The Great Tabletop Roleplaying Survey - Initial Data Comb

All praise to The Scholomance who just released a delightful anonymised dataset of a big survey they ran at the turn of the year. Their initial write up is here.

They got a solid 1902 results and you can see a few direct results on the initial write up which I will not rehash here:
How many tabletop groups are you involved in that regularly play game sessions?
How do you usually play your sessions?
How often do you play tabletop roleplaying games?
How long do your sessions typically last?
What was your first tabletop roleplaying system?
Select your current main system.
How would you rate the importance of a system?
How would you rate the complexity of your current main system?

The huge value in this type of big survey is in the cross-referencing, not the raw numbers. You can test out hypotheses like 'people who meet less often will probably game for longer' - and you've got the frequency of meeting up and duration of gaming to check that.

On a first look, it appears that for folk with monthly or more frequent games, that broadly holds true - more 3-5 hour games among the monthly gamers and more 1-3 hour games for the multiple-times-a-week folk. Folk playing less than once a month flip back to more shorter sessions - makes me suspect that if you do not have a regular monthly game carved out, you are taking whatever opportunitites you have, however long they might be.

There is another neat pair of 'what did you start as' and 'what are you now' for player/DM roles - as might be expected the player-to-DM channel is a one-way ratchet. A fair block of players become DMs, maybe half the DM's get to play sometimes but... ain't no going back to 'just player' for those who started as DMs...

Another one I checked was favourite genre against what people are currently playing - and it looks like a decent chunk are getting to play their favourite games - especially Sci-fi and Pulp games - and Fantasy but that is hardly surprising. Green in each bar below is the fraction of people currently playing in their favourite genre for each of those genres. For 'multiple genres across multiple games' the 'mixed genre' people are getting a partial nod.

Anyway - some quick cuts since the data got released - there is a ton of stuff in here that will merit more careful read through - perhaps using 'first game edition' to try and unpick the elder gamers into finer boxes, pull together a list of what games played and there are tons and tons of comments that will merit reading through in their own right. Lots to chew on, I will return to this.