Hey so I've never played dnd before, I'm not sure how to play it, I can't find any groups in my area and most of my friends know nothing about it.
I thought maybe this site would have a way to play online so I can learn without having to travel to find a group but I can't really figure this place out.
There is a forum subsection for “Looking for Players & Group” you can use to try and find an online game, often played via Discord, Zoom, or the like. I would be a bit cautious with that - D&D is a game with infinite possibilities and with infinite possibilities comes infinite different play styles. For example, some folks really like the combat and only want to do that, while others might want to do more roleplaying - those might not mesh well together in the same campaign. Or some players might have fairly absolute views on how the game should be played or on character alignment and morality, while others might have more a more flexible playstyle or enough emotional intelligence to understand more complex characters and situations.
That’s not to say you cannot find a group online, but online groups can sometimes lead to bad experiences. It is important to not let these bad experiences colour your impression of the game, and remember you can always quit a group that just is not working and find a new one.
Another way to find a random group would be to ask around at your local game store and see if there are any in person games willing to take in a novice player. Similar issues to online group finders, but in person play is simply better than online games.
The other option is to curate an in person group yourself by dungeon mastering. It is a lot easier to find a good group if you already know you get along with the people you would be playing with. DMing is a fair bit more work than being a player, and can be hard for a brand new player to start with (but not impossible - I DMed before I ever was a player). However, finding a DM is the biggest barrier to entry for the game as there are vastly more potential players than DMs. By being the DM yourself, you remove that barrier to entry, making it easier to convince real world friends to just give the game a go.
Local comic/game stores often have postings for local groups of you're looking for in-person, so that's always a decent way to meet people (you just might go through a few groups at first before you really mesh with one).
If you're on social media, I know that there are lots of local Facebook groups focused on helping people find games locally too. Try searching "[insert your city name here] Dungeons and Dragons" or "[city name] TTRPG" or something and you should be able to find your local gamer community and get an in that way. That's how I found my current group!
There is a forum subsection for “Looking for Players & Group” you can use to try and find an online game, often played via Discord, Zoom, or the like. I would be a bit cautious with that - D&D is a game with infinite possibilities and with infinite possibilities comes infinite different play styles. For example, some folks really like the combat and only want to do that, while others might want to do more roleplaying - those might not mesh well together in the same campaign. Or some players might have fairly absolute views on how the game should be played or on character alignment and morality, while others might have more a more flexible playstyle or enough emotional intelligence to understand more complex characters and situations.
That’s not to say you cannot find a group online, but online groups can sometimes lead to bad experiences. It is important to not let these bad experiences colour your impression of the game, and remember you can always quit a group that just is not working and find a new one.
Another way to find a random group would be to ask around at your local game store and see if there are any in person games willing to take in a novice player. Similar issues to online group finders, but in person play is simply better than online games.
The other option is to curate an in person group yourself by dungeon mastering. It is a lot easier to find a good group if you already know you get along with the people you would be playing with. DMing is a fair bit more work than being a player, and can be hard for a brand new player to start with (but not impossible - I DMed before I ever was a player). However, finding a DM is the biggest barrier to entry for the game as there are vastly more potential players than DMs. By being the DM yourself, you remove that barrier to entry, making it easier to convince real world friends to just give the game a go.
In my experience the groups I have formed online have been better than those in person. If a DM posts one that they want to start a game with 5 players they might get 20+ applicants. The downside of that is as a player you might have to apply many times before being accepted but the good side is the DM will usually choose from 5he applicants that will mesh well with each other and with the DM. Going to a game store you are likely to be put in the group that has a space regardless of playstyle. Playing with existing friends works well because you have fun just being together so tend to be more forgiving of different desires of things like combat, roleplay, exploration mix.
