Insurers estimate of the population of gamers

In my quest to find data points on how many D&D players there are out there I stumbled upon this "The tabletop gamers’ survey" by Compare The Market - the general gist of which is "there are a lot of gamers out there, have you got insurance for all those out of print RPG books and precious, precious miniatures?" - which fair play, they are transparent in their angle in all of this, respect the hustle and so on.

They do give us some interesting insight with a 3000 person survey equally split across the US, Canada and Australia - finding that ~ 30% of US and Canadians (about half that for Australia) play or played tabletop games and the most popular of those games in every case was Dungeons and Dragons.

Their focus was a little unusual because it was about the physical stuff - with questions like 'I play, but I always borrowed minis' - more than whether people were current or lapsed players. If we bucket it all together as 'how many folk ever played D&D - now or in the past' we can compared to other sources and build some confidence in our understanding of what is going on.

Taking all the answers on whether folk ever played and collected a tabletop-roleplaying game or wargame we get
US - 29%
Canada - 32%
Australia - 16%

The found D&D was the most popular tabletop RPG or Wargame in each country and that combining all the survey results gave 32% of respondants selecting it. I do not think we can assume a flat ratio across the three countries and say therefore we have a thid of each survey response group saying they play or have played D&D - ~10% of all surveyed folk for US/Canada, ~5% for Australia.

There is a bit of a range in there - I spitballed back in 2022 that there might be ~33-43 million USA "fans" based on assumptions M.T. Black made on trends from WotCs 2020 claim of "over 40 million fans around the world." Recognising there was a daisy-chain of assumptions in there, it translates to 9-13% of USA folk being fans. Coming in the same ballpark but still a pretty wide range.

Recognising there is fuzz in there, I think "about one-in-eight folk in the US play or have played D&D" feels more plausible than the high-ball "about one-in-three have".

There are other bits and pieces like Cyberpunk and Call of Cthulu also being mentioned in there but given that we have no other sources for even as rough an analysis as this for those games, there is nothing I can do with those.

Sources

2026 Survey by Researchscape (N = 1253)

2025 The tabletop gamers’ survey (N = 3035)

2022 Survey by Researchscape (N = 1074)

2019 Survey by Researchscape (N = 942)

2000 Adventure Game Industry Market Research Summary (RPGs) V1.0 (N = "about a thousand")

How quickly can a new D&D edition take over?

I was fascinated by Troy Press recent piece "D&D Rules, According to Past Players" based on a general survey they did which found the D&D players among a broad sample of the population but also asked when and which edition they had last played - with the fascinating insight in that article that where 20% of the respondents had played in 2026 (the past four months), only 7% of respondents had played 5.5e as their last game.

This prompted me to mention this to the author on Mastodon who further revealed "The sample size for those who played in the last three months is small: n=40. Of those: 10% played 5.5, 66% played 5e, 14% played 4e, and no other edition was in the double digits."

This is fascinating - my first question was then "how does this look for an adoption trend for the new edition?" - how does the share of games being played with 5.5e compare to how many folk were playing 4e or 5e this many years after the launch of those editions?

To get an idea, we turn to the Obsidian Portal campaigns launched - taking annual slices we can get a sense of popularity of editions back to 2008.

To recap - this was done by loading the Campaigns page on Obsidian Portal and noting the campaigns per system for each year available (back to 2008) using the Wayback Machine so we capture from 4e dropping through to now.

Originally inspired by Troy Press writing in 2019 on RPG campaigns played by system and I have been tracking this and updating annually for a few years now (2022, 2023, 2024, 2025)

We also have the now-discontinued Orr Reports which gave us the same insight for Roll20. With that and the Obsidian Portal data we can pull three continuous trends and then chuck on whatever single points we have for 5.5e from various sources for comparison.

Looking at what we get we see a pretty clear rapid-switch over to 5e from 4e when it launched. We see an initial high take-up of 4e that started to fade off pretty rapidly (competition from Pathfinder at that point). Pathfinder 1e had a pretty good start to a solid 60% of new campaigns launched on Obsidian Portal the year before 5e dropped.

