Moo

lesbrarian goat gal

Online, I do a little bit of art and a little bit of web design. Offline, I'm a children's librarian!
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jkap
@jkap

genuine question. how the fuck do you actually get a Group together to play a ttrpg. do you just go up to everyone you know like "hey i'd like to play lancer. do you want to play lancer?" do you post on a forum or some shit? how does this work. i feel like i've forgotten how to make friends or be a normal person who does social activities.


jkap
@jkap

actually just generally. how do you make friends when you're 30 or really any age past like 25


jkap
@jkap

a lot of you are mentioning joining discord servers. i am glad that this works for you but i am unfortunately incapable of using discord/irc/any sort of Group Chat in any real way. it is fully incompatible with my brain. i understand that this is a me problem though.


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in reply to @jkap's post:

honestly you'd be surprised just asking everyone you know, how many people are up for it or already into it, at least in my experience. you also might be able to find a group if you go to one of those local non-chain game/nerd shop type places, if any still exist around you. some places organize LFG events!

the actual answer is to find a group when you're 14 before everyone has jobs and it becomes impossible to schedule anything :(

The one time I've gotten someone to play a TTRPG with me was when I asked a friend if they'd be interested, and when they said yes, I immediately opened a rulebook to help them start creating a character.

the shortcut: find someone who can collude with you

then start a recurring event and just Be Okay if it's you two, but once a third starts showing up you can start gaining momentum. You want to start with two already colluding so it's not awkward for the newcomer imo

In my experience, when one of your friends is getting married, you hang out with the people who live in your city until one of them causally mentions running a D&D game, and you grasp onto that with all of the desperation of a drowning man and invite yourself to join their campaign.

Honestly, it's hard. You can find pickup games at like a hobby store, but there is a very high probability that at least one person in your group will be the most unpleasant person that you've ever interacted with. I think the common strategy is to find one of those groups & suffer through a month or two of games while decoding the group's internal politics, with the end goal of sussing out who is both fun to be around and also who won't snitch when you splinter off to play a different game.

From my perspective, there have been three ways that have been successful for me personally:

  1. Find a Discord server, like others have suggested here (sorry that that doesn't work for you!)
  2. Find cool people who are already in a group and tell them you'd be interested in joining if they ever need another player
  3. Find friends of yours who are generally interested in the same ttrpg and one friend who would make a good DM/GM and playfully bully them into doing a one-shot sometime

I told the people I already play another ttrpg with if they wanted to play lancer and since they're massive mecha dorks they bent over backwards in order to find a slot in our schedule.

Also, lancer does have a discord server where people try to organize games, you can always try there.

in reply to @jkap's post:

You have a couple choices!!

You can talk to friends and gauge interest. Once you get one or two friends you can ask them if they have friends who want to join. And once you get 1 GM and 3-5 players you got a group! It's easiest if you're the GM in this case.

You can also put up ads at local comic/game stores. Lots of places have meetup boards for this exact purpose. You're taking a chance with randos, but I've had more success than failure!

There's also online groups and putting up requests on forums or social media. Those are a little more volatile. But my current group I got by making a post on Twitter and having some people show up on discord! We've been going for three years now.

Me and my best friend started playing dnd together with like one other person in high school, and then various other people filed in and out of the group for a while until now where I'm in the same group of 4 (plus or minus 2) people that play games together usually at least once a month. Idk how this helps but that's what I did lol

Moved to a new area and my partner and another friend just went to conventions to meet folks and ended up organizing a group by leaving flyers and meeting folks during one-shots.

What I usually do is check the various lfg subreddits and ttrpg discords. Some of the discords will have a role that pings you when a game is posted.

The risk with this is gettin' stuck with gross randos and it can take a couple months to find the right group. (Hell of a lot easier when you're the one running the game)

For Lancer specifically, their discord is your best bet. The have good moderation policies.

making friends is so. hard. i feel like since 2020 especially & with not drinking anymore my bonding machine is straight broke & even when i find a way to meet new people (difficult enough) i don't know what to like... do about it....... it's all a mystery to me now & it really can get to be a bummer

i gotta admit, being a furry and talking to other furries is pretty much the only way ive made friends in the last 7 years and i dont know how i would have done it otherwise

I usually ask my friends to play a game and make a discord server or the like to host it on. Its super helpful if you're willing to run things since having a game facilitator is the biggest stumbling block

Unfortunately as for finding friends I've mostly done it by hanging out in trpg spaces and running games

in reply to @jkap's post:

In my experience with my TTRPG groups, yeah you ask everyone you know. And then if you still don't have enough people you have the ones you got ask everyone they know. Then you enter Scheduling Hell or decide to do a play-by-post thing on a forum or some such. This only works if you already have a DM though.

If you are willing to do extra work you might have more success being like "if you join I'll help you make a character" or if you know what kind of like... settings or tropes someone likes, telling them that they can totally have that in the game!

As for how to make friends as an adult, I make like one extrovert (or more extroverted than me, a low bar) friend per decade by forcing myself to go and do things and slowly absorb their friends when we all hang out together. If extroverts ever stop adopting me I'd probably become a hermit.

