Main highlight of this year in gaming was spinning up my Ducal House menagerie-world game. We had the great good fortune to hold session zero in a bar the weekend before lockdown dropped - so we shifted directly to online via Roll20 + Skype. The intended tempo was twice a month, ~5 hour sessions; goal of this was to set expectations for time and make 3 games a month as 'we got in an extra game' not 'we missed a week'. Finally on average we got in 3.4 sessions a month. Stats wise, this puts the game on the average - weekly game is still traditional.
For session times we are skewing towards the long end of the standard hump according to some sources with 5.6 hour long games on average.
Some of the lessons learned from this campaign I wrote up. I worked up some new methods to keep things on track like 1-page session prep. We managed to play through some modules within the campaign - the Kobolds Art Exhibition (part 1, part 2) and Wolpertinger, Wererat... Well!
So far we are well on the way to being my 3rd longest running campaign and going strong. We have over-shot estimated hours by ~90%.
I also had the good fortune to get into a monthly Out of the Abyss 5e game which has been a treat, run by someone with real mastery of the Roll20 nuts and bolts that adds a great tactical combat layer to things. I do not like to run this, but I do like to play it.
Back on this blog I did a bunch of reviews of the torrent of things that have come in the door:
Ultraviolet Grasslands
Thousand Thousand Islands
Creatures (Fateforged)
NOD Magazine #11
Veins of the Earth
Mork Borg
Wormskin #1-8
Kefitzah Haderech - Incunabulum of the Uncanny Gates and Portals
We Have Lost
Dark Roads & Golden Hells
2 Worm 2 Furious
Pathfinder Planar Adventures
I think these justified their calories burnt when I was able to dump them into a reddit thread of someone looking for where to put their Christmas cash and point them to some things they were not aware of.
Third major thing done was the big internet data trawl - gathering up lots and lots of old surveys to try and spot patterns over time. Things that surprised me were:
There is such a difference in class preference between the online community and general gamers.
How quickly new joiners have come to the game (80% of players are here since 2015).
How skewed and stable the preferences for the 3 pillars are over time.
How much TTRPG is dominated by the US (70% of players)
Lastly on looking back - who has come here to look at all of this? Interestingly, the readership here skews much more European and Asian than the norm for online TTRPG interactions. As best I can extract the numbers from the blogger dashboard we see almost equal European and North America interaction which is unusual.
I figure this links back to connection with The (Irish) Adventuring Party podcast and in particular its fun discord server. Coupled with my being based in Austria I think that explains that. Otherwise, the large response from Asia looks like it ties back to the popularity of the Thousand Thousand Islands review and people following from there. Welcome all, I hope you continue to find it worthwhile to follow.
Main plans for the year ahead are:
Continue to review my shelves; rest of planar handbooks, new zines.
Play/run my campaigns
Get back to my local Adventurers League with RPG Vienna once things settle down
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