As for having no idea what you are doing, if you haven't already read them, the basic rules are a great way to start and they are free here on DDB. In addition there are many great YouTube videos on running/playing DND. I highly recommend Matt Colville's Running the Game series as it does a great job starting from the very most basic game play aspects all the way through to more advanced topics, and is done with a friendly and encouraging approach. Finally, this specific forum here on DDB has some great information about tools for running games online.
Don't be afraid to use these forums or try to find particular users to ask questions of if you feel more comfortable with that.
I hope you can get a game going, and just relax and have fun. Happy gaming!
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All the world's indeed a stage, and we are merely players, performers and portrayers...
Sorry if my question sounds rude, i have no such intention. Why do you want to try roleplaying? It will not make you feel like "the good guy" if you are an adult, just wanted you to know that. You'll simply be burning calories(killing living) and fight fictional evil in an imaginary realm. There are many things you can learn from the game though, like how psychotic human beings are.
Sorry if my question sounds rude, i have no such intention. Why do you want to try roleplaying? It will not make you feel like "the good guy" if you are an adult, just wanted you to know that. You'll simply be burning calories(killing living) and fight fictional evil in an imaginary realm. There are many things you can learn from the game though, like how psychotic human beings are.
For the OP’s benefit, this is sort of what I was talking about in my initial post - folks have different perspectives on what D&D is. This user might not feel that D&D allows you to feel heroic - but I have plenty of friends who play D&D specifically because it lets them feel like heroes. There are also games where the party might show themselves to be secretly psychotic… but exist many games where the party genuinely is full of “Good” aligned characters in the more traditional sense.
So, I would not let the above editorial on what D&D can and cannot do colour your opinion in the slightest - that is just one perspective by one person among myriad different ways to play D&D.
You might also look into some of the groups on Discord.
This one is a great place to go if you know nothing about it. They even offer free "classes" teaching the ins and outs, from character creation to how combat and treasure works.
This one is a well-developed and highly active community with dozens of games per week. Takes a bit to get going, especially if you don't know anything about making a character yet, but I have had a lot of fun there and met some cool peeps.
Sorry if my question sounds rude, i have no such intention. Why do you want to try roleplaying? It will not make you feel like "the good guy" if you are an adult, just wanted you to know that. You'll simply be burning calories(killing living) and fight fictional evil in an imaginary realm. There are many things you can learn from the game though, like how psychotic human beings are.
That is a very specific statement that is on no way universally accurate. If you want to be an actual heroic "good guy" that doesn't wander about doing random acts of psychopathic homicide (aka a "murderhobo" in the TTRPG vernacular), then all you have to do is don't play your character like a sociopathic vagrant. Despite what the memekiddies would have you believe, there really are people out there that play D&D to act out fantasies of being actual heroes saving the world from genuinely evil bad guys. There's a lot of range to the spectrum, from Saturday morning cartoon level simplicity to dark and gritty settings with graphically described horrible things going on where your character may find themselves experiencing serious philosophical and moral dilemmas while trying to determine what the best and most "right and just" course of action truly is because none of the available options are appealing.
Or you could play like Thser apparently does and treat your game as a free form version of a Grand Theft Auto game where you ignore any pretense at following a plot and wander around a city murdering random bystanders and looting their corpses until either everyone is dead or the authorities or other evil bastards or some other party manages to kill your psychotic character.
The appeal to D&D is that you can play out whatever sort of adventure that you and your play group want to. It can take some time and effort to find a group of other people who want to play the same kind of game as you do (and are all consistently available to play at the same time), but there is almost definitely a group out there for you and however you want to play. Somewhere.
For an in person game your options are mainly either putting together a group from people you already know or looking for a group somewhere like a local game store or comic shop. Many such establishments have artifacts of a bygone era called "bulletin boards" where people can write down information about a game they want to organize along with how to contact them on a piece of paper and affix it to a large, thin piece of wood or similar material that hangs on the wall. Such "boards" are the ancient, pre-technological precursors of modern online forums such as this one.
