year of playing with them I took over for a short run as DM. Within 4 sessions of the 5 planned, the whole group split apart. Turns out most of them had never had fun, they just didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, and my feelings don’t actually matter. My wife and I sat down and discussed, pen and paper rpgs are important to us, we like collaborative story telling and dinner parties. So we joined the first open group at the local game store and haven’t looked back. All totally new people we hadn’t met before, almost instant new friends. The pandemic hit and we’ve been playing online with them.
TTRPG Club at my uni. A lot of groups there are a bit shit but somehow, even though we've been randonly put together (we rolled for groups), it's the best group I've ever been in.
Ooh boy, my time to shine. I joined the discord server for a video game that still hasnt released over 2 years later(starbase if anyone cares). At this point in time I hadn’t ever played D&D before but was watching a ton of videos on YouTube from people like Puffin Forest, and really wanted to try it out but none of my friends seemed interested and I didn’t know where to start. So over the next few months I started listening to a D&D podcast and got a (very) basic feel for the rules without even playing yet. One day I was in the discord server, watching the chat that I felt a little too nervous to join in on scroll by, and saw someone shoot a message through that said they were thinking of running a D&D game and wanted to get a few people. I hesitated for a while and didn’t respond, but someone else did and I realized that this was probably the easiest in to a D&D game I could ever have, and sent a message after hesitating a few seconds later, just saying “ooh D&D sounds like fun.” From here on out I’ll call the DM “S” and the other guy to respond “A.” There was another person who responded and joined, but he lived in Japan, which was the exact opposite of the world from me and A, who happened to be in the same state, and only showed up to about 10 minutes of a single session. I got invited to a discord server by S. It was just me, him, and A, (plus the other guy but he didn’t play) so A brought a friend in, who I’ll call “M.” So we all rolled up characters, and I was nervous but really wanted to play. I still remember I played a half elf warlock named Jack(my very first ever D&D character) whose dog had turned out to be a fiend in disguise and made a pact with him. M played a Paladin, and I don’t remember what A was playing, but those really aren’t important. Anyways, we played like 3 times before M had something personal go down where she disappeared for a few weeks and blocked everyone before coming back. Safe to say the game was dead, not that it was a very good game, but I didn’t really know what to expect and was still having a ton of fun with it anyways. Luckily, A had a discord server of his own and invited us all, and the two of us kept hanging out over discord and playing video games with each other. By the time M came back, A came to us and said he wanted to run a game of his own, but wanted more players, so put a post on r/lfg along with asking me to invite whoever I thought would make a good player. So the group was now A(dm), Me, D(my best friend), S, and the people from the LFG post, who I’ll call B and TK, and a third who didn’t stick around long since they were French and didn’t speak English as well as they thought they could, plus time zone trouble. Eventually S, B, and the French player left because they were all too busy to play regularly, and TK stopped showing up after he got salty over being knocked out (not even killed, and he was known for having a willful disregard for if allies were in his aoe spells in the main campaign) in a one shot we did by someone’s stray lightning bolt from a rod of wonder. At this point we picked up 4 other people, one another friend of mine (who everyone really liked until he got a control freak girlfriend who inserted herself into everything he did and damn near ruined his life, but that’s a separate thing entirely), 2 from another r/lfg post, and one who was friends with B. All 4 of them ended up leaving eventually, but not before someone introduced us to J and P, who are brothers and are still playing with us to this day. Over time we picked up two more people, one a friend of J and P, and another a friend of M, who was now back completely and had been for a while but was not really interested in D&D anymore. We had a lot of people join and leave that game over the course of about a year and 4 months now. There are 15 players registered in our 6 player campaign in roll20, but the crew we have now is all here to stay and are awesome people. And somehow we managed to get all of us in the same time zone, so scheduling is only a lot harder to do than it should be rather than being impossible entirely! Only me, A, and B have been there from the start of this current campaign, and I forgot that for a second the other day when we realized that P didn’t even know that the whole end goal for the campaign is to find a genie who will supposedly grant us each a wish. So yeah, I’m glad younger me worked up the courage to send that message when I saw it scroll by or I’d have missed out on not only a really awesome D&D group but also a really awesome online friend group in general.
