Hi all! We're Nate, Devon, and Jared, the founders of StartPlaying.Games. StartPlaying.Games is a platform that helps players find tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) and professional Game Masters.

I (Devon) have been a professional Game Master for over five years, running games for players all across the country. I even started hiring other professional GMs because I had more groups than I could run! The biggest issue I've been seeing with people getting into the hobby or trying new game systems is finding someone to run the game for them. A lot of solutions involve digging through discord servers and forums, which aren't very friendly to new players and require a lot of time and effort. I knew there had to be a better solution to this, and started creating some Pro GM groups to network with others.

A few days after the pandemic hit San Francisco in March 2020, I got a call from Nate, who wanted to pick my brain about being a professional Game Master. He was working on a similar idea, but with a tech-focused twist: an Airbnb-type marketplace to find Game masters and other virtual game masters. That first night, we spent hours on the phone chatting about what the platform could be, and for hours each evening for the next several weeks as we began to build StartPlaying.Games.

Over the next few months, we spoke with over a hundred Game Masters and Players while building out StartPlaying.Games. We launched our platform 3 months ago, and since then we have had over 2000 bookings and around 300 GMs join our platform. And with 40 million+ D&D fans around the world, we know there is a market for our platform.

We offer users the ability to join solo, book for yourself, and a group, as well as hand-picked options for custom and corporate requests. We make money by taking a percentage of game bookings.

On StartPlaying.Games, Game Masters get more time to focus on planning and running games instead of building a website and business platform. We’re now chatting with game publishers to help them find players for their game systems, and working with convention organizers to help them run virtual conventions. We are also chatting with charities on how to get more involved in helping them run game-driven fundraisers.

We would love to hear your ideas and any feedback you have!

I tried this service and ran 2 campaigns with different groups of friends. It was amazing. DND was something I wanted to try for a long time but the barrier to entry was (at least, perceived to be) really high.

Great to see this finally launching. I'll be recommending this service to anyone who's interested in dipping their toe into DND. I also love that you're making being a "Professional Dungeon Master" a plausible future career choice. :)

My kneejerk reaction to the headline was that this might be a service to connect existing groups to vetted, high-quality GMs, like a premium service aimed at the sorts of folks who'd otherwise spend a ton of money on TTRPG tables and miniatures.

But this is more like a rideshare model, where you're looking at who's available for a given timeslot/location, then jumping into a game that's determined by the GM. With online games, you're also likely playing with strangers.

This makes the whole thing feel more like a permanent convention/event setup — you pay for a seat at a table and agree to work with whatever's handed to you. Which is great, but it also has to compete with similar free game matchmaking as well as those types of (now also virtual) events.

I'm also confused about the age tier filters — the "No Use By Minors" section of the ToS is very clear about users under 18 being prohibited from using the service, but there are game filters for games that can include players ages 9-17. That seems impossible without breaking the ToS.

The Code of Conduct is welcome, but it's stowed away in the bottom of the ToS. For a social product like this, it would benefit from being much more prominent and discoverable. It's also unclear how to report issues with or violations of the CoC; there's a contact email and URL in the ToS, but they point to a different domain of startplayinggames.com, and the Contact form URL in the ToS just plain doesn't work.

More importantly, the CoC doesn't appear to give the GM the ability to define additional conduct rules or expectations that don't necessarily delve into content sensitivities — can players be late, show up unprepared, play intoxicated? Can a GM remove a player who is following the CoC but otherwise being disruptive? I see some who state they will in their profiles — if they do, does the player get refunded, and from where does that refund come? What potential consequences are there for players or GMs who remove a player from a game?

What's the revenue split look like? I tried the "Become a GM" link from one of the GM profile pages, but it pulled up a blank profile, presumably because the footer links are all relative? https://startplaying.games/game-master/become-gm

This is awesome! GM/DM are a rare resource, and as a forever-DM, I would love using such services to be actually able to play.

One thing I think would be a cool addition : play by post games.