For online games there are a lot more options, but that also means a lot more games that you won't necessary enjoy so you'll likely have to sift through the ads and postings and even after that it might take multiple attempts actually joining a game before finding one you're comfortable with and enjoy being part of. Various forums have LFG (Looking For Group) sections, including the D&D Beyond and Roll 20 ones. There's also reddit's r/lfg, numerous facebook groups and a whole bunch of Discord servers that are focused around providing a community space built around D&D and/or general TTRPGs.
Online games are typically played either as purely "theater of the mind" where all the action and events are happening entirely in the player's imaginations, on a Virtual Tabletop (VTT) that displays a map and objects with tokens representing player characters, monsters, etc that can be moved around plus built in dice rolling apps and even digital character sheets that let you just click something on said sheet to automatically make the necessary roll and add the correct modifiers, etc. Often theater of the mind is used for roleplaying out general scenes then a VTT for specific exploration and combat sequences. VTTs are mostly browser based and often require no downloads except, in some cases, for the DM who uses the tools of said VTT to load in maps, tokens, and assign PC and monster to said tokens, etc; players generally need only to make a free user account and then click a link the DM provides and then move their token around.
For actually learning the rules:
Yes, learning the rules definitely helps. Many of those places I mentioned above to look for games will have at least some people who are willing to and even enjoy teaching the hobby to new players (not all, but you might be surprised how many there are). That being said it still helps if you've at least read over the basic rules. Wizards of the Coast (the company that published D&D, commonly abbreviated WotC) has a freely available PDF called "D&D Basic Rules" which is a streamlined version of the Player's Handbook and a few bits of extra information and recommendations for Dungeon Masters (aka DMs) such as magic item stats and guides to building encounters plus fifty pages of monster and NPC stat blocks to build those encounters with. Going through the parts that actually cover rules for character creation, ability scores, combat, and magic rules might take anywhere from one to several hours depending on your reading speed but is absolutely time well spent.
Most D&D games are played in sessions ranging from 2-4 hours, often on a weekly recurring basis. Spending the amount of time you put into every single one of those sessions just once will make all of them go smoother. Even if you need to refer to the rules on occasion because you don't remember exactly what a particular spell does, or if your character's class based abilities refresh on a short rest or a long one, you will already know things like what AC means, what a saving throw is, what proficiency in the Investigation skill means, and what numbers you add to what sort of dice rolls to make attacks with your character's main weapon. Knowing those basic functions of the game will mean you can stay focused on telling the story and describing the action that those things determine and represent.
f you want to be an actual heroic "good guy" that doesn't wander about doing random acts of psychopathic homicide (aka a "murderhobo" in the TTRPG vernacular), then all you have to do is don't play your character like a sociopathic vagrant
You should use fictional there, and you are not becoming your pc, you are roleplaying your pc. Your pc is actually composed of neural pulses, rest is your imagination, it is not an actual person. Yes, people act like heroes and try to save fictional worlds, while eating real things to fantasize in the real world. So in effect your fantasy heroes are using real living beings as their fuel(what do you think you are eating?), so that you can feel like them, but you got to know that you are not them. There is no escape from this truth.
Roleplaying games however when played correctly, can teach a person to be more understanding, more emphatic person, it can even teach you things that can even teach you real life skills, if you make the game detailed enough. Then again, let us remember what people did/do with their survival skills in our antiquity,history,present when they no longer needed them to survive, tyrany and war on their own kind.
Flushmaster i have been DMin and playing since before the advent of personal computers, so i am what you'd consider a relic in these forums i guess. What makes you think our games are murdehobo games? You are simply confessing your own instincts, in the current game i am playing in, my character killed a single person accidentally as he did not have combat experience, he used too much arcane force on a thief who did not heed his call and stop, he attacked him with a magic missile and dropped him. This event greatly changed him, and he started walking the life of a cleric who despises war and shares his knowledge for free to people who he sees as "peaceful" and devoid of excessive pride. And this is happening in a ToA campaign. He is now trying to save a fellow cleric who apparently made a deal with an evil eldritch art patron, he might be thinking that he can deceive either his deity or his patron, or perhaps his friends as Sun Tzu suggests but his way is clearly up to no good, though it goes against the principles of the PC i am roleplaying, thus the subject pc is currently looking for a silent place to live a silent life(ofcourse somehow trouble keeps following him for some reason).