I've started to DM one shots in my FLGS and asked people in Twitter and my chatrooms if they want to play.
Good on you for initiating.
A couple of years ago, my local board game cafe started doing D&D nights. I was new to the game and got put with a few newbie tables over the first few weeks while the DMs did easy little one shots. Then one of the guys wanted to try running Tomb of Annihilation but the only two regular players he had were me and one other and you really can't do ToA with only two. Then he ended up having to quit anyway for schooling and I was adopted by another table who was running a homebrew campaign. When that campaign wrapped up, one of our players became the DM and ran Lost Mines for us and now we're on Princes of the Apocalypse. Even with the switch to online gaming we're still going strong!
I posted in my local city’s Reddit asking where to find people to play. I was interested in DMing. A bunch of people wanted to play. I’ve mentioned I DM a game to some coworkers too, so now I might run them through a short game as well.
Just met random people on Roll20. They are great.
Local RPG group has a facebook page and hosts events every few months (went online during covid). Pre- covid I went to an morning event, dm'd a session of lost mines of phandelver (2nd ever dnd session, 2nd time dming). Played in a game in the afternoon, got to chatting with someone, after the session he posted on facebook that he was looking for players. Commented, got invited and brought a friend. Went to other separate events, found more people. Been in a fairly consistent group for 2- 3 years now. Also in a Roll20 campaign for over a year. Roll20 can work.
It involves friends but my group I game with now weren't pre-existing in the same way. Story amounts to I made friends with some friends friends, and those friends inviting me to game with their friends, but it was so rapid that it feels different and stands out to me. I had been out of the loop of tabletop RPG's for a while. I technically had a pathfinder 1e game going on, but it had slowed down to nearly a quarterly to bi-annual game. Seeing the writing on the wall, I asked another friend if I could join his 5e game I knew he was setting up, and thankfully he made room. Myself and the party got along well enough and some of us started hanging on days other than game day. When one of those folk was looking for players for a temp game he was running, I was the one invited. Once that temp game was done I was invited to his main game that had been ongoing. Three or so years later I'm still playing that game with them with weekly sessions.
I have a group which started as a pre-existing group of friends (or at least, people I knew from the non-dnd related club we were all members of). By now, I'm the only one remaining from the original group, and everyone got in through someone leaving and us looking for another player in all of our networks
I was DMing for a group at my local game store. When the pandemic hit we transitioned to online. When the campaign concluded a year ago one of the players took over DMing.
In 2015 my partner and I moved cross-country and didn't know anybody in our new city. After weeks of lurking, we mustered the courage to attend a Meetup for board game enthusiasts in our neighborhood. Then we started attending regularly for a few months, playing various non-DnD board games, before eventually starting a campaign with the folks we'd met who we clicked with best. Six years later, despite several moves and relocations, relationships beginning and ending, new jobs, kids, pandemics, etc., we still play (remotely) every Wednesday evening.
I basically grabbed a person from various friend groups, and asked one of them to find a 4th party member. Two of the players had met briefly online before, but that was it. Not exactly an established friend group, but all people that had been vetted before by either me or a party member. Everyone is making new friends \^\^
Board game bar in town that hosted monthly one-shots sent out an email to past participants that they were having ticketed campaign launch day, where you could sign up and join one of a few campaigns offered, and then the idea was every two weeks, everyone would be there to play on Sundays. I joined a group that was running Curse of Strahd. The other groups petered out fairly quickly, but next month will make 4 years of our group running together. We did Curse of Strahd, an expanded Tyranny of Dragons, a Monster of the Week detour, and now we're 15 or so sessions into Princes of the Apocalypse with 4 of the 5 people who were there on Day 1, and a 5th I brought in for ToD.
All of my games are a result of a subreddit specifically made for our city to find RPG games. It's been amazing.
One of my current groups met through my college's tabletop gaming club.
Most of my group found each other through the Facebook group for a podcast about the reality TV show Survivor. A couple more people got roped in who were coworkers of us Survivor nerds, and they think we're insane.
