BuddyPress.org

I’m starting a website that’s dedicated to building a community around tabletop roleplaying games. The intent is to create a full community of people in the state of Arizona where we can become a
one-stop-shop for every aspect of the hobby.

Among our primary goals is finding a way to make it easy for people to find each other and
make games happen. It’s the hobby’s biggest hurdle, and I think it’s one that’s easily addressed with the right tools in place. The idea is to let community members create detailed profiles and post ads for their tabletop games. From there, a matchmaking system sorts games and users and puts them together using an algorithm. I picture something like OKCupid’s matching algorithm—but for TTRPGs and groups of people.

Based on what I’m reading on your site, BuddyPress offers a lot of the side benefits I’d want included in a tool like this. Obviously you’re not designed to be a matchmaking service, so I’m just here wondering what it would take to build something like this on top of your platform.

Let me explain the process of what I’m picturing:

1. Gamemasters (GM) post their game advertisement with full details about it using a form. (game system, style, player preferences, etc.).
2. Players build profiles specifying their availability, preferred games, playstyle and more through a matching form.
3. The system compares the game ads with player profiles, generating a weighted score to rank potential matches.
4. Based on a threshold score, matches are suggested to GMs and players.
5. Once there’s a match, the player or GM can reach out via the site’s chat tools/Discord {integrated together would be great too).
6. After chatting, they accept or reject the invite.
7. When both sides accept, the system fills the next available slot in the GM’s game,
8. This repeats until all the slots are full or the GM closes the ad.
9. The system then opens communication between all matched players using the site’s chat.

We’re already running an analog version of this on Discord with a couple hundred users. It’s been pretty successful considering our small scale and limited capabilities—we’ve helped hundreds of people find games over the last year.

Now, we want to take it to the next level with a fully integrated website as a hub for everything TTRPG in the state. A store, blog, resource directory, and a ton of other features. This tool will just be a big part of it.

So, I’m no expert on websites (last one I built was in 2001), so I’m planning to have this site professionally developed. I really don’t know what’s possible these days and it’s intimidating to try and learn it all.

So with this vision in mind, do you think a tool like BuddyPress can be customized to do something like this?