How to Play Dungeons and Dragons Online

Playing Dungeons and Dragons Online

Would you like to find a group to play D&D with online?  Playing a great tabletop RPG online can be absolutely awesome, but finding, and maintaining a healthy group online can have its own unique challenges. The good news is we’ve mapped out the process for you and have made it easy to find your next rockin’ D&D group.

Part 1 – How and Where to Find a Group

We’ll be bringing you other related articles on how to make the best of a D&D game played online.  Today we’ll be digging into how to find a great group. We’ll showcase a questionnaire to run through to help you find what you’re looking for and showing places on the web that really shine at helping with this process. In future articles we’ll be looking at the ins and outs of playing online including tools to use for maps, characters sheets, rulebooks, how to do dice rolls.

Why Play D&D Online?

Playing online offers great flexibility for playing D&D in a way that is not limited by the constraints that you have when gaming in person. Your session times and durations can be really worked into a busy schedule. For example, I run a game over google hangouts that are on late evening weeknights.  This allows me to get through my work and home responsibilities for the day and then get in a few hours of gaming in the evening,

One of the biggest overarching benefits to playing online is that you extend your reach to interacting with tons of other players.  This allows you to potentially find a group that really matches your playstyle and schedule.  Only free on Thursday evenings after 10PM Mountain time?  Changes are there are others with a compatible time slot available. 

Also, with playing with a group online, you can really hone in on finding like minded folks that share the same interests. Looking for a group that is focused on tactical combat? Espionage? Political intrigue? Covert ops? Immersive roleplay?  Some mix of a few of these? Something else? If you’re willing to put in the work to find it, you’ll find a group to play your niche online.  This is not to say that you need to have something that’s off the beaten path to have a good time with a group online… just saying that it allows connecting with a much wider pool of folks than you would be able to otherwise.

Getting Clear on What You’re Looking For in a Group Online

Before you start surfing forums and LFG websites, you may want to do a quick inventory of your own desires for what you want in a group.  Knowing what you’re looking for will help you from feeling lost in the flood of possibilities out there.  Consider the following questions when before you start looking:

• Do I need a game that is beginner friendly?
• Am I set on playing 5E D&D or would I be open to another system / genre?
  • If you’re new, we strongly recommend that you start out by playing 5E D&D.  It’s the most streamlined D&D edition with the lowest barrier for entry and the largest current player base.
• Does the game need to be free to play or would I be open to a pay-to-play experience?
• Do you think you might like to play in a custom / homebrew world or would you like to play an established campaign?
• What is the play frequency?
• What platform will we be playing on? (See the tools of the trade list below)
• Do I prefer more theater of the mind vs. battle matt and minis… or a hybrid of both?
• How much of a role-playing focus will there be?
• Am I open to a play by post style of game?
• Will we be playing with webcams?
• Will there be online dice rollers?
• How will I be managing my character sheet?
  • D&D Beyond? Other?
• How will I get access to the rulebooks?
  • D&D beyond?
  • Physical books?
  • Other?

It is very much OK not to have answers to many of the questions above. Just let the topics that you feel strongly about help influence what you look for in an online game.

Are you Willing to be the Dungeon Master?

Let’s address the tarrasque in the room. Finding a group to play with will be tremendously easier if you are willing to be the dungeon master for the game.  There is a serious supply and demand dynamic with players and DM’s. There are many more players that would join a game if hosted by another DM than vice-versa.  If you’ve always wanted to be a dungeon master, maybe for your friends but the whole thing seems intimidating, you may want to check out our Campaign Launch service.

Places to Find Other Players

D&D Facebook Groups

Facebook groups can be a great place to not just find a group of other players to game with, but also a community of like-minded people that can be your sounding board for ideas, problems, jokes, and fellowship.

We have a great, new and budding Cloud 9 Tabletop Facebook Group that you are welcome to come and be a part of.  There are other officially sanctioned Facebook groups such as:

Adventurer’s League Facebook Group

D&D Online Facebook Group

D&D Discord Servers

Discord servers also serve as a great place for RPG geeks like us to find each other for organizing into games and connecting to a sense of community with each other.  We run a discord server that hosts looking for group rooms, dedicated gaming rooms for in session games and a of play-by-post sessions. It is really a sister application to the Facebook group and blog.