Comparing those to what we see for 5.5e - the few dots we can scrape together - we do not appear to be seeing the unambiguous take-off that was obvious at this stage for 5e. One could have maybe told a story last year about how 5.5e was having a 5e-equivalent take off as seen on Roll20 but it is hard to continue that. While fully acknowledging that these points are a grab-bag of sources, they are clustering between 10-45% - this is not the ~66-80% range one might expect to see if most folk were playing 5.5e these days.

So returning to our initial seed - that Troy Press finding of only 10% playing 5.5e - it seems on the low side but maybe a real marker for 5.5e being significantly less adopted than 5e was.

Notes

The Roll20 track above was checked against surveys from each end of that time span and matched up with what else I could find online.

The Obsidian Portal data is no longer useful for this because they do not distinguish between 5e and 5.5e - apparently taking WotC at their word that it was not a new edition but not helpful for this exercise.

Sources:

2026 Survey by Researchscape (N = 1253)

Campaigns page on Obsidian Portal

D&DBeyond poll (Feb 2025)

Facebook Hombrewers poll (Dec 2025)

Reddit r/LFG analysis (2024)

How deep the bench of legacy D&D players?

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)

Restoration of the r/OSR blogroll

tl;dr: a tale of recovering a piece of blogging community infrastructure from bad decisions and technology failure.

Regular readers will have noted I flag the r/OSR blogroll as a place to look for interesting blogposts. I think even in this time of blog-rings, bluesky feeds and other blog aggregators, the r/OSR blogroll serves a purpose in being a low-threshold start point for folk to throw their blogs out in front of a place where their likely audience comes to look.

Around the start of 2023 there was a question about getting the blog-roll pinned to the top of the r/OSR subreddit and at the same time the mods offered to automate its creation which I took them up on. By the end of the year it was clear one or both of these may have been a mistake and I suspect it was both - pinning killed visibilty on mobiles and the automation subsequently broke/stopped updating in early 2024.

After waiting out the year, on the anniversary of things breaking, I relaunched it in the old way - manually done, this time on a Friday, and mercifully it has seemed to reignite, albeit at a lower intensity than before.

Now in the stewardship of u/Leicester68 of Leicester's Ramble, the blogroll has run since pre-pandemic I believe - I took over posting them every Sunday in mid-2021 from u/Sofinho1980 of Alone in the Labyrinth as they took it over from u/shuttered_room of Shuttered Room.

Taking "comments" as our core indicator of success - these are the people leaving links to blogs, commenting on the blogs of others and generally participating - we see things are steady since we restored the blogroll, but still only half of where it was before the unintended hiatus of the auto-updater breaking. Being optimistic, there is a suggestion that the new stewardship of Leicester68 might be bringing in some more eyeballs, certainly there is proven, recent potential to be doing better.

Year in Review 2025 - Endies Edition

Since the Endies were kicked off by Lady Tabletop, I am going to include those bits in my usual end of year. I am stealing Luck Roll's format as it speaks to me most.

This year in stats:
Live sessions ran as a GM: 56
Live sessions as a player in a group: 14
Games read: 13 close read enough to review, est. double that again skimmed
Number of systems played: 5 (3.5e, 5e, Salvage Union, Fabula Ultima, Levity)
Hours played: 328 hours
Number of groups played with: 8
Number of games purchased: Not tracked for sanity's sake. Est. I filled 1 meter additional shelving.

All told a top-3 year, mostly driven by running the Hexcrawl on Friday nights, underpinned by running Ducal House and a bit of Lizard Kings 2d20, and playing the completion of Rime of the Frostmaiden and homebrew Nirealis campaign. Fewer little opportunistic bits than last year, driven by a huge amount of energy in the early year going into implementing code of conduct for RPGVienna and all the cat-herding involved there.