Anyway your assumptions about other people's way of playing are offensive, it is a fact that as gamers we are all a bit evil, playing the good guy does not change that fact. What you eat are seeds, plants and animals that did not even complete their lifespan, and you are using their life to fuel your fantasies, so that you can feel like the good guy, i am not the good guy, the character i am playing with is, that is why i am serving him, and the species of the individuals i consume in real life as food. Did you by chance think you are a good guy? Escapism does not make you a better person friend. Unless there is someone playing the game who understands his inner evil and try to show you that this road is up to no good, ofcourse those people who think they are the good guys tend to distrust the honest evil man, this is something my kind is used to since antiquity. Those who confess their sins and those that do not...
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Hey so I've never played dnd before, I'm not sure how to play it, I can't find any groups in my area and most of my friends know nothing about it.
I thought maybe this site would have a way to play online so I can learn without having to travel to find a group but I can't really figure this place out.
There is a forum subsection for “Looking for Players & Group” you can use to try and find an online game, often played via Discord, Zoom, or the like. I would be a bit cautious with that - D&D is a game with infinite possibilities and with infinite possibilities comes infinite different play styles. For example, some folks really like the combat and only want to do that, while others might want to do more roleplaying - those might not mesh well together in the same campaign. Or some players might have fairly absolute views on how the game should be played or on character alignment and morality, while others might have more a more flexible playstyle or enough emotional intelligence to understand more complex characters and situations.
That’s not to say you cannot find a group online, but online groups can sometimes lead to bad experiences. It is important to not let these bad experiences colour your impression of the game, and remember you can always quit a group that just is not working and find a new one.
Another way to find a random group would be to ask around at your local game store and see if there are any in person games willing to take in a novice player. Similar issues to online group finders, but in person play is simply better than online games.
The other option is to curate an in person group yourself by dungeon mastering. It is a lot easier to find a good group if you already know you get along with the people you would be playing with. DMing is a fair bit more work than being a player, and can be hard for a brand new player to start with (but not impossible - I DMed before I ever was a player). However, finding a DM is the biggest barrier to entry for the game as there are vastly more potential players than DMs. By being the DM yourself, you remove that barrier to entry, making it easier to convince real world friends to just give the game a go.
Local comic/game stores often have postings for local groups of you're looking for in-person, so that's always a decent way to meet people (you just might go through a few groups at first before you really mesh with one).
If you're on social media, I know that there are lots of local Facebook groups focused on helping people find games locally too. Try searching "[insert your city name here] Dungeons and Dragons" or "[city name] TTRPG" or something and you should be able to find your local gamer community and get an in that way. That's how I found my current group!
In my experience the groups I have formed online have been better than those in person. If a DM posts one that they want to start a game with 5 players they might get 20+ applicants. The downside of that is as a player you might have to apply many times before being accepted but the good side is the DM will usually choose from 5he applicants that will mesh well with each other and with the DM. Going to a game store you are likely to be put in the group that has a space regardless of playstyle. Playing with existing friends works well because you have fun just being together so tend to be more forgiving of different desires of things like combat, roleplay, exploration mix.
As for having no idea what you are doing, if you haven't already read them, the basic rules are a great way to start and they are free here on DDB. In addition there are many great YouTube videos on running/playing DND. I highly recommend Matt Colville's Running the Game series as it does a great job starting from the very most basic game play aspects all the way through to more advanced topics, and is done with a friendly and encouraging approach. Finally, this specific forum here on DDB has some great information about tools for running games online.