I'm not a native speaker and I'm always more comfortable in written games rather than spoken ones, mainly because of the highly specialized vocabulary that I don't recognize immediately when spoken. Of course, this could be roleplayed (playing an outlander character), but I bet it would quickly grow old :)

I suppose any non-native speaker would feel that way too - and then, there's the timezone problem.

One thing I know from roll20 : localized games are not the answer. There is just not many enough players outside US to properly fit each timezone with enough diversity. That's also why PbP has been what worked best for me.

Anyway, I'm glad to see this happen, best of luck!

This is a great idea and just what I wanted!

I have a question about which system is better for a story-driven game for beginners.

Some context: I like RPG, but I have played exactly 4 times in the last 20 years. Last time I played it was D&D and my experience was it was more of a tactical game focused on combats than characters and story. It was about the squared map, knowing all the rules of your weapons and spells and trying to beat the GM in this game. All the rest seemed like cutscenes to the combat mini-games.

I didn’t enjoy this that much, especially since I do not know all the rules, limitations and possibilities of my weapons/spells.

I would prefer to develop a story together. A system where you don’t need a exact map with squares/hexagons to make decisions, for example. Where story and character decisions on what to do matter more than tactical decisions in combats.

Also, despite living story-driven games, I am not much into “acting” (doing voices, emotions and reactions like my character). Not sure if I have too many restrictions to find a good system or group here.

So, which system should I look for that it’s welcoming to beginners and story-driven?

Super neat idea!

As a DM + general TTRPG lover, I think the real magic is playing with friends so the game can be exactly what the group wants, then each session and campaign can build on each other.

Our group has running jokes that span campaigns and worlds, because we have that shared language from being a group.

With that said, I still think this is a fantastic idea for everyone from all fronts to be able to play the games you like and get exactly what you want out of a game.

I will have to take a look because I have been curious about how to get deeper into this area, possibly for pay. One thought was to start a game shop in my town but I have heard super low margins and just not a great idea.

HOW FN APROPOS!

I literally just bought two new dice sets yesterday - and my brother berated me saying "When was the last time you played DnD?" -- And I thought - well, Ill need to find a way to play again... and just put that out into the Universe...

Now I see this...

So - you have a new user in me. Ill look into your site and find out how to participate!!!

Thank you

Totally missed the opportunity to call this "AirDnd"

I think this is excellent. As a start up it seems like you need to land product market fit for core DnD users willing to pay for a GM first. But after that there is an interesting strategy of seeing if you can expand the DnD market in general to more casual or newbie players. I think this is a huge opportunity.

I am in my first paid campaign now, and as a first time player my sense was that probably 80% of it was really complicated and could be stripped away for simplicity. Things like: speed, rolling for character creation, initiative, casting times, etc. These are sacrosanct to DnD players but there is a much larger gamer/board game crowd that doesn’t care. They want to get to the exciting story moments where you roll a D20 and win or lose, that’s it, in about 10 minutes.

First there was Dwarf Fortress and then there was Minecraft. I think there is an opportunity for the Minecraft of DnD, appealing to 10x as many people.

Some feedback for what it's worth:

The reason I won't take a stab at this, as badly as I want to get into D&D, is that I have an unreliable schedule and can be pulled away at any moment (I have young kids). I won't even try because the possibility of letting others down is paralyzing.

I'm not sure if this is even something you can fix, but, there it is. And maybe there are ways to handle this gracefully without me letting the rest of the party down. In that case, maybe this is a communication/education problem.

This is really great - I've fallen out of playing table top RPGs lately (kids, time), but especially being able to play early morning or late night is great. Pricing seems great - makes me think of it as an alternative to movies.

One place you might find some inspiration is italki.com - it's for language learning, but a very similar idea of pairing people with teachers. They have really nice search and scheduling functionality.

