I never expected this, but the majority of my players are co-workers. Before, my players were a mix of friends and “friends of friends.” I’ve also had luck with game specific discords (e.g. Blades in the Dark) that have their own channels for finding players & games.

So, this gaming group started a Me, My Wife, Friend A, Friend B, and a couple that friend B met more recently.

For various reasons, Friend B dropped out about the time I started running a new game for the group. A little later we decided we wanted to slowly increase our numbers to buffer the ability to play if someone was missing.

I picked up a player from Reddit who had never had a chance to get into a PF2E game, all his attempts had met with DOA groups and I wanted to improve his experience. Later on, I picked up another player from Royal Road, she and I both publish serials there and follow each other’s stories, and started chatting.

Edit: Oh, and all this is online, excepting the couples none of us live within convenient distance from each other. Though ironically, the other couple moved last year and are now only two hours away from us.

I have learned through many years and many tears that it is better to find people who want to play RPGs and make friends with them than it is to try to make your friends play RPGs.

RPGs are a bigger commitment than many people realize. It’s more like joining a sports team than playing a board game. Most of them require you to show up several times a month, learn some rules, and remember what happened last time. That’s too much for some people, but your friends are more likely to over extend themselves because they want to be nice to you. So you get the perennial scheduling problems. It should surprise no one that people who didn’t go out of their way to find the game are less reliable than people who did.

So my greatest successes have been playing with strangers who became friends. One pandemic crew were from a band’s fan discord. One was put together from the reddit /lfg post. Another was from a fan discord for the specific game I wanted to play.

It also doesn’t help that D&D is so mega popular it sucks the air out of the room for everyone else. For a long time I wanted to play Fate, but I couldn’t find players and trying to convert D&D players was an uphill battle. I would go directly to a fate fan site or discord if I wanted to do a game of it now.

I run only online so that flavors my methods

1. I’ve run all my games the last five or so years on the same discord server. When games have ended some have left it while others have stayed. So I have a base pool of players already vetted once and are (was) available when I run my games.

2. Generic group finding communities. The LFG here for example, but also various discords.

3. System specific Discord/forums. Here there are folks already invested in the strange system I want to run, only need to find those available.

4. VTT specific channels

I ran my (P1e) game in a game store for years so I recruited there. I actually had a huge turn-over of players because people wanted to try it then didn’t stick with it. One session had 11 players because everyone that was interested was interested THAT DAY for some reason. Next session was down to eight, then we settled on seven basically until the store went under.

I occasionally get someone referred to me, but it’s rare. I scout anyone and everyone that even hints at playing TTRPG, though I don’t necessarily recruit them if it’s obvious we don’t want to play the same game or same style of game. (I’ll certainly invite people who play mechanically adjacent games though as long as they’re interested in the same style of game.)

I just had a player inform me today that he’s not going to be available to rejoin the campaign for at least a year, if at all, so I’m probably going to be visiting the local game store to try recruitment there. I may need to run some one-shots at the store or something to get people interested in my game since it’s presently a home game and I don’t want to move back to a game store (too much stuff to move as I use a lot of materials). I have one guy I might try to recruit as a player as well, as I was introduced to him as someone who could help him with exposure to the system a few years ago. His schedule doesn’t seem open enough to join a regular game though.

When I first started playing, I played my first D&D3.5e game with people I met through meetup. This was back in 2004. Meetup might still be an option though.

I would not be above online recruiting but I only run face-to-face games, and I’m in Charleston, WV so it’s rare that I’m in online groups with anyone within a two hour drive outside of Facebook. Facebook is an option, of course.

I also am not above trying to convert friends and family, though my immediate family has made it abundantly clear that they’re not interested. I had an old friend in my previous campaign for awhile but I’m pretty sure he would have rather gone out to dinner, watched a movie, or played some video games, so he didn’t stick around.

Really, I’d recruit just about anywhere. I’d not be above recruiting strangers that I just heard mention TTRPGs, though I might be more discerning with a home game than when I was running the game at a game store.

The first campaign I’ve ever played advertised on a community related to a play podcast, tangentially related to D&D, and It was incredibly fun! It fizzled out, but it opened a whole new world for me.

I invited the GM and some players from that campaign, my best friend and advertised it on the same community. That campaign I started like 3 months after I first played TTRPGs, and is the longest campaign I’ve played, over 2 and a half years long! Very invested players

I’ve directed a campaign by responding to a group looking for GM but it fizzled out because I didn’t prep as much as I’d want, though mostly because players realised they didn’t have enough time to play. All others I’ve directed have been with the same people, or extended group related to the first campaign I’ve gm.

Looking for them was a bit harder, and I I used any and all tools; roll20, internet forums, discord, Reddit, you name it, I’ve probably used it. My most played was in like 2021-2022 with a different game every day, gm every Saturday and other Sunday, and player all days minus Sunday (yup, double dipping).

I had a lot of fun but I don’t think it was that healthy in hindsight because I was dealing with depression and It was my main way of socialising, and it drained me playing so much yet I always wanted more. Now I have a much more healthy and casual relationship, which I’m happy with

WHEW THAT WAS QUITE LONG TL;DR: I’ve used everything I could to find games as a player, but as a GM it has been very easy and with my usual friend group.