Rachel Dove, a former stock broker with Charles Schwab, likes to play the role playing game Dungeons & Dragons. But the 35-year-old who lives in Commerce City said she often had a hard time finding compatible people to play with.
“It is a role playing game, so it can get very intimate and you want to feel comfortable with the people at your table. So there are opportunities to go to local gaming shops and simply join a group of strangers and play the game,” Dove said. “However, that takes away some of the fun of the role-playing elements. So what people are really looking for is a way to forge a real connection through this game.”
She said sometimes people might share the imaginative or strategic traits needed to be good at the game, which requires at least four and as many as nine people and has about 50 million players worldwide. About 40 percent of them are female and 60 percent male, with a quarter of them between the ages of 20 and 24. But not all people might be appropriate partners for every kind of player, she explained.
“I went online; I found a game to join, and as soon as I got accepted into it and started playing, it was a group of white men, and they looked at me and they go, ‘Oh, well, OK. I guess it's good. We have a girl at the table now in case we need for you to seduce anything, but otherwise you can just sit back. We've got this taken care of,’” Dove said. “And at first I thought, ‘Maybe that's a joke.’ I quickly learned it was not a joke. So obviously that was not a great experience for me.”
So she decided to leave her job and create the app, aimed at helping people find the kinds of DnD players they want to play with. After beta testing it with 500 users, she’s launching Dungeons NOT Dating on Friday.
“What people are able to do is set up a profile similar to a dating app, where they can put in things like their value tags, hobby tags, other personality tags. They can say whether they're extrovert, introvert, LGBTQ-plus, they love hiking in the great outdoors. And then they build out their character and then they're able to swipe through those other people's profiles based on character first.”
Once they see a profile they like, players can reach out to form a playing group, she said.
“They would get to decide if that's a character that they want to play with, and then they could see, ‘Oh, and this Tling Rogue (DnD character) was created by Rachel, a woman from Colorado who's LGBTQ-plus and whatever else about me,’ just so that you're sure you're going to be comfortable in that space or with that person,” Dove said. “And then you're able to start building the connection via chat and a group chat feature so that you can start adding more and more people into that chat until you form a whole party and then start planning your play sessions.”
She said the app eliminates the need to use social media to find gaming partners, and that women, people of color, queer people, neurodivergent people and those with social anxiety who may have struggled to find gaming partners are part of the target audience for the app, which is free with ads.
It also eliminates the guess-work and potential rejection for those looking for people to play the game with, she added.
“They're going online to things like subreddit threads or Facebook groups, and they're saying, ‘Hey, I want to play. I'm available to play. Does anyone have room for me at their table? I can play Fridays at 5:00 PM,’ or something. And then they're kind of keeping their fingers crossed and hoping that a group of strangers says, ‘Yes, come to our table,’ and then keeping their fingers crossed longer and hoping that that group of strangers also accepts who they are and they get along with them.”
Now, using the app, people will be able to stop having to cross their fingers and will have a bit more control over their experience.
“Instead of me putting myself out there and hoping to be accepted,” she said, “I'm in control. I get to say, ‘I want to play with you,’ or, ‘I don't want to play with you,’” Dove said. “So I'm in control of building that table.”