This is cool! Have you guys considered going into modern board games too? Some of the rules can be quite complex (1-2 hours explaining rules, getting through the first couple of rounds), and there's quite high demand for people figuring them out on say, TTS. Think Splotter games, Brass, etc.

I find it incredibly hard to imagine why anyone would pay for this.

Is it really so hard to find one person in a group of players that wants to GM?

Is it really that hard to find a group of players in the first place?

Meetup has always been perfectly adequate to find a group, and I have to do that only once for every place I live.

This is really cool and probably should have been made a while back, and I'd absolutely use it if I didn't luck into a game earlier this year. I might still use it to play something else.

One thing is, it seems very targeted at TTRPG curious folks that have never played before, like people who have watched Critical Role or heard of D&D and are fantasy fans but have no idea what the actual play experience is. This makes sense, it's a fast way to grow your user base. But I'd be more likely to use the product if I could search by system and request specific games. I would use it to play more niche games that fewer people are running as one shots.

Based on your company description it seems like you're moving in that direction.

Just checked out the site, and one thing I'd recommend is allowing GMs to give more detailed info on the price per session. In the "Upcoming Games" section, one of the games is listed at $30 per session, which seemed incredibly steep compared to the other featured games that were all ~$10 per session. I clicked on the expensive game to see why it was so expensive, and it turns out that's just the rate for a single person, but it goes down to $10 for sessions with 3 or more people. This seems like a cool idea, and I wouldn't want DMs to miss out on players because they saw a high price on the front page and went with a cheaper option.

This is an awesome service. I initially planned to do one or two one-shot games and this has become a regular pastime with half a dozen games played over a couple of months.

Some GM’s are better at keeping players engaged and I have found you get what you pay for. There is a walkthrough game for kids on Saturday mornings that is on my list to try.

I would like to see player profiles somehow captured by the platform as the back and forth between the different gameboard programs is a bit clunky. Letting GMs set up multi-game campaigns on a subscription basis may also be interesting.

Overall a big fan and now a loyal user!

Hey, great idea! I have always wanted to start playing, but I don't know anyone interested in DnD. Having some GMs willing to introduce new players to the game is fantastic!

There are some comments here suggesting that the service might not make much sense since it should be easy to find someone willing to be a GM in a group of friends. I just wanted to say that that is not always the case :)

I have been dreaming about this :) Minor comment: Would it be possible for you to show the timezone next to the schedules - I assume that you show in my browser configured TZ (or pro gm's are serious night owls - I'm in CEST atm), but its pretty shitty to be an hour late/early due to assumptions, especially this time of year when DST ends (and not necessarily on the same date)

Needs FFG SWRPG as an option. Saga edition and D6 are both totally different games.

Can this integrate with other tools in the community, like RPGSessions.com? What about mysheets.com? Or myRPGTools.com? What about OggDude’s character builder? What about the various dice rolling programs?

Can you also handle FFG Genesys, which is very similar to FFG SWRPG?

What about virtual tabletop games?

Do you handle audio chat, background music, and video as well? What about shared maps, like roll20?

I’m already in a number of different Discord servers for various different SWRPG campaigns, and while the games themselves don’t cost me any money, Discord certainly does. And if I want the Discord server to perform reasonably well, then I have to get yet another Nitro subscription, and that kinda gets old after the first half dozen or more Discord servers.

And scheduling is a hard problem that I have yet to see anyone handle right.

Speaking only for myself, I’m not looking for a 24x7x365 convention. I want to play with the same group of people every week (more or less). It could be a really large group, so maybe only a small subset of us can get together for any one game. But still the same group of people, albeit perhaps with a few different options for GMs.

Give me a reason to use your community system instead of the various Discord servers I’m on, please. Not only will I be happy to give you money to do so, I’m willing to give you extra money if you can make that experience even better for me.

Really cool idea! I could definitely see myself using this service when I graduate and have more time.

Out of curiosity, what is player retention like in campaigns? Have you guys considered adding any incentives to keep players coming to the sessions? When I last played DnD, we would always have a ton of fun during the sessions, but it was difficult to keep everyone coming back regularly.

