**RPG Schedule Discord Bot (no longer maintained)**
This bot makes it super easy to sync up your events and RSVPs with your discord server.
Hammertime - A website that gives you copy/paste code to paste into Discord. Every player will see the resulting time in their own time zone! Great for searching for players too. Just put your weekday and time into hammertime and don’t worry about the actual date.
This simple, free resource makes it actually possible to figure out when your players are available! You’ll never have a conversation like “Uhhh tuesday? Nah how bout Wednesday at 3?” ever again.
Now, sometimes the hard part is getting your players to actually fill out their schedule on this dead-simple tool. I recommend sending each of your players the link with a personalized message, and giving them a deadline by which to enter their schedule. Remind them as the deadline is coming up if they haven’t filled it out yet. This can motivate most people to do it.
If you get a lot of pushback on filling out the When2Meet, then it might be time to go back to the drawing board on the amount of commitment your players want to put into an RPG, and what they want to get out of it in return. There’s nothing wrong with playing a low-commitment pickup RPG every once in a while, but only if everyone is on board with that.
Doodle is similar to When2Meet, except it can also connect to Zoom or Google Calendar, and has a slightly more modern user interface. If you want to pay for it you can even get some fancy extra features, like setting a deadline. However, the free option is covered in ads and it can only do specific dates — whereas When2Meet can also do general days of the week.
It’s best to look for people to game with who live nearish to you, even if you are socially distancing and must play online. This way you’re likely to have a language in common, and also you’ll only need to work with one time zone or a couple time zones that are relatively close together.