What fraction of us are DMs

Reading the articles around the WotC announcement of the plans to milk us all for every penny we are worth (Dungeons & Dragons executives think “the brand is really under monetised”) - one of the things they said was 'DM's are 20% of the customers' - and I wondered if we see that anywhere in our various surveys?

At its most basic, 1-in-5 DM's implies a standard table size of DM-plus-four-players - and I think there are more of us running for bigger tables than that.

Pulling together some surveys which say how many folk people play with, we get signs that many people are playing on bigger tables - except for the MegaDM survey, more than 50% of players are at tables of 5+. Even the MegaDM survey has 45% of tables larger than 4 players. There is the question about people playing at different tables of different sizes but since the question asked is 'how many do you play with' let us suppose that people have more or less responded with the typical number for their overall experience.

Pulling together other sources with rougher categores "2-4 players" "3-4 players" which does not allow us to directly compare, we still see signs that 4 player tables are not the majority. If this was true, all those lines would be over 50% at the 4 player line, since many are under that says more than half of players are playing at larger tables.

So is this by choice for folk? We get a hint that people would prefer to play smaller tables from articles about a 'DM shortage'. Questing Beast discussed this question in a video recently though his poll results do not give us enough detail to move the needle on our estimates so far.

Digging back into the archives we can see in old surveys people having to DM who did not want to - 12% who would rather be players, having to DM. Compare this to the 3% who are players who would prefer to DM and it suggests that those who want to DM mostly get to and there are a bunch of folk who have to who would rather not. That does speak to not enough DM's to go around.

Another thing we can check is what are the fractions of DM's in the people answering these surveys - how close is that fraction to the 20% mark? We see from the surveys above that the survey respondants are playing at tables roughly the size we are expecting - however when I check through the surveys, where they ask if people are DM's or players, the answer comes back 50/50 or thereabouts. This fits with what we understand that DM's are more likely to be engaging with these online activities.

This number had been discussed among my ancient friends along with comments of how some are running multiple tables and so their DM-to-player ratio is ~3% or the like but we figure most DM's are not running lots of tables at once. Certainly for the most of my time and most of what I see among different circles and different places, the most common model appears to be 'run one game at a time, perhaps play in others simultaneously'.

So that 20% of us are DM's seems broadly correct - certainly within rounding error, for it to be 15%, we would need to be mostly running tables of 6 players plus DM's which I do not think most are. The scourge of scheduling ensures that for the most part.

Sources:
2014 D&D Survey on r/DnD
Enworld 2004
MegaDM survey 2017
Reddit Subclasses 2019
Facebook 5e group 2020
Twitter poll 2020
Dragonsfoot forum 2011