I really like the idea and wish you well.

One tiny advice, all the buttons on your website have anti-aliasing on the text. Anti-aliasing works great on large text, or small text, if it is white in color on dark backgrounds. In your case, the smaller buttons have readability issues, especially the "Signup/Login" button on the top right.

Feature request:

For public games, it would be nice if there was a way (similar to kickstarter) to have a minimum number of people attached to the game before it starts/gets-funded, otherwise it doesn't happen.

I would be very interested in trying this out, but do not want to end up paying for a 1 on 1 session if no one else joins.

This sounds great, my friends and I used to have a regular game night but busy schedules and a few people moving means now it's something we just kind of talk about doing on Roll20 or something. I already posted to our group to see if I can get them in a session!

Cool. Pricing looks looks great. Low enough to justify a few hours of fun. High enough to only get people who really want to be there. Hopefully its enough to keep DMs engaged. Looks like me and my boys are going to dive into a star wars story.

Site has some sort of performance issue. Could be hugga death. Just to let you know, as you might lose people who ar just impatient. I got the impression too much JS running? Maybe prerendering and cdn required?

> I also love that you're making being a "Professional Dungeon Master" a plausible future career choice. :)

Professional DM'ing will never be good for anything other than making some money on the side unless you're charging players an unreasonable amount of money. Yes, there is an imbalance of potential players versus DM's, but at the end of the day the only thing preventing anybody from being a DM is getting over false assumptions that "it's not as fun as playing a character" or "I'm not Matthew Mercer and thus I'm going to be a bad DM". If my introverted and self-critical ass can DM and have players enjoy the experience, so can whoever is reading this.

I DM a weekly 2-hour session, beyond the actual time spent in the session I spend ~45 minutes prepping every week (and I'm running published modules right now, not homebrewing, so that's just time spent reading ahead, writing session notes, etc.). Paid DM's generally charge $25 per player for a four hour session, and their prep time is included in that - given that even running the same module for multiple groups still requires prep time and longer sessions moreso, you're only making $15-25/hr before banks, taxes, etc. take a cut. Not only that, but being paid means you have fairly high expectations placed on your skills that nobody would have for the friendly DM running a game for fun.

I don't have anything against paid DM's, but unless you are literally providing an insanely polished experience that has potential players willing to drop $50 each for a session you're not going to be making a living off it that justifies the time spent beyond some extra pocket change.

> ran 2 campaigns with different groups of friends

Wait what? Am I missing something? You made your friends pay to play with you?

Thanks so much J0ncc! We're really excited about how things have been shaping up!

I agree so much with this! Most people who move into the pro gm world have a ton of experience and resources, but the reviews are one of the best ways to have people vetted. We only show GM's who have 5+ reviews on our search, but any GM can list a game if it meets our review standards.

I like that take on it being a permanent convention set up. The drop in games are definitely filling that niche. A bunch of our games aren't in search because GMs use our tools for charging their customers and scheduling sessions, but for private groups. I'll be honest, we're working to make the ToS more clear as we've learned about other use cases. We mean to say, Minors need a parents consent (credit card to book). As we have grown, we're working to create a better and more apparent code of conduct.

You also found an interesting bug! If you haven't signed up for an account but click become a GM, it won't work since our database looks for an account to them upgrade with new permissions. Thanks for pointing that out!

Good call on the relative links -- just pushed a fix!

100% this

Sorry you had that experience. Honestly though it sounds more like a bad DM, or a mismatch in what kind of game everyone wanted to play, than anything inherent to DnD.

Story in an RPG comes out of the choices the players make in response to the world. DnD enables that just as much as any other system. And nothing about putting yourself in your character’s shoes and making choices requires taking an improv class or talking in funny voices, so don’t worry about that.

But a bad DM who treats every non-combat encounter like a video game cutscene can be a bad DM in any system.

