u/FreeKi11

Stories to come:"Or the table where someone skins a bugbear to wear it as a disguise....."

Quick version up front: if you run games, I'm hand-picking founding GMs and beta testers to get in early and help shape it (more at the bottom). And if you're more on the player side, get on the waitlist at that link so there are actual tables waiting when the doors open on July 10th!

That's a real screen from the thing I built, running live. The table in the shot is a demo listing I staged so I'd have something to show, but the site itself and everything on it actually works. EnterGuildHall.com

Im FreeKi11, 35, lifelong player, went to school for new media and interactive development, been making casual apps on the side for about a decade. Every couple of years my life moves cities, and every couple of years I lose my D&D group and start the hunt over. r/lfg, the local Discord, a Facebook group, a friend of a friend. I usually find a table that works for now. I almost never find the one that actually fits, and it almost never survives the next move.

Here's the stuff that actually ends groups, and none of it shows up in "plays 5e, free Thursdays":

The player who's checked out most of the session, just waiting to land his one-liners. In his head they're the reason everyone loves having him there. In reality most of them hit flat, the table fake-laughs and moves on. He doesn't build the world or roleplay, and he tunes out through combat right up until it's his turn to swing at the dragon.

The GM who hates phones at the table, but gets so caught up with the two quick, witty players that the back-and-forth just runs away with him. He moves the party into the next room and locks in the decision before the quieter, more thoughtful folks have even worked out what they wanted to do. A few rounds of "wait, I was about to say something" and they stop trying. They end up on their phones, and then they catch passive-aggressive jabs from the GM, who feels disrespected that nobody's into his story. Meanwhile they're in a group chat venting that they cant get a word in edgewise.

Or the table where someone skins a bugbear to wear it as a disguise, and it lands as a fun gross-out for four people and genuinely horrifies the fifth. That fifth person doesn't say a word. They just start being "busy" on game day. The table reads it as flaking. Really it's someone who never got asked where their line was, and isn't the type to make a scene about it.

Those quiet ones are who I keep thinking about. The conflict-avoiders, the people who swallow it and slowly disappear instead of blowing up the group. Right now the whole hobby kind of runs on them either toughing it out or ghosting, and I hate that.

My brother-in-law has been bouncing around Germany hitting this same wall for years. But he told me about one table that stuck with him. Before session zero the GM handed everyone a little "contract," asked how they felt about the hard stuff, had a real conversation about it, then built the game around what they said. He says it was the best table he's ever been at. That's honestly the thing I'm trying to recapture, just without making every GM invent the form from scratch.

So the core of Guildhall is a compatibility score you see before you ever apply to a table. Think loosely D&D Tinder, except the match isn't "is there a seat," it's "does this table actually fit you." That's the number on the right of the screenshot, with the plain-English reasons it does or doesn't fit. The part I'm proudest of is the 22 content boundaries, each on a five-step ladder from a hard no up to "I actively want this." Permanent character death, torture, harm to kids or animals, player-vs-player, that kind of thing. A hard no is a wall, you and that table just never match. A soft no still matches but flags it, so you walk in already knowing. Your boundaries stay private, a GM never sees them, they just quietly shape who you match with. Nobody gets rated, theres no stars, no leaderboard. I left all of that out on purpose.

Two more I care about. That phone thing from up top, I made a phones-at-the-table preference for exactly that, because some tables genuinely don't care and some can't stand it, and now you can just say which you are instead of finding out three weeks in. And theres an LGBTQ-friendly toggle that works both ways: set it as a player and you match toward tables that have flagged themselves welcoming, set it as a GM and your table says so out loud, so the people who need that find it up front instead of the hard way at the table.

To be clear, none of this replaces session zero. Talking to your table still matters, always will. It just clears the obvious landmines off the floor first, so session zero is the fun part instead of the awkward part. And if you just want to throw up a quick game, you can post a bare-bones listing in about a minute. All the compatibility stuff is opt-in.

On money, since it always comes up: it's free, and the core stays free. Down the road it'll be ad supported to keep the lights on, but the ads never touch the matching or who gets seen. The second money can buy its way up a match, the whole thing is pointless.

The big thing: it's built and live. I could flip the switch today. The only reason I'm holding is I'd rather have real players and GMs from this community get in, break it, and tell me whats wrong before I do, instead of one guy guessing in the cave, with a box of scraps. I'm aiming to open the doors July 10th.

For the doubters out there: More Screen Shots of the Site on imgur, or reach out and I can left you behind the gates to see it working live!

Two things I'd love from this thread:

Founding GMs. This is NOT "come run a game tonight." Its get in early, kick the tires, and help me decide what the score should actually weigh. You get a permanent founder badge, early access, a Hall that stays ad-free for you for good, founder titles you earn as you bring people in, and Guild Invite codes to pull your existing crew straight into your group. Comment the table you'd run, or the one that fell apart on you, and I'll let you in.
A real design problem I'm stuck on. Right now I have a "Setting" field (high fantasy, sci-fi, gothic, post-apocalyptic, and so on). I can't decide if Setting should just mean genre. A couple people have floated touchstones instead, like "think Conan" tells you more than "low fantasy" ever could. How would you actually want to say what a table feels like before you join it? I don't have the answer yet and I want to get it right before launch.

