[MrDrMcCoy]

There's lots of neat tricks for DHT peer discovery and NAT hole punching these days. Wouldn't be hard to make a local game sever manager that lets you share join information to your friends and have it automatically resolve all the networking needed with no VPN, static IP, or DNS required.

[rollcat]

I normally recommend Tailscale, and that's a great starting point, for games that do not support any of the neat tricks natively. The problem: it's more difficult to build a community around that. You're introducing a point of friction, and a lot of newcomers will bounce. It's difficult enough to guide a non-technical friend, and Tailscale is top among the absolute easiest solutions.