How to find a D&D group online that lasts

Finding a group is easy. Finding one that still exists in three months is the hard part, and almost every guide to this skips it.

Where people look

• Marketplaces. You browse listings, pay per session, and get matched with strangers. Fast, and the quality varies wildly because the platform isn't vouching for anyone.
• Big public Discord servers. Free, enormous, and a lottery. Some are excellent. Many are a channel where twenty people say "LFG" and nothing happens.
• Reddit and forum LFG posts. Free and high-churn. A group assembled from strangers who each answered a post has no reason to hold together when one of them gets busy.
• Friends of friends. Still the best odds, and the least available option if you don't already know players.

Why groups fall apart around session four

It's rarely rules disputes or a bad Dungeon Master. It's that nobody agreed what the game was before it started, and that the first person to miss a week discovers that nothing bad happens, so they miss another. Nearly every dead group died of scheduling, whatever story people tell about it afterward.

What to check before you commit

Ask these before your first session, in whatever venue you found the group in. A group that can't answer them is telling you something.

• Is there a fixed night and a fixed start time, or is it "we'll find a time each week"?
• Is there a session zero, and does it cover tone, content limits and what happens when somebody has to leave?
• Who decides what happens when two players miss the same week?
• What happens to your character if you leave in month four?
• How long has this group's Dungeon Master run a table for, and did those tables end or stop?

What paying changes

Paying doesn't buy you a better story. It buys you somebody whose job it is to hold the schedule, prepare between sessions, and deal with the player who's making everyone else's evening worse. Whether that's worth money to you is a real question and we've written it up straight: is paying for a Dungeon Master worth it, including the situations where the answer is no.

If you want to see how we do it, the running games and their nights are listed on the play in a campaign page, and the people running them are on the Dungeon Masters page with the games they run.