Gamer Recruitment Tools

Getting new players or finding a new game master is rarely easy. Recruiting a gaming group when you’ve moved can be even harder. In the past I’ve been lucky enough to encounter someone else who does my recruiting for me. But with my last move I had to do it myself. Today I’ll share some of the gamer recruitment tools out there that can help you accomplish the same.

Being an introvert, it's always been a bit hard for me to make new friends. And with a two-year old to take care of and wife who seems to work a job and a half, I don’t have a lot of free time to search around or frequent gaming shops (even if there was one that I could easily reach). So I turned to online tools.

Now I didn’t want to find an online group. I have one of those already. I need local people and I need them to be interested in the types of games I like to play (which can roughly be described as “not D&D”). With that in mind I crafted a pitch for a game I thought might have wide appeal (Vampire: the Requiem for newbies). Then I scoured the net for roleplaying networking sites.

Online Gamer Recruitment Tools

If you look around you will find many online recruting tools advertised but most are either defunct or poorly populated. Here are the ones that I found that still seem active as of 2016:

• www.rpggamefind.com: this networking site seemed eerily dead when I visited. Partly this is due to a very positive feature of the site: games which were posted over 90 days ago are automatically removed from the site. Thus every game advertised is one that is active or was active very recently. I sort of hope something like this catches on, it makes the process of sifting through which games and gamers are active in a region much easier. In the end I got one player from this site which beats most of the alternatives.
• nearbygamers.com: I have used this site in the past and even been recruited through it once. The interface is primitive but it does show you what gamers and groups exist locally. I established an ongoing group there for future games but at the moment I’ve had no takers. I could contact local gamers through this site individually but it seems laborious and I have no idea if they are even local anymore.
• www.penandpapergames.com: Another site I’ve used in the past, this one is a little less user-friendly. I posted my game but had no responses.
• www.meetup.com: I had a good deal of luck finding and attracting new players with this site when I lived in the Bay Area but its effectiveness depends on the local community. The gaming meetup in Sacramento seems based north of the city. It also has many lurkers and few active members. If I was more mobile I suspect I would get more out of it.
• forum.rpg.net: I was very dubious that I would find many people through rpg.net. I find forums in general high on talk and low on commitment. But I attracted most of my players from my post there and could have easily gained more if I was running my game online. I certainly recommend posting here if you are looking for new players.
• www.enworld.org: I’m curious if this site would mirror the response from rpg.net. Their structure is similar and both are busy forums. Ultimately I didn’t post my game here as I had a weird profile issue where my username became my email address. Needless to say I didn’t want to post anything until I sorted that out. By that time I already had the players I needed.
• www.boardgamegeek.com/users.php: Another site recommended to me, this seems more focused on boardgames. I didn’t use it but it does seem alive and well.
• forums.rptools.net: this site is geared more to online games so it didn’t fit my search criteria. But it's active so if online is your thing try here.
• Obsidian Portal: I don’t know that anyone uses this as a search tool but you can. I set up a campaign site both as recruiting station and as the eventual resource for my game. My search for local games through Obsidian Portal was disheartening as it was overwhelmingly populated by D&D and D&D related games.
• www.findgamers.us: another gamer search site where you can find players and advertise games. I didn't use this site in my search so I can't say how effective it would be.

Other Tools

Forums and Communities can also be a potential source of players. Raising the idea of your preferred game on the system’s official or unofficial website or at a dedicated G+ or Facebook community page can also work in theory. The major limitation for in person games is the population. Outside D&D, most communities seem to struggle to hold more than a few thousand members. Spread that across the world (or at least Europe and the US) and it becomes unlikely anyone lives nearby.

Local conventions are another resource to use. You can easily meet new people and even judge their playstyles. At the very least you can play in some games and get a sense of what systems are popular near you.

So I hope the tools I used and listed help you in your own search. Let me know if there are any vital options that I missed!