Troy Press published a piece "D&D Rules, According to Past Players" based on a survey they did - and I am fascinated by the 'mentioned in passing' implication of a huge amount of non-active D&D players in the USA - something like 1 in 6 USA folk have played D&D at some point, apparently. Does this make sense?
We poked at this before in "Comparing TTRPG player surveys in US and Germany" where we looked at the previous surveys from the same outfit - Researchscape 2022 Survey and 2019 Survey which also look at who among the general US population has played TTRPGs.
Here they pulled in 1,253 US adults and found 16% - 204 people - had played D&D at some point. They mention "the data was weighted to the U.S. population by 9 demographic questions. The credibility interval for closed-end questions answered by all respondents is ±4 percentage points" so we could conservatively say 12% or 1-in-8 is more representative of general population. If you want to go wild, you could say 20%, 1-in-5 have played D&D at some point but that just seems implausible.
If we stick with the 1-in-6 estimate and take the Census.gov estimate of 342.5 million in the USA, this implies about 55 million folk in the USA with D&D experience?
This is *fascinating* to me - because the perception is that the TTRPG industry is niche - in my lived experience, folk have never heard of a dice that is not six-sided, never mind thrown a d20 in anger. WotC themselves made an estimate of "over 40 million fans around the world" in 2020 - M.T. Black tried to sweep up this and other estimates of how many D&D players there are back in 2021 and ended up with 48 million from taking WotC at their word on growth rates.
One possible way to reconcile the 'feel' of this is the point that this '1-in-6' group are folk that ever played D&D in their lives - if we tease out when they last played things change a touch. Of those surveyed:
20% played this year
23% in 24/25
15% in 2020-2023
41% have not played this side of the pandemic
So roughly half of that are active, half are folk who have played a but no longer do. These are still chunky numbers - 23 million folk who played back in the day, 32.5 who played since the pandemic - 11 million who are playing this year. This survey was taken in April and we know that there is a good chunk of folk who do play on an annual basis so some slice of the 24/25 players are probably still active, just have not gotten their games in this year yet.
There are a couple of other stats they pull out that chime with numbers we have seen elsewhere - 20% of male respondants have played D&D, 13% of female respondents - there is the 60/40 male-to-female ratio we have seen before.
So where is everyone?
We get one additional clue in the editions breakdown at the end - 7% of the respondants had last played the new 5.5e, while 35% had last played 5e. That says, assuming everyone who ever tried 5.5e back in 2024 is still playing today, there are nearly double the amount of folk who are playing today, who have not made the jump to the new system. At the most generous, those folk are all playing 5e - so they were buying new books of WotC up to two years ago. I am sure a bunch of folk are still playing previous editions so that number is lower.
I am going to posit here that D&D's general cultural footprint suffers from the fact that for a lot of folk, they just need to buy the tools once, then they're set up. I can throw no rocks, sitting with multiple editions racked up around me, but even I balked at 4e and 5.5e. People can buy the gamebooks once, whatever edition, and never surface again - merrily playing away with their own game table, invisible to the outside.
Apart from 5.5e it is not clear who could be playing which editions - if we can take a hint from what we see on Obsidian Portal I suspect of the older editions we would find 3e/3.5e, BX and AD&D most likely to still be played.
There was a Techraptor report in Jan 2025 that said 3.6 million characters had been created on D&DBeyond for 5.5e after its first year which aligns quite neatly with the 3.9 million 5.5e players suggested by that 7% of respondants. There is almost certainly some fuzz around that - folk making multiple characters, folk trying 5.5e and reverting to an older edition - but it is coming to the same order of magnitude at least.
We see 58% of folk who ever played D&D have done so since the pandemic - and at least a quarter of them are playing older editions because a max of 42% have last played 5e/5.5e - what are the other 16% playing? Those folk are also not on D&DBeyond because older editions are not supported.
At a minimum it says there are a third again of players out there playing offline for whatever number of players are appearing online through use of D&DBeyond. I think that figure is probably far higher since folk on D&DBeyond create multiple characters, so that online footprint represents less actual people and thus the offline ratio is much larger.
All told a fascinating glimpse into that 'silent majority' of offline players out there, playing away and not interacting with the online nexi of RPG discourse, never counted in any of the 'community polls'.
Additionally, it suggests that there are likely a bunch of ex-D&D-players around in the US that no longer game. All our surveys and the like suggest that most of that is driven by lack of group and lack of time, not lack of appetite for the game itself. Perhaps there is an angle to be worked there for drop-in pick-up games?
Sources:
2026 Survey by Researchscape (N = 1253)
2022 Survey by Researchscape (N = 1074)
2019 Survey by Researchscape (N = 942)
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