That said, like another poster mentioned, 4th edition did tilt heavily towards being a skirmish wargame dressed as an rpg. 5e is much better in that regard.

But if you want to get away from swords and sorcery fantasy and if Lovecraftian horror does anything for you, check out Call of Cthulhu. The rules are straightforward, creating characters is easy, and it usually focuses on unraveling a mystery rather than completing a Conan the Barbarian style quest. Combat is de-emphasized, because characters that keep getting into fights with unspeakable eldritch horrors tend to have short life expectancies.

Do you know what edition of D&D you were playing? 4e was heavily focused around gridded combat and it turned many players off, as tactics and math overshadowed the role playing.

If you haven’t given 5e a try yet, do so - it’s substantially less crunchy that previous releases and frees combat from the tyranny of the grid if the group wishes to play it without.

As far as balance between combat and story, that’s all up to content. Published adventures tend to be very heavy on dungeon crawls, while many homebrew adventures lean more towards RP.

Oh yeah! I would check out systems like Monster of the Week

https://startplaying.games/join-game/intro-to-monster-of-the...

https://startplaying.games/join-game/thieves-in-the-night-16...

Or Cypher System https://startplaying.games/join-game/black-rain-ripples-[cyp...

Both are pretty fun systems!

Monster of the Week is one of a _bunch_ of quality spins on the Powered by the Apocalypse/Apocalypse World engine. They span a ton of genres, and they all share relatively simple, story-driven mechanics:

http://apocalypse-world.com/pbta/

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse.php?filters=44825_0_0_0_...

The d&d lineage (from old school dungeons and dragons, via advanced dungeons and dragons, through pathfinder and d20 system and on to 5e) can all be played without grid and all that. For a "ready" example see the call of cthulu d20 edition/remake.

But in a pick-up game with strangers, and with the current "mainstream" d&d - you probably have to be lucky to enter a campaignwwhere you develop a character as rich as Elminister or the Lord of Waterdeep.

For systems that encourage story-telling - I'd look to Cypher as mentioned by others - and of course white wolf's Storyteller system. It can be used for almost anything - but Hunter and Mage are probably most beginner friendly for players. Beware that mage can be quite mind bending.

A wiki from our current mage campaign: https://radio-noir.fandom.com/wiki/Radio_Noir_Wiki

Old blog from a previous storyteller/mage inspired original setting:

http://thebookofworlds.blogspot.com/p/world-of-argos.html

Ed: I've also heard good things about:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Falkenstein_(role-pla...

And for a fun ruleset (but slightly dated setting) check out Underground! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_(role-playing_ga...

In addition to the recommendations for Powered by the Apocalypse games (specifically Monster of the Week) I'd also encourage you to look into the FATE system, especially FATE: Accelerated Edition[0] and its SRD [1]. It's designed to be fairly light on the mechanics, and to help the GM and the players focus on the development of a story within those mechanics. I've been running a homebrew-story FAE game with a group of 4 friends and I really like the flexibility it gives us to focus on the narrative and character development. Also it's designed to be a pretty minimal time commitment to learn the rules well enough to give it a try.

[0] https://www.evilhat.com/home/fae/

[1] https://fate-srd.com/fate-accelerated/get-started

>> I would prefer to develop a story together. A system where you don’t need a exact map with squares/hexagons to make decisions, for example. Where story and character decisions on what to do matter more than tactical decisions in combats.

You're probably looking for something like the old Call of Cthulhu by Chaosium:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_of_Cthulhu_(role-playing_...

I see from the wikipedia article that the last edition was in 2014, so it's still going. There used to be a d20 version, also, for those people who don't know how to read two d10 side-by-side ;)

You might also want to check out the user forums at rpg.net:

https://forum.rpg.net/index.php

You can find threads for all sorts of games, more or less popular. You're bound to find something that you will like.