Most played / least surprising inclusion: D&D 5e .
Funniest game: Hexcrawl25 game - the flying lizard session.
Best personal achievement: Getting the Hexcrawling mechanisms down, seeing the players working with the map without my input.
Most memorable ending: Finishing Rime of the Frostmaiden - squeaky fight to the finish, big feels choice at the end, our DM pulled together a great epilogue.
Most satisfying crunch: Starting to get the hang of the Conan 2d20 system.

On running games

Ducal House - slowed this year, 21 sessions, ~3/4 the time we have spent on it post-pandemic, which was effectively a strong start through to summer and then it has slowed dramatically since - pratically becoming a monthly game. A big 'arc' got resolved in June, tracking down an artefact and slaying the last emissary of a dead god. There was some good old fashioned wilderness bashing, stirring and avoiding entanglements in a whole cats-cradle of fighting factions, and a big aerial fight. An adversary encountered in session three in 2020 was finally slain. Things calmed after that, with some self-contained sessions and an impromptu trip to the moon. We shall continue into year seven, see which big threads get reeled in next.

The Dukes Last Stand, by the Bard

Hexcrawl Dual Mode - a standout success - 30 sessions, 136 hours in the Friday night slot - what I switched from open tables to. The Hexcrawl25 challenge serendipitously crossed my radar just at the point I was looking for something new, I pulled in a roster of vibe-matched regulars and got to kill three birds with one stone - motivating myself to build the hexcrawl, running a back-to-basics sandbox campaign and giving myself an easy way to run stand-alone adventures for 'off-cycle' weeks. Overall, solid success, have to work out some squeak where players split up and then do not proactively regroup but 30 sessions says the formula is generally working.

Lizard Kings 2d20 - an attempt to spin up a second 'online after-hours' campaign, modelled off the successful Southern Reaches game. A lumpy start so far, very high drop-out and cancellations, much, much higher than predicted. Paused in Nov with a view to rebuilding the roster and restarting in 2026. Those sessions that ran were not bad and it did succeed in one primary aim to bring some great commissioned art into play. Ran with Conan 2d20 but one has to ask - all the D&D games go ok, the one non-D&D game I've got, the wheels fall off. To be pondered.

On games played during the year

Rime of the Frostmaiden - we wrapped our campaign - this our monthly online game, the core group I started D&D with in the 90s + the in-house test team + one of our college gaming comrades. We took ~169 hours over 28 sessions to save the Ten Towns and Icewind Dale, our second 5e official campaign to get done in cover-to-cover. Great times, always a treat saving overcoming obstacles with such seasoned, goal-focussed adventurers. I liked Rime quite a lot - we did a lot of thundering around the tundra, uncovered a couple of big mysteries, some of which were tied masterfully into randomly rolled character backstories by our DM, and then rushed about saving the Ten Towns from threats. I played a budding megalomaniac evoker, a danger-close fire-ball slinger who was a Reghed tribesman by background - and being a wizard faithful of Tempus - "never back down from a fight" led to me getting downed 22 times in 28 sessions, including one dead-dead and wish resurrection. Good times, good times.

Niraelis - a new campaign - homebrew from a local DM, play in person with some luxurious pre-game rituals like pot-luck meals beforehand. More character-led and world-exploration driven, we are still in the early phase of unravelling mysteries in this one.

Fabula Ultima - a con-game at the Indie RPG Con organised by the Vienna DM Supergroup. Bufo Bufo, one of the veteran GM's from the Friday night sessions ran Fabula Ultima. It was fun to play the system, rolling with the archetypes, and it was a nice change to do a one-shot of a new system at a con, it has been a while.

Levity - a playtest session with the Vienna GM Supergroup, fun, sort of reminiscent of Royal Blood but a more universal-ised system.

Review of gaming goals

Decent gaming - top 3 year by session count and hours - though I definitely felt the drag of scheduling static more this year than previous - Ducal House, Lizard Kings and Niraelis both suffering from slow patches.

From about April you can see my playcount dropping below what might be expected from previous years as my energy got sapped away by all the nonsense that drove us to stand up the code of conduct for RPGVienna and then dealing with the pushback from it. It seems to have had the desired scarecrow effect as there has been not so much trouble since it was instituted.