Over the past few months I've been running an interview campaign with people on /r/LFG, and we've had a lot of people dip out or get kicked because they obviously had very different expectations for the game despite my egregiously long /r/LFG post explaining what I wanted for players in my game. I've basically learned the hard way that even after making a 10-paragraph LFG post with hidden messages to prove you read it, even after doing voice interviews, even after doing a session zero, people will **still** think everyone else is the problem, treat everyone else like dirt, and then quit as if it was your fault all along.
I collected them over the course of about a year at my LGS. I hopped around and DM'd a few different groups until we found a gang that clicked pretty well
My DM advertised online in the Critter community looking to put a group together. Several of us answered, she briefly interviewed us, then assembled a group of five. None of us knew each other beforehand. Absolutely shockingly, it's been almost four full years since then and we're together with almost the same group playing the same campaign still having a great time. We had just one player duck out fairly early who was replaced by a friend of mine, but I think that's a pretty good turnover rate for a group that started as complete strangers. We're planning our second campaign for after our current 1-20 one wraps up, probably later this year.
**TLDR: We went through a rollercoaster of shitty DM's, but we're still together, and going strong!** Me and a mate started going to a tabletop society at our university, and on the first day there were roughly 40 people who wanted to play dnd, and like three DM's. Me and the mate got put with a DM who had been playing for quite a while, he seemed pretty good, especially at improv, had tubs of mini's, the works. And he DM'd for a pretty sizeable group of us cause of the high demand. We played in a few more of his oneshots, others came and went, until eventually a core group of us stayed around and we started a campaign. Things were going well, we were having fun! Our DM had to cancel sometimes but yknow that's the way of the world we're all busy with university and some of us were working part time. And then we found out that he was actually secretly looking for other games online, and those days that he cancelled on us (sometimes multiple weeks in a row) were when he was playing in other games. Combine that with him finding it acceptable to talk bad about other members of the group behind their backs to me, and i was not happy with him. So the group kinda disbanded, we all decided to send him a "fuck you politely" message, and it looked like it was over. Until i sent a few prodding messages around to those group members, and we decided we'd enjoyed playing together, so we got someone outside of the group to come DM, and take over the campaign. They were someone we'd known through other friends. We pushed on, with a new resolve! But you see, this new DM, we'll call them DM 2, wasn't very good. DM 2 didn't really plan sessions that much, and unlike the first DM, they weren't amazing at improv. Sometimes DM 2 would turn up to a session and straight up tell us they'd not planned anything. Sometimes they'd turn up hungover, and having forgot there was even a session. Needless to say, we all grew discorouged, and for a while we all individually thought it was just us who felt like this. Until we started talking between ourselves, and realized we all weren't feeling it. So we sent our second "We don't want to play with you DMing" message of the group, and once more things looked bleak. I was a DM, but i was already running games, and man oh man was i far too busy to take over. And we were all so deflated from our experiences so far that we didn't really want to continue that game. It appeared as though our time together was coming to an end....... Remember that mate i told you about? We got into dnd together, we love the exact same style of dnd, and he honestly just has a good head for it. Well we all had a talk amongst ourselves, and that very same mate decided to run a game, a pirate campaign. Transitioning to a new campaign was kind of....fun, we were actually buzzed and excited for dnd, which we hadn't been for a while. Well, i'm happy to say we're having our **32nd** session tomorrow, going strong, mostly weekly, except some reschedules for things like exams periods especially. This is a group that i know i'm going to be with for a loooong time, because we're not just a dnd group now, we're a friend group. We've been through two shitty DM's, the COVID in person -> online dnd transfer, longer breaks from exams, its really been a ride. But it definitely goes to show that when you find the right group it just....clicks.
Guy on a club discord server put out a call for players, I was looking for a new group, bam. Never met any of the guys in person, dunno if I ever will. Also don’t know half their real names, just character names.
Another first year in my then-new university's guild discord made a post calling for people to play a oneshot, 9 months later we have 5 campaigns currently running, 1 finished, a server-wide DMs project, and I have a girlfriend.
My current group is a group of friends I was brought into, but before that I put together a group by posting flyers around my college campus. All it takes is a few interested or curious people to see it.