If you're more on the player side, get on the waitlist at the link so there are real tables waiting when the doors open. And if you just want in early to mess with it and tell me whats broken, say so and I'll get you in too.

So I'll ask you the thing I most want to know: what's the quiet mismatch that's killed a table for you? The one nobody said out loud until it was already too late.

Thanks for reading. Come find your table, and meet me at the Quest board in the Hall!

Here is the thing I got backwards for most of a year: I assumed the variables I could capture cleanly were the ones that mattered. They are the ones that matter least. The variable that actually decides whether a campaign survives is the one I still cannot figure out how to measure, and I am hoping some of you have.

Context, briefly, so this is not abstract. I have been trying to turn "is this player a fit for this table" into an actual score you could look at before session zero. Not a vibe, a number, with weights I set by hand and can defend. I have rebuilt the weighting four times. Each rebuild taught me the same lesson harder.

The clean signals are a trap.

System, format, language, even schedule. These are the parts you can put in structured fields and capture without anyone lying or guessing. So early on I weighted them heavily, because they were the parts I could trust. That was the mistake. Getting the system right is table stakes. A table of six people who all play 5e on Thursdays is not a good table. It is a table that has cleared the lowest bar and nothing else. I now weight system and format low on purpose. They are a floor, not a fit.

Schedule is the interesting one in this group, because it looks clean and is not. "Free evenings" and "free evenings" is not a match. Two people whose actual windows overlap by three hours every week is a match. So I stopped scoring availability as a yes or no and started scoring the size of the overlap, and I made a thin overlap read as a warning instead of a green light. A thin overlap is just the "weekly game that becomes monthly" death, deferred. The calendar is where good intentions go to quietly fail, and almost nobody scores the calendar honestly.

Then there are the signals that are expensive to capture and worth everything.

Content boundaries. The failure mode that haunts me is the table running heavy on-screen horror where one person had a hard line they were never actually asked about, so they sat through three sessions getting smaller, then stopped replying. A free-text "no weird stuff please" box does not catch that, because it gets skimmed once and forgotten by session two. So I went structured: a five-step ladder (hard no, prefer not, fine, on theme, prefer) across roughly twenty topics, on-screen violence, romance, real-world religion and politics, substance use, and so on. The point of the ladder is not the data. The point is that it forces the question to get asked and surfaces the mismatch before anyone has committed to anything. There is also an LGBTQ-friendly signal that runs both ways: a player can say "I want a welcoming table," an organizer can say "this table is one," and a player who needs that lands on the tables that already said so, instead of finding out in the room.

And then reliability, which is the whole reason I am posting.

Ghosting and slow table-death kill more campaigns than any taste mismatch ever will. The player who is present for exactly one moment per session, the one where the dragon is in range. The one who flakes twice and then ghosts because flaking twice felt too awkward to come back from. This is the single most predictive thing about whether a table lasts, and it is the one variable I have not found an honest way to capture.

Every version I have tried is bad in a different direction. Too soft and it measures nothing, a participation trophy that tells you nothing you did not already know. Too hard and it becomes a scarlet letter for one rough month during a divorce or a deployment, which is both unfair and the fastest possible way to make every decent person refuse to be scored at all. The instant people feel ranked as humans, the good ones opt out, and you are left measuring only the people who do not care, which is worse than measuring nothing.

So that is my real question for this sub, and it is a design question, not a "validate my idea" question: how do you capture "this person shows up" without building something punitive enough that the people who actually show up refuse to participate?

If you have ever designed or even seen an attendance or reputation system that threaded that, in an RPG context or anywhere, I want to know how it handled the cold start (a new player has no history and is not a flake), the bad-month problem (one lapse should not be permanent), and the gaming problem (any score people can see is a score people will farm).

A few smaller ones I keep going back and forth on, in case they are easier for you than for me:

A single hard boundary against an otherwise excellent match. Right now one "hard no" against an "on theme" listing zeroes the score, even when everything else is a 95. I think that is right, because a boundary is not a preference you average against. But "one axis can veto all the others" is a strong claim and I would like it stress-tested by people who design systems for a living.
Experience and commitment level. I weight these light, on the theory that a mismatch there is friction, not a campaign-ender, so it should nudge the score, not gate it. Agree, or am I underrating it?
The thing I left off entirely. What is the one signal you personally would never form a table without knowing, that is nowhere in anything above?

Full honesty, because this sub rightly wants it stated plainly rather than buried: this is not purely theoretical for me. I built a working version of this, alone, in the evenings, because I got tired of finding-tools that get you a table and then leave the part that actually matters to luck. It is free, the core stays free, it is ad-supported, and the ads never touch the score or who gets seen, because the entire thing falls apart the moment money can buy your way up a match. It is in my profile if you are curious. It is genuinely not why I am here. My brother-in-law has been hitting the exact same wall moving around Germany that I keep hitting in the US, five apps deep and still doing all the real screening by gut in person, and that is what finally pushed me to stop complaining and build the matching layer.

I am here because nobody designs the player side of this game as hard as this sub designs everything else, and I would much rather be wrong in the comments than wrong at someone's real table. So: how would you measure "shows up" without turning it into a permanent record, and what did I weight backwards?

[OC] My weekly group fell apart over something nobody brought up at session zero, so I built a tool that shows you the table fit before you commit [Mod Approved]

I spent a year trying to score table fit. The number I trust least is the one that decides everything