Don't be afraid to use these forums or try to find particular users to ask questions of if you feel more comfortable with that.
I hope you can get a game going, and just relax and have fun. Happy gaming!
All the world's indeed a stage, and we are merely players, performers and portrayers...
Sorry if my question sounds rude, i have no such intention. Why do you want to try roleplaying? It will not make you feel like "the good guy" if you are an adult, just wanted you to know that. You'll simply be burning calories(killing living) and fight fictional evil in an imaginary realm. There are many things you can learn from the game though, like how psychotic human beings are.
For the OP’s benefit, this is sort of what I was talking about in my initial post - folks have different perspectives on what D&D is. This user might not feel that D&D allows you to feel heroic - but I have plenty of friends who play D&D specifically because it lets them feel like heroes. There are also games where the party might show themselves to be secretly psychotic… but exist many games where the party genuinely is full of “Good” aligned characters in the more traditional sense.
So, I would not let the above editorial on what D&D can and cannot do colour your opinion in the slightest - that is just one perspective by one person among myriad different ways to play D&D.
You might also look into some of the groups on Discord.
That is a very specific statement that is on no way universally accurate. If you want to be an actual heroic "good guy" that doesn't wander about doing random acts of psychopathic homicide (aka a "murderhobo" in the TTRPG vernacular), then all you have to do is don't play your character like a sociopathic vagrant. Despite what the memekiddies would have you believe, there really are people out there that play D&D to act out fantasies of being actual heroes saving the world from genuinely evil bad guys. There's a lot of range to the spectrum, from Saturday morning cartoon level simplicity to dark and gritty settings with graphically described horrible things going on where your character may find themselves experiencing serious philosophical and moral dilemmas while trying to determine what the best and most "right and just" course of action truly is because none of the available options are appealing.
Or you could play like Thser apparently does and treat your game as a free form version of a Grand Theft Auto game where you ignore any pretense at following a plot and wander around a city murdering random bystanders and looting their corpses until either everyone is dead or the authorities or other evil bastards or some other party manages to kill your psychotic character.
The appeal to D&D is that you can play out whatever sort of adventure that you and your play group want to. It can take some time and effort to find a group of other people who want to play the same kind of game as you do (and are all consistently available to play at the same time), but there is almost definitely a group out there for you and however you want to play. Somewhere.
For an in person game your options are mainly either putting together a group from people you already know or looking for a group somewhere like a local game store or comic shop. Many such establishments have artifacts of a bygone era called "bulletin boards" where people can write down information about a game they want to organize along with how to contact them on a piece of paper and affix it to a large, thin piece of wood or similar material that hangs on the wall. Such "boards" are the ancient, pre-technological precursors of modern online forums such as this one.
For online games there are a lot more options, but that also means a lot more games that you won't necessary enjoy so you'll likely have to sift through the ads and postings and even after that it might take multiple attempts actually joining a game before finding one you're comfortable with and enjoy being part of. Various forums have LFG (Looking For Group) sections, including the D&D Beyond and Roll 20 ones. There's also reddit's r/lfg, numerous facebook groups and a whole bunch of Discord servers that are focused around providing a community space built around D&D and/or general TTRPGs.
Online games are typically played either as purely "theater of the mind" where all the action and events are happening entirely in the player's imaginations, on a Virtual Tabletop (VTT) that displays a map and objects with tokens representing player characters, monsters, etc that can be moved around plus built in dice rolling apps and even digital character sheets that let you just click something on said sheet to automatically make the necessary roll and add the correct modifiers, etc. Often theater of the mind is used for roleplaying out general scenes then a VTT for specific exploration and combat sequences. VTTs are mostly browser based and often require no downloads except, in some cases, for the DM who uses the tools of said VTT to load in maps, tokens, and assign PC and monster to said tokens, etc; players generally need only to make a free user account and then click a link the DM provides and then move their token around.