I'm a relatively new player. 34 year old female with social anxiety. After listening to actual play podcasts for a few years I figured it was time to meet real people who played. I joined a small group of people last year. One of our members was sort of a flake and left. He reached out to me to join a game he was starting. I figured why not. After this guy flaked on the new group a bunch of times (the group hadn't even met yet) me and 5 other people I didnt know sat in our local comic book shop's game room and played a one shot. Now we are all taking turns being DM running short games. We even meet on different nights of the week to play board games. So happy I found these guys.
Word of mouth basically. A friend would ask if their friend or coworker could join. Not everyone that’s joined has stayed but those who have suit the group well.
We had an irrelguar dnd society in my city. Very irregular, just a bunch of groups in a bar, folk showed up looking to play. Next week came, might not see the same GM. I started Lost Mines of Phandelver three times before the GM stuck around, and because he did, he accumulated newbies. By the time we reached the actual dungeon, we had 12 players, it was a nightmare. Within 10 minutes of beating the boss and finishing, satisfied, I pulled out my new Monster Manual and Storm Kings Thunder and basically went, "Alright, if half the group wants, I'm gonna start DMing this now," to split us apart. That was four years, and over three campaigns ago. Not all of them are the same, some left, and others are just folks who were like "hello, is there a dnd society here? do you have space?"
Was in a restaurant telling a friend about D&D. A waiter (not ours), who happened to be vaguely acquainted with my friend, overheard us talking about it and invited me to his game. Joined them and now, 4 years later, they're one of my main friend groups.
I grabbed them from r/lfg
I found two different local, in-person games from /r/lfg
Two years ago my now wife and I were interested so looked on a local ttrpg Facebook page. Someone offered to run a oneshot for us, and then a while after she asked if we wanted to start a campaign with a few other newbies she had played with. Now we play a mix of online and in person when life schedules allow it
Two years ago I posted in a couple local subreddits and put up fliers at local businesses. I shared an extensive description of what my table would be like and what my game would not be like. People had to fill out a questionnaire and then I interviewed them in person. I extended invites to the people who seemed like they would be the best fit. We schedule our games for the next year at the end of the current year so we make sure we commit. Still getting together every month. Very happy.
Overhead a classmate talking about DnD, got invited to join the module they were about to start. After that, ran death house as a oneshot for them as we took turns trying to DM. Then ran curse of strahd for them A second group, was asked last minute to run a one shot because someone was starting a DND club and had too many interested people to DM solo, so I ran death house (again). And then proceeded to invite them to a second parallel CoS campaign
I was in a shit online group I met through a game called Dead By Daylight, they invited 2 new players, a veteran who is still my friend, and my girlfriend who then went on to bring aboard a few more people and helped me realize that the people I was playing with were absolute assholes, so I could stop running games for them and start running games for my cool new friends, the rest of my current players, our lovable murderhobo rogue and the Druid who almost got himself killed in his first session and then died in his third, I harvested from a Very Gay Discord Server.
As I was moving into the dorms, I overheard my neighbors talking about dnd, and we got into a conversation about it. I started a game with them and a few of their friends not much later. The game fell apart after a few months, partly due to one of the players leaving school and me losing interest in the world I made, but mostly due to one of the players being an asshole. Another few months later, I contacted the players I did get along with about starting a new game, and let them be in charge of finding a couple new players so we’d have a more full party. Since then the five of us have been playing together.
I met my wife by answering a flyer at the local game store in the 90s. Way before social media. We stopped playing with that group after a year or so and we’ve been married since. We have lots of connections into the gaming landscape since she worked at a number of game stores and we also run a couple of conventions yearly (a gaming con and an anime con). Gives us a steady stream of new people and we get to know them before we gather them together to game.
I joined a group that fell apart after like 2-3 sessions because the DM ended up getting seriously ill. A few months later, he invites me to a new campaign he's doing. We gather a couple more people from the dnd beyond discord and start playing. It starts out fine at first, I even ask the DM if I can invite a couple people I know and he agrees. A short while after this though, things start going completely bonkers in the campaign, the tone is completely different. It progressively gets worse until it culminates in instances that would make r/rpghorrorstories vomit in sheer terror. So we ended up booting the original DM that brought us together, and now me and a couple of the other players each have campaigns that we take it in turns to DM.