The benefit to a discord is that you can both find folks and group with them organically on the server very easily.  The Cons is that there is no match making system, and that webcam & screen share functionality happens only in direct message conversations with up to 10 folks… but not in the official channels, so you have to have a little finesse with setting up your rooms if you want to run a live game with webcams.

Join ourCloud 9 Tabletop Discord

Aside from ours here are some excellent Discord servers to check out. 

Dungeons & Downvotes, The unofficial Imgur/Reddit D&D Discord!  

Pair O’ Dice Another great RPG community

Campaign Launch

If you are looking to launch a D&D campaign online for you and your friends but you’re new to D&D and not sure where to start, we offer a Campaign launch service that walks you through character creation, your first tutorial session with one of our dungeon masters, and even shadowing and mentoring in your own first game as a player in your party.

Reddit LFG

I feel like this is an embarrassing confession to admit but I’ve only recently discovered Reddit, but I’ve really grown fond of it very quickly.  It is very intuitive for searching and posting content, and it seems like there is a subreddit for every possible niche of content that I’d want to dig into.  Finding a group to play D&D with online is no exception.

Pros

• Super easy to use format if you like reddit… just read and post.
• Flexible, system and tool agnostic.   You can find players who are using a myriad of different tools and platforms to get together online. The forum is not limited to a specific tool.,
• Lots of volume of games and players

Cons

• Searching for your game is pretty manual as this is a text based forum.  There is no match making system

Tools of the Trade and Related Forums for Finding Groups

Roll 20 LFG

Roll 20 is a browser based tool that is dedicated to hosting RPGs.  It has integrated maps, miniatures, monsters, dice rolling, chat and voice, and a lot of it is free.  It is worth mentioning that Roll 20 also has a dedicated Roll 20 LFG Reddit channel as well.

Pros

• Very Intuitive interface
• Has keyword searches / matchmaking kind of system
• High volume of players and game masters using the platform

Cons

• It’s tied to the Roll 20 tool.  While Roll 20 is a great tool that serves many people well, it’s honestly not my personal cup of tea.  I would much rather play in a theater of the mind style.  Every time I’ve tried to set up a game online through an app like roll 20 I feel like I spend so much time both in prep and in session worrying about the point and clicky-ness of the system, than in immersion in the story and improvisation of the moment.  I’d personally rather ditch the click-administrivia.

Fantasy Grounds LFG

Fantasy Grounds is a software based tool that also is dedicated to hosting RPGs.  It is in direct competition with Roll 20 and performs many of the same functions.

Pros

• Has a supportive community dedicated to helping learn the fantasy grounds tool and learn D&D.

Cons

• The Fantasy Grounds forum was the least intuitive of any LFG tool we reviewed in this process.
• It is linked to a specific tool – fantasy grounds. Like Roll 20 this LFG method is tied to the tool under which it supports, which, for me, is a turnoff.

Google Hangouts, Skype and Twitch

These platforms enable folks to get together and stream their webcams and desktops to each other, and in some cases to the rest of the internet.  There are other chat tools that perform similar functions these are just the most commonly used.  They offer flexible ways to connect with other players in a live session but do not necessarily have integrated RPG features such as dice rollers or character sheets built in. These are more so tools than they are places to find other players.

Honorable Mention – Tabletop Simulator

There is a growing community of enthusiasts who love playing on Tabletop Simulator which is available on Steam.  If there is an active forum for finding others to play with on this platform, we can’t find it.  If you have a place that you’d recommend going to group with others on Tabletop Simulator please feel free to let us know about it in the comments.

Honorable Mention – Adventures League

Adventures league is official D&D sanctioned play. The idea is that you can hop between adventures league games at different tables with different DMs and continue with the same progression and story.  The primary way to get involved with adventures league is via local gaming store, however they do have an online community as well.  There is a Google+ page (Google+ is being decommissioned within a year or so as of this writing so would not recommend getting too attached here.) and there also appears to have a Facebook group dedicated to adventures league. As of this writing we’ve applied for the group, but the mods have not let us in yet.

What else?

We surely could not have captured it all. Do you have other great places for finding a group to play D&D with online? let us know in the comments!

Related Articles

D&D Beginners Guide: So You Want to Play D&D