Comparing Grognardia polls to other surveys (pt. 1)

Since Grognardia, cornerstone of OSR blogging, did a bunch of how many, how often and when did/do you play polls (see Musings on Poll Results (Part I)) I thought it might be interesting to compare those results against what other sources I have pulled together over time. These were three seperate polls with 320-470 respondents each, no guarantee they were the same people each time so pinch of salt in that it is likely not the same people in all of them. We can compare each one individually to see how the trends stack up against other polls. One could very cautiously suppose that this is a comparison between OSR players (readers of Grognardia) and the general 5e audience (D&D 5e Facebook group, Reddit D&D groups) but very cautiously indeed.

First question was How many people – players + referee(s) – were there in your gaming group at the time you first started roleplaying?. Lots of the other gaming table size polls out there exclude the DM so I trimmed one off the Grognardia ranges. The batching is fairly rough, just the three buckets, but enough for us to work with. The Grognardia question is 'who did you start with' and has a good quarter of folk starting with just one or two initial players. That maps to my own experiences - my short run initial campaign had two players.

None of the other polls ask about initial group size so we are comparing these initial groups to others contemporary groups and they definitely do look smaller.

The second question was How many people – players + referee(s) – are in your gaming group at present? which goes back to this question in a useful way. Here we see that the Grognardia respondents are today playing at tables that look pretty much like everyone elses - the finer detail in the question lets us get a pretty nice comparison. The Grognardia groups look to trend a little smaller, less 6 player tables and up but otherwise 50% of people are at four to five player tables.

The third question was How long are your RPG sessions? and here direct comparisons get a little fuzzy because all the different polls use different time buckets. Plotting in the mid-point of all the time buckets gives us a rough sense of what people are doing and here it looks like the Grognardia respondents are playing somewhat shorter sessions than many of the other polls.

Given the bucketing of the time ranges, trying to put an exact time estimate of session length down would be a sheer guess but the drop off in the tail of longer sessions compared to the other polls does suggest the average for Grognardia respondents is lower than for the other polls.

More polls are being run and questions asked, part II of discussions is already up with polls on era of joining the game and age at time of joining and further poll questions are out such as was D&D the first game you played. I am looking forward to following along with this series and will be look at these age and era numbers soon.

Sources:
D&D 5e Facebook group, 2020 (actual)
D&D 5e Facebook group, 2020 (ideal)
Elderbrain survey, 2020
Reddit Subclasses survey, 2019
MegaDM survey, 2017
Sly Flourish DMs, 2016
Le Thiase 2014 survey
Reddit D&D, 2014
Enworld, 2004