For actually learning the rules:
Yes, learning the rules definitely helps. Many of those places I mentioned above to look for games will have at least some people who are willing to and even enjoy teaching the hobby to new players (not all, but you might be surprised how many there are). That being said it still helps if you've at least read over the basic rules. Wizards of the Coast (the company that published D&D, commonly abbreviated WotC) has a freely available PDF called "D&D Basic Rules" which is a streamlined version of the Player's Handbook and a few bits of extra information and recommendations for Dungeon Masters (aka DMs) such as magic item stats and guides to building encounters plus fifty pages of monster and NPC stat blocks to build those encounters with. Going through the parts that actually cover rules for character creation, ability scores, combat, and magic rules might take anywhere from one to several hours depending on your reading speed but is absolutely time well spent.
Most D&D games are played in sessions ranging from 2-4 hours, often on a weekly recurring basis. Spending the amount of time you put into every single one of those sessions just once will make all of them go smoother. Even if you need to refer to the rules on occasion because you don't remember exactly what a particular spell does, or if your character's class based abilities refresh on a short rest or a long one, you will already know things like what AC means, what a saving throw is, what proficiency in the Investigation skill means, and what numbers you add to what sort of dice rolls to make attacks with your character's main weapon. Knowing those basic functions of the game will mean you can stay focused on telling the story and describing the action that those things determine and represent.
f you want to be an actual heroic "good guy" that doesn't wander about doing random acts of psychopathic homicide (aka a "murderhobo" in the TTRPG vernacular), then all you have to do is don't play your character like a sociopathic vagrant
You should use fictional there, and you are not becoming your pc, you are roleplaying your pc. Your pc is actually composed of neural pulses, rest is your imagination, it is not an actual person. Yes, people act like heroes and try to save fictional worlds, while eating real things to fantasize in the real world. So in effect your fantasy heroes are using real living beings as their fuel(what do you think you are eating?), so that you can feel like them, but you got to know that you are not them. There is no escape from this truth.
Roleplaying games however when played correctly, can teach a person to be more understanding, more emphatic person, it can even teach you things that can even teach you real life skills, if you make the game detailed enough. Then again, let us remember what people did/do with their survival skills in our antiquity,history,present when they no longer needed them to survive, tyrany and war on their own kind.
Flushmaster i have been DMin and playing since before the advent of personal computers, so i am what you'd consider a relic in these forums i guess. What makes you think our games are murdehobo games? You are simply confessing your own instincts, in the current game i am playing in, my character killed a single person accidentally as he did not have combat experience, he used too much arcane force on a thief who did not heed his call and stop, he attacked him with a magic missile and dropped him. This event greatly changed him, and he started walking the life of a cleric who despises war and shares his knowledge for free to people who he sees as "peaceful" and devoid of excessive pride. And this is happening in a ToA campaign. He is now trying to save a fellow cleric who apparently made a deal with an evil eldritch art patron, he might be thinking that he can deceive either his deity or his patron, or perhaps his friends as Sun Tzu suggests but his way is clearly up to no good, though it goes against the principles of the PC i am roleplaying, thus the subject pc is currently looking for a silent place to live a silent life(ofcourse somehow trouble keeps following him for some reason).
Anyway your assumptions about other people's way of playing are offensive, it is a fact that as gamers we are all a bit evil, playing the good guy does not change that fact. What you eat are seeds, plants and animals that did not even complete their lifespan, and you are using their life to fuel your fantasies, so that you can feel like the good guy, i am not the good guy, the character i am playing with is, that is why i am serving him, and the species of the individuals i consume in real life as food. Did you by chance think you are a good guy? Escapism does not make you a better person friend. Unless there is someone playing the game who understands his inner evil and try to show you that this road is up to no good, ofcourse those people who think they are the good guys tend to distrust the honest evil man, this is something my kind is used to since antiquity. Those who confess their sins and those that do not...