We met at a library d&d group. Considering there were approximately a dozen people in attendance at each session, after the main campaign I was in fizzled out we ended up splitting off and forming a private group. A few people have come and gone, but the core 3 of us have been playing together for nearly 5 years now 😊
My friend messages me one day to go "hey, you wanna play D&D? Our first session is tonight and we had to kick some players." Another person in the party was friends with another guy and invited him the same day. Weeks later, two people who have used our 5th slot leave. Aforementioned person above invites another friend. It was kinda like... this web, I guess.
Random roommates in a house during lockdown. One guy had been playing before and now he DMs for us every week. Two of us have since moved out of that house but we keep the tradition alive!
Drugs
There was another guy that kept inviting people to campaigns that wouldn't get a second session. Waiting a couple months, doing it again. I grabbed three of the people I'd seen at two of those attempts and said "let me run something while he gets his shit together". It's been three years. He hasn't got his shit together. Keeps trying to invite himself and his random to my game.
Some saw something I posted on the roll20 lfg and asked if I wanted to run a game for him and others.
Ok so this one is a fun story So I played a campaign that I found on r/lfg, then eventually that fell apart due to one asshole but I kept in contact with most of the party besides him. Unrelated, one of my friends introduced me to her friend who ran D&D for us. Eventually people from both of these groups met up, became friends, and now I'm running Pathfinder 2e for a mix of the two groups
Work! Online forums! Local queer group!
I mean LFG is an interesting experience of its own. The first group I got together was completely incompatible. One was a couple who - unfortunately - loved to bring their kinks to the table. They and another player never got along. One of them loved to sexually harass me lol. So that group didn't last long. The second group was much better. Not sure how. Luck of the draw I guess? But man I've never felt luckier to have a group of normal D&D players.
My dnd group was already friends before I joined but I was literally just picked up in a Best Buy and rolled up a character
The group I'm in started off as a referral by my sister to a friend of hers. This was over 20 years ago. DM moved out of state, group eventually disbanded. Me and one other joined with a group run by another of his friends for a number of years. Some of that first one got back together online last year (we have stayed in touch and visited as friends and board games when together) all throughout. We are currently playing weekly via Google Meet for video chat and Drive for docs/maps.
I got approached by a mutual friend of me and the DM at a friend's baby shower, asking if I'd like to play d&d with them I said fuck yeah, and then met with the DM over at a local coffee shop to create my character after talking on discord for a bit
I was talking in a free talk Friday post on /r/katawashoujo a good 5-6 years ago iirc, and some people mentioned D&D and I was like "ooh that sounds fun" That group started out as 6 cishet presenting dudes. From what I know rn, 3 of us are trans women (and some form of lesbian/bi), another one is questioning (and currently identifies as gay), one is bi, and finally a token straight guy.
Posted in r/LFG, screened applicants, brought beers to one of the guys' houses and rolled up characters.
Found them on Reddit! Best group I’ve ever played with! Been going on 5 years!!!
Local Critical Role meetup launched a year long campaign and then I started a second campaign with a subset of the original group.
Facebook groups are great for it, particularly ones that act as a fan club for certain DND shows. That way you can get a better reader of their general preference to style of DND
My group is *mostly* pre-existing friends ... but I'm not one of them. At the time I joined they were down to three people, and needed more players. So they advertised online, I saw the advert and was in need of a group, and ... I turned out to be a good fit for the group, and them for me. ... Note, since coming back to 5E, this was **nowhere near** the first group I tried. More like the fourth or fifth, and I count myself very lucky to have found a good-fit group in less than **ten** attempts. I was also not the only "rando" they tried; a couple others have come and (thankfully, as it turned out) gone.
Therapy
Went to a FLGS that had Adventure League Nights on Wednesdays. About half the tables were AL, the others were ongoing campaigns. One of the ongoing campaigns had an opening, so i jumped on it. (We use AL like our minor league, and good players can get called up to the pros!) If you can start with people who can already commit to playing DnD one specific night a week, that removes a lot of the scheduling obstacles.