You can play any system any way, and popularity of D&D (especially online and in English-speaking countries) means that you're more likely to find the 5% of D&D players that want narrative-focused D&D than the 50% of World of Darkness or Call of Cthulhu players who want narrative-focused games. But there's enough of both to find someone on the internet.

Also systems come with setting and genre - if you like medieval fantasy and political intrigue Call of Cthulhu might not be for you (because it takes place in more modern times in real-world+ universe and it's mostly focused on horror/mystery). World of Darkness has a culture of focusing on narrative and acting over mechanics in this system, but it can be a little too "emo"/"existential horror" for some people. Or maybe it's my prejudice, I've never personally played it, just watched some games in the 90s.

If you don't like crunchy mechanics there's a very simple d6 system:

1 = you failed AND something bad happened

2 = you failed

3 = you failed BUT something good happened

4 = you succeeded BUT something bad happened

5 = you succeeded

6 = you succeeded AND something good happened

Your character sheet is just a table with free-form description of what you're good at (you roll 2d6 and choose better result) and what you're bad at (you roll 2d6 and choose worse result). DM can also give you more/less dices depending on how hard something is to do.

That's pretty much it - you can play it now :). I don't remember what was the name of that system but it's commonly played late-night at conventions - almost no setup required. And it tends to create games with little focus on combat.

Voice-acting is a matter of personal preference I think. I don't usually do it and I've never had problems in games where some people did it and some didn't.

Anyway - the key to having fun is to set expectations on the first session. Better to talk about it in advance than to waste time playing with people who want to have fun differently than you. The system is secondary (and you can always houserule stuff away if it's too complex for you).

Well to get to more story aspects - you really need to be at least conversant with the mechanical aspects and also the actual fluff so you don't keep breaking Suspension of disbelief for the players.

I DM online for a group and we start at 9PM every Monday for similar reasons. A few people in the group, including myself, are married with children and we want to enjoy a game when the kids are in bed and there's less of a chance of interruptions. We also have an alternate day everyone has agreed on so if somebody has an emergency or can't avoid making plans on the regular game night we can still have our session for the week, this is important as a chain of missed sessions because life happened to get in the way can cause a group to fall apart.

If you're not at a point in your life where you can make a (bi-)weekly commitment with a similar setup, you can always find a DM that is looking for substitute players that can fill in when a regular party member is missing. This is a tactic used by many to avoid cancelling sessions altogether because a player cannot make it, and to keep players on a "waiting list" should a regular need to step out. No commitment on your part is needed and there's no hard feelings if you can't make a game after getting the call because you're not part of the regular group anyway.

Just make sure to find a DM that's understanding of the parental life and if you're comfortable with it you can always give them control over your character if you have to step away where feasible (no DM will want to roleplay for you in social settings, but generally other players can handle those and if there's a check you specialize in they could use your stats in a pinch - but when you're just dungeon crawling it's NBD to drive your character in combat or exploration). While I always have my wife to available to deal with any issues that may crop up with our child on game night, my players are fully aware that I'm willing to take over their character for a bit if they need to step away for an urgent matter.

At the end of the day it's important for everybody to remember _it's a game_, and we're there to have fun. The party member that regularly skips a session because they only seem to join when there's nothing better to do is a drag, but the vast majority of DM's and other players know that life is not so convenient that nothing will ever interrupt a scheduled session and aren't going to hold it against you.

One last suggestion: you can always do play-by-post. There's quite a few groups that operate this way, and it's a great way to get into the game without having to find 2-6 contiguous hours to play. The experience is most certainly "not the same", but that's the point.

I feel this so much! We're hoping to roll out a "Play Now" option down the road so you don't need to plan to be free. I think finding a way to find really flexible GMs would be helpful for solving this too.

I assume you’re a single parent, which is why you can’t make an agreement with your partner for some periodic uninterrupted time.

Have you looked at how often you are actually interrupted for a meaningful amount of time during the time the children are, or should be, asleep? Try to get a sense of the actual likelihood and severity of the disruption, because these games can handle a player stepping away periodically for a few minutes.