r/startplaying

I keep getting ads for a website called StartPlaying which seems to be a DND game finder site.

They have seemed to have partnered with critical role, which was the main thing that caught my eye.

However when scrolling on website something really didn’t add up to me. I kept seeing campaigns that used AI to advertise and seemingly some of the same campaign bios cut and pasted or at least ripped off one another. I’ve filled out interest for some of these groups who needed 1 last player, but never got a response back, which makes me wonder even more if the platform is real.

I will also say something that stood out to me was that you have to pay for sessions, but all the sessions are online. I understand paying for an intro course, but I have not seen/heard of people paying to playing DND. Maybe i’ve been playing with friends for so long to not have noticed this change.

Has anyone had any success with this site?

If a player misses a session (reason unimportant), does SPG have an order of things that happens next or is it entirely up to the GM what happens?

For example, in my current unpaid games I have a strike system based on players missing sessions. Could I use said strike system when I begin hosting games on SPG or do I need to follow a set of rules?

TL;DR: Looking for people to join a game together.

I’m fairly new to DnD, having only played one short campaign irl pretty long time ago, and haven’t played since. I decided to try online as I struggled to find a group irl again and joined the first group I saw on SPG. The GM was really welcoming even though I was new and overall provided a great immersive experience with their voice acting and funny responses to the group’s shenanigans.
Recently I had a bit more free time and wanted to join more games of this GM, but found out that they don’t have that big of a recognition yet and cannot start more games for now. That being said, I want to look for a group to join their other games with. If you want to check out their profile, their name is Draxter on SPG.

P.S: I’ve searched for similar posts on the subreddit and couldn’t find similar ones, so please forgive me if this is not the type of thing that should be posted here.

This is a campaign I've been running and refining in home games for years, and it has grown to be something I'm really proud of and want to share! Check out my profile on StartPlaying for more info about me as a DM, and join the campaign while seats remain! Hope to see you there!

I clearly don't know how the internet works, or Reddit, or startplaying... But there was this post about people's startplaying experiences that I got in my feed, and I was like oh! Let me check out this sub and see what other productive conversations people are having about start playing....

And like a thousand scroll-downs later, there's nothing else here but all these spammy ads for games. Are people actually creating these manually or does startplaying have some sort of "automatically create reddit post every time I make a SP listing" feature?