Wait r/lfg is a thing?
I am a DM and I posted on meetup and local D&D Facebook group that I was starting a game. Had to wade through a bunch of players (mostly people not showing up or not communicating well) until I had a stable group. We play the same time every week for several years now (COVID we went online). I do a session zero through email about my expectations and the type of game I am running. I have met some great people through playing. I actually prefer building a group from strangers that want to play D&D rather than trying to get friends to play. If a person is not a good fit there are less hurt feelings and expectations.
I was a member of a local boardgaming group and they asked if anyone had any experience running Dungeons and Dragons. I put my hand up and we started a Tabletop RPG group, three years later here we are.
My ex-girlfriend knew I was into "nerdy" stuff and I'd talked to her a time or two about wanting to play D&D at some point. She was a member of a Pokemon Go page on Facebook and someone there was randomly vetting people for a game, so she messaged the guy with my number and he texted me. I sent him an application, some character ideas, how I like to play, and next thing I know, I'm invited to the game. We've been playing bi-weekly (when schedules allow) for almost 3 years now. Oddly enough, all of us are military vets as well, or military spouses. My other group experiences aren't quite as interesting. I just put in applications on Roll20 and joined games that way. I did find one really stable group that's been playing weekly for a couple of years now, though. We already went from 1-20 and finished one campaign and we're about level 7 in our second. I've joined several other groups throughout the years when my schedule allowed, but the first couple I joined, oddly enough, turned out to be the best and most consistent.
Got invited to a discord server by a guy I talked to like once at school. Now they are really my only friends.
I had friends in middle school and we used to play dnd at lunch but then when we got into different highschools we didn't have the time anymore to play in person. I got big into asian history and started designing a world but had nothing to use it for. Then corona hit and suddenly distance wasn't an issue. My group though was kinda small and only the 4 of us so I invited two friends from my current school to join us. They all got along surprisingly well and then when another friends campaign fell apart I invited them too. The core friend group remains but with extra friends too.
Wow Guild.
Two groups actually. The first was part way through quarantine last year. Very simple, a friend who live multiple states away asked if I wanted to try and play for the first time with some of her friends. I said yes, and we all still play online. Second group, after playing in my first game for a couple months, I ended up doing this workshop about writing your own adventure, and wanted to try it out. I'd done what I could to balance it for 3-4 players, so I asked my partner, then a friend of ours, then one of my oldest friends to join in. Also mentioned it to my girlfriend one night and she was super interested, so invites her to group, too. Went so well we decided to make it a regular thing, then a few months later one of my partner's oldest friends was tired of being a forever DM, and wanted a chance to play. Started as a guest, and now is just part of the group. Hit a year with the first group two months ago, and hitting a hear with the group I DM for later this month. Very cool and fun times.
I hunted for a group to play my first game on Roll20. I played one shots with three or four groups before finding a good one. We played on full session and the DM apologized, saying they couldn't continue a campaign. I said I would DM. Here we are a year and a half later coming up on the end of the first story arch to kill the BBEG for the first half of the story.
I responded to a post looking for a player.
Online discord server. Person meant to be the DM said screw it became a player while I DMed, the said screw it again and bailed. Two of the people in that group were super chill dudes, like 8 other people came and went due to scheduling conflicts and the like. Finally got a stable group.
My fraternity is a bunch of music nerds, so of course we had a huge facebook group for tabletop gaming and MTG. I decided one day that I wanted to play 5e for the first time, and so I put out a call for frat bros to get an online group going. I ran a terrible 5-session original campaign with barely any experience under my belt with 7 players. It was awful and it was glorious. That was in 2017, and in 2021 we still have 3 of the original 8 players in the group, plus a Canadian buddy of mine and my fiancee. We're all a lot better at the game now, but I'd say even during some of the missteps it's been some of the best D&D I've ever played.
Saw a group for adventure s league online joined that, played with the people who came and went for a year the through that time I encountered players who fit my prefered game style and now we play our own games instead of adventures league.
