02 December 2023

Table Matching Survey Results

I ran a survey of our local game group to discover preferences and see what else people would like to be playing. From conversations at Night of the Rolling Dice I thought it would be a good idea to survey the group to ask what games people want to play to then try and match up tables. Partially inspired by the frequency of recent group matching posts here, I wanted to try and highlight preferred frequency (weekly, monthly, etc), preferred session length, online/in-person/both so folk could hopefully see that there were others interested in the same timeslots.

Our standard tempo is a Friday night session and a sometimes Saturday brunch session - my hypothesis going into this was these were driven purely by force of habit - those timings generally working and being 'good enough' we left them. I wanted to know if there could be other times that would suit people who could not make the Friday night slots and what those would be.

What stands out to me from the point of view of getting more tables going:
* We have people interested to play most weeknight evenings - plenty of room to fit in a new game.
* We have nine people interested to run a table - behold your player pool!
* 11 of us are happy to play online

People available per day - our regular slot is a Friday due to room availability but it looks like it would be even better for folk on a Saturday or Sunday.
Preferred frequency of play - most people are being covered by our weekly session but we have a fair few that once or twice a month suit better.
Preferred session duration - towards the longer-haul end of things but pretty expected.
When I asked what style people liked to play, they could select all they liked of the categories:
Long Campaign - persistent character group, long story arc, sidequests
Mini-campaign - short duration, single story arc
Episodic - stand-alone sessions, continuous world
One-shots - try something different each time

Everyone is happy to play in person, 11 of us are also happy to play online.

What side of the screen do people want to be?
Preferred Genres - while dark / heroic fantasy are the most popular this says there is ample appetite for others.
The full list is:
Dark fantasy / Sword and sorcery
Heroic / Epic fantasy
High/Epic fantasy
Fairy tale
Horror / occult fantasy
Post-apocalyptic fantasy
Science / techno / steampunk fantasy
Cyberpunk
Hard / Historical fantasy
Wild West
Psychological Horror
Space Opera (star wars)
Hard Sci-fi (Expanse)
Wartime
Zombie Horror
Grimdark future (40k)
Superhero

Plus three mentions for ‘Mystery’ and one each for "Low/no magic fantasy", "Mech sci fi", “Silly” Fantasy á la Terry Pratchett and "Eldritch Horror".

Preferred Systems - again show a lot of appetite to try other systems.

Plus ~3 hits each for Blades in the Dark, mörk borg, Powered By The Apocalypse games in general. We got a single mention each for Trophy, the wildsea, Monster Hearts, Ironsworn, Pagan Pacts, Dungeon Crawler Classics, Monster of the Week, cbr+pnk, cyperpunk red, spire, alien rpg, vaesen, shiver, lancer, salvage union, amd "anything rules light".

So for now we are broadly doing what people want - running weekly in person games that are mostly one-shots, some episodic, in standard D&D 5e for typically 4 hours a session. It looks to me like there are opportunities for people to run other games on weekends - both daytime and evening - and potentially even run online if the logistics prove challenging.

While the majority of folk are here to play standard 5e D&D, there are lots of folk willing to try new systems and settings with even the least popular systems and settings (40k, superheroes) having enough folk interested that you could probably make up a table.

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