The 3 pillars of gameplay beyond D&D

A new survey from D&D Research Wizards (NYU team) is ongoing and they have published some preliminary results. This one is open to all TTRPG players and it is interesting to see it plotted against D&D focused surveys.

The increased importance of role-playing makes some sense as broadening the apeture from D&D to include everything will bring in many games where the classic modes of finding abandoned ruins and searching them for treasure while fighting off beasties are not their primary operating modes. Taking Call of Cthulu as an example - for almost all the games of that I have played, combat was lethal and to be avoided by the squishy humans - the fun was in the investigations (exploration) and the roleplay.

Similarly for World of Darkness - games I have played of that were less exploration focused and more roleplay and combat (fistfuls of d10s!) focused. Investigations and problems solving were usually rapidly brushed over by the application of high level gifts.

The survey is still open, looking for information from all Tabletop RPG players. There is also a raffle with participation prizes which is nice.

Other sources are:
Sven Writes twitter poll (2020)
D&D reddit survey (2014)
Sly Flourish facebook poll (2018)