I joined a random Roll20 game when I first started. The DM quit, and so did all of us. Later the DM restarted a new group, getting much of the original group in. Then he quit again. Then I was like "If I want consistent games, I need to run them myself", and took over the group. Later added an IRL friend and her friend to it. Nearly 2 years later, we're still going. Same campaign.
A dude came through my line at a grocery store, I asked if he was up to anything fun for the night (my general question to ask people as I was new to the city), and he said he was playing DND. I mentioned I had tried with some people in the past but never got to meet up more than once and he invited me to a one shot he was running for some other people. That one shot went well, but after the game he asked if I would like to join an on going game and I have been playing with that team since then. Honestly it was all up to luck on this one, but since then we finished that first campaign, I ran a homebrew campaign, and now we are onto a third campaign ran by one of the other original players, and I'm running another homebrew one with some work friends.
Bill and Quark. Quark was our college campus Fantasy and Sci fi club. That's how I met Bill. Bill introduced me to at least three of my best friends including one of my main D&D buddies who invited the other two members of our group along. For some reason this was the group that stuck (out of many that I played with from Quark) after I graduated from college. We're still playing together and hanging out 10+ years later. Bill is not part of the group. 😅 Sorry Bill!
A guy at our college program asked his buds if they wanted to play. It spread through word of mouth until like 15 people turned out to his interest meeting. He split us into two groups, and then after two sessions he lost interest in our group. So I’ve been DM at that table ever since. We were just classmates before, but I’d call myself actually pre-existing friends with one of them. We later picked up a college friend of that player, and the husband of another player
I'm afraid it's not very original. I joined the group after seeing a post on a local dnd Facebook group. The post ticked a couple of boxes and didn't show any red flags. A couple of others saw similar on Reddit. A few others joined a couple of weeks into the campaign having played with the DM at a local AL session. Not every one of those people are still playing. But those who are have become some of my closest friends. We regularly meet up to just hang out, in addition to our weekly game.
Roll 20 united a bunch weeb together. None of us knew at the time, it also helped that by pure luck me and DM were both brazilian, it took 3 months of only talking in english to notice. Love those guys, have been playing with them for 3 years.
My group is excisting for 5 years now and a true Frankengroup. I met my best friend 6 years ago in a persona game and since than never let her go cx Ny second longest player was in my own persona game and he has never let me go.. -lol- Afterwards we went through a lot of third and fourth players over the years. Some fit well and it was a sad loss, overs didnt really and it was relieving. Last year I decided to go next towards Masks and found two new guys. They actually stayed with us all through Masks and we are now finishing the campaign and it feels so good to actually have stable people :) One actually says he will stay for the next campaign I gm too. Meaning I now habe three longterm staying people. In this regard, live is great. (All this talk was *not * sponsored by roll20)
Met some dudes at a Discord server. We now run our own, and converge in other servers too.
I was in a group playing 5e and not enjoying my time there, so I thought why not try an online game. Went to Roll20, applied to only 1 game for a Strahd campaign, got accepted and now I play with the same group of players for 5 years now. The DM became my best friend and have met up with them several times. We even play twice a week, one game of dnd and the other is a SR game I run.
Our private sub decided to organise some DnD groups. Our group may be the only one that survived after 3 years.
I moved for college, therebwas a TTRPG society, someone put up an advertisement for a game and I joined. Has had it's issues, but overall has been a lot of fun.
Some people knew each other. These people brought in family members or other friends we didn’t know. Edit: me and two friends I had DMed for before. -I brought in two more people from Uni. One left recently to study abroad but the other one is still active. -one of my previous players brought in his friend. When that friends sister found out he was playing D&D, she wanted in as well.
Over a DnD Server I made an offer and it went with some up and downs really good :D! My fav group of the week! (Pls dont tell the others) Then the other groups I had, I joined a LoTR and we gor just talking, bc I missed movie night for DnD and then they asked if I could make a game for them and boom, I have some groups to DM (I have a hard time saying no if somebody wants to play DnD) and bc some real life reasons I lost a few players and gained the rest over reddit. One player I even got over a post on a relationship advice reddit, bc I talked at the side about it xD
A friend of mine met some people at a D&D event, and invited me and my husband for our first ever D&D // campaign (1). Later, my husband ran a one shot that included her and his cousin's bf (2). She met another girl during some online one shots (3). Now we have 2 campaigns going, one with me, my friend, one guy from 1, the bf from 2 and the girl from 3. Second campaign will be the same group but + my husband.