I've made almost all my adult friends through the kink scene, but there's really nothing special about kink. At the end of the day the best way to make friends is to have a bunch of people that you run into regularly. That's why so many people make friends at work, but it also might work to have a regular bar or park or club you hang out at, or some kind of shared-interest meetup that happens regularly enough. Religious and cultural spaces also fill this function pretty well.

Our (very little) experience trying (and failing) to set up group games, is that you gotta take on the responsibility of making things as smooth and thoughtless for everyone else. This includes inviting everybeing, managing schedules, doing the admin stuff. Everybeing we know is anxious, tired, has a lot going on, and it's easy for them to want to play a game but it's much harder to make a commitment to play the game.

Even if you don't intend to GM, you kinda gotta take on the burden of convincing everyone, getting them together and discussing it (for this, either a group voice/text chat is kinda necessary).

Ahm! We make most of our friends through discord, but we've also made friends through Cohost! It's. It's honestly not hard. If you see someone that interests you, it really really is as simple as just reaching out to them and saying you'd like to talk. Similarly, when someone reaches out to you, even if it's scary, tiring or tedious, it's important to stay open-minded about it and give it a shot (if they interest you of course).

This... It gets complicated with you, though. You are one of the admins of cohost, which makes you kinda famous and sets up a weird dynamic. Lots of the beings here probably want your attention and time (we know this about ourselves, we get starstruck). You are influential and notable within the Cohost sphere. But... Well, there's plenty of influential and notable beings in this website; you are not unique in that regard. We don't say this to be offensive, rather, we intend it as a way to break down barriers. Your potential relationships with others don't have to reduce to Jae!CohostAdmin and Random!CohostUser. There's a lot more depth and planes of interaction possible, a lot more ways to relate and connect, and there's plenty of beings here that have also had to deal with fame and may feel isolated because of it.

So, yeah. We. It seems like the kind of thing you tell to a kid, but the best way to make friends is to just go "hey you are neat wanna chat / join my game" and let that build into something, and to not be discouraged when that fails, or when bonds meet stumbles.

i do definitely feel the hangup of being "the person whose name is first in the list of people to follow when you join the website" in terms of trying to talk to people who i meet on the website. the reality is that i am just Some Guy. i have never been in a position of notability or influence and so i have a bunch of hangups around parasocial shit. this is also all a personal problem. does help to hear that it's not necessarily an issue

We put a lot of thought into parasocial interactions. It's honestly creepy how much they affect our brain. Some of our main social circles are webfiction discord servers, and we're always super conscious that some part of our brain goes "notice me, senpai!" towards authors (and youtubers, streamers, etc.). It can be hard to just act normal when we look up to them and know they probably gotta deal with a lot of unwanted attention.

It's also the case here: a part of our brain lit up and went "jae noticed us!". But we're not trying to get your attention. You are just Some Guy and we think we have some useful advice / experiences we can share (we hope we aren't overstepping. And sorry for this long-ass comment!).

It is deeply ironic, but you might have an easier time connecting to other beings outside of Cohost. Somewhere you don't have to worry about running the place and keeping up a "customer service" public face. You might also find it easier to make friends in physical spaces if those are accessible to you. We saw plenty of folks giving advice here on how to go about that ^^

A lot of our friends we've made through small, private friend/family/polycule chats, or when a friend explicitly invites us to meet one of their friends. If no one you already know wants to play Lancer with you, you can always ask those beings to ask their friends. Heck, you can always tell your loved ones that you wanna make new friends, and ask if they'll present you their friends. We don't know anything about you; maybe you already know all their friends. But, the point we want to highlight is, the people who care about you think you are great, so they would probably be more than happy to present to you the other people they care about.

We were pretty bad at making friends in school and college; most of our friends approached us, or were groupmates for some project. We've always felt a bit like the stray that people take home and adopt. Grew up isolated, bullied, so fragile, and we were always just so different to everyone else. Heck we haven't made any local friends because we're too afraid to leave our house.

Despite all that though, we've had plenty of opportunity to grow. And, well, meeting someone, be it online or offline, building a bond, any kind of bond, is nothing more than a dance (...we've never danced with anyone). Maybe you ask them out to dance, maybe they ask you. You figure out how each other moves, figure out boundaries, make missteps, correct and adjust to each other's needs, and simply try to have a good time. There is no need to have everything figured out from the get-go. Just, if someone catches your interest, don't fret over it and give them a hello ^^ If there's some perceived power imbalance at play, you can mutually figure it out, later. If things remain uncomfy or unhealthy, that's okay. Not every connection is meant to last. That doesn't make that connection a failure, it's okay to not be friends with someone and still appreciate what they brought into your life.

Ahm. As a last comment, we understand that the staff might want to be accessible and reachable for the Cohost userbase. We understand that in such a small team, everyone is effectively a spokesbeing for the project. But there's no need to put yourself in that list of people to follow if it makes you feel uneasy. Heck, maybe that list has outlived its stay and it'd be better for everyone to instead put a list of some of the most prominent tags. After all, tags are one of the main discoverability mechanisms, and the one folks migrating might struggle with most.

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