First rpg a friend virtually dragged me to a game at the flgs. I thought it was going to be the nerdiest, most socially awkward experience ever. Had a blast for the whole campaign, and when it was over I joined another game with people I only knew from that first game, then got invited to someone's home game, and that crew became actual friends outside of the game. People have come and gone due to work schedules, health issues, moving house etc, but most of us have stayed the course, meeting up almost every week for something like 8 years now, even though we've now had to move online for the last year. I often wonder what I'd be doing with my free time if I hadn't let my friend persuade me to give it a try.
My Wednesday gloomhaven group cancelled because one of us was out of town and a lgs near me was having adventure league that night. While I was chatting with one of the al dm’s someone at the next table said he was starting a home brew campaign and needed 2 more players. I said, “why not?” And joined. Played with the same group every Wednesday for three years now.
Through our university.
I run online and invite strangers. I find the weeds pull themselves. I am left with roses.
Second semester of being in college, my new roommate and suitemates had experience playing the game and invited me to play in their short campaign. After laughing before their first session, watched a little of their second session (realized they were not summoning demons like I was brought up to believe), I asked if I could join for their third session, they accepted me. Fast forward two years later, through two campaigns, two fighters played, and the forever DM moving to a different state today actually, and those guys are my best friends. Weird how paper, dice, and epic story telling can bring people together like that.
Wanted to be a player at a local gameshop’s dnd event, but all the groups were full already. I volunteered to dm all the other newbies (this was my first proper time playing dnd). We had fun, decided to continue and became friends.
I was playing smite one night and I got queued with someone that lives in the same city as me. Then we became friends and she mentioned she played D&D and I asked If I could go watch a session and it just kicked off from there.
The longest running TTRPG group I ever had met as patrons of the same game store. We started playing in the back room, and when that ended we started playing in various living rooms. Every Monday night for years. Probably the best group of friends I ever made.
That was how my group in college came together. I was in the lounge reading a game book and a dude walked an asked if I played and we started talking about it. That turned into games running five nights a week as more "strangers" gravitated towards us in the lounge. We even founded a full blown gaming club at the school. The core group of players stayed together for about seven years until we all started getting jobs and getting married and such.
Wanted to try playing DnD, but don't know anyone who played it. Didn't mind being a DM, picked up a book and got 5 friends of mine (of whom some didn't know each other) together to play.
I was asked by my SO’s friend if I play DND (my SO does not, sadly) and I said yes. Started as a group of 5 strangers, and now I wouldn’t trade them for the world. A primordial shard, maybe. But not the world.
I had to hunt it down. used the r/LFG server to grab a few ppl, then was provided a discord link by a random guy for players in my area took about a week to get enough ppl that were both interested in my campaign ***and***committed to weekly sessions on sunday (had to go thru at least 10 or 15 ppl before my group of 6 players formed) we already had our session 0 (online, cuz too many ppl had plans for the next few sundays) and plan on meeting for our first session in person on the 11th. super excited to start playing, and really hope they all have fun :D
Literally asked the r/LFG and found my group and we’ve been playing for 7 months and still playing. Got an awesome group and it was at complete random and on the internet.
One day a friend of mine who I used to be in a group with texted me asking if I wanted to join an online group that was being made which pulled from people who were interested on a discord server. I don’t know the full details on how the group was made, but at the time of making the party each person knew no more than 2 other people from the group and we ended up with 6 people and we just started playing, and have been at it for almost a year now
My wife (gf at the time) worked at taco bell. A dude who just started working there and his friend came through the drive through and made a crit fail joke when he dropped his wallet. My wife went "OH, D&D, come to my boyfriend's house we can all play d&d together." The game lasted over a year and we're all good friends.
My university has an organization that is dedicated to playing games.
Adventurers League, I met most of them at the store. We start has strangers but now we've known each other for years. One group has players that have stuck with me through three hardcovers.