Looking back at the goals I set last year to see how things went, it looks pretty good.
"Continue Ducal House - year six!" - that big arc got closed out, things slowed but continued so success.
"Continue Spelljammer Academy at the Friday night drop in games - or pull the plug and try something else by end first quarter." - The answer to this was "pull the plug and do the Hexcrawl" - pulling in a roster of vibe-matched regulars.
"If a new Friday night drop in game is required, maybe something using Ultraviolet Grasslands?" - see above.
"Run more DM'ing 101 to get more new folk happy to try and DM their first game." - only got in one at the start of the year.
"Play more Rime" - done, to great success.
"Try and organise more DM Supergroup" - less done than I might have like but not bad - there was a burst of energy leading up to the Indie RPG con, with a pulse inspired by a false-alarm of Quinns possibly visiting Vienna. After the con, folk relaxed a bit and we did not really pick back up from there.

Blogging has also been more entertaining this year than others - catalysed by Elmcats big project; I think it gave us all a bit more of a sense that there are multiple communities out there, we are not just screaming into the void.

Gaming goals for 2026
Weather the coming of another small householder and return to gaming within the year
Running up to that, conclude Hexcrawl campaign, dismount from Niraelis cleanly
Decide whether to pause Ducal House on a cliff-hanger or some manner of resolution
Try to run more 2d20 Lizard Kings in the New Year, decide if worth maintaining
Do more GM Supergroup, where possible
Hack Your Sector, Your Problem into some form to test at table

Querying OSR Blogging Scene Vibrancy

On Ye Olde Question of 'is the OSR dead' but this time with some data - based on community participation in jams and challenges and continued appearance of 'big idea' posts - not dead yet.

A bit ago there were a slew of posts on the OSR blogging scene losing vibrancy - and I had no way to tackle that in a non-subjective way. Hero of our times Elmcat has been sweating over a red-hot RSS feed to pull together a colossal graph of the OSR blogverse by back-tracking peoples blog feeds and linked posts. They have also generously provided us with 'top 10 posts' lists for the last ten years which allow us to at last have some sort of visibility on activity levels.

The Blogverse, by Elmcat

To try and get a sense of vibrancy increasing or decreasing, what metrics are we using? The main complaints that seem to get brought up are a shift toward selling product in place of improving practice at table. Even there, one mans post refining practice at table is another mans "why is there yet another 'how to dungeon crawl' post?" A laudable retro-clone to one is anothers sign that everything is a rehash.

Another set of complaints is the channel-jamming effect of various awards, various crowd-funding seasons and so on - but those are social media noise complaints. The underlying concern is the reduction in new creative things. I think we must accept some repetitive blogging as new folk rediscover the basic truths of gaming styles and blog about it. Our institutional memory is nil so it feels unfair to get salty at folk when they write up something older hands already know - how were they to know what they just wrote was hotly debated on defunct social media sites years before they could even read?

So to try and find a handle on whether or not we are seeing creativity fall off or whether we are getting new ideas, we can turn to Elmcats great labour to try to spot whether big new touch-stone posts, those with a lot of link-backs, are still emerging.

Published	Post	Links
31 October 2018	Automatic List Generator v2	233
17 October 2007	Grand Experiment West Marches	143
19 December 2008	Party like its 999	95
08 October 2019	Landmark Hidden Secret	80
06 May 2008	Shields shall be splintered	87
06 July 2024	RPGADAY 2024	72
10 June 2017	Tomb of the Serpent Kings	71
06 April 2021	Six Cultures of Play	69
07 May 2016	The GLoG	70
24 April 2011	twenty quick questions	75

New Campaigns on Obsidian Portal (2025 Update)

tl;dr: continues the stable trend since 2023 - 5e still 2/3 of campaigns, very little sign of change anywhere. So on the one hand, this is a 'nothing to report' report - on the other, the stability is the point.

Another year with scarce data on what people are playing in general (come back Orr Reports, bring light to your people...) - we turn to another years data from Obsidian Portal to try and read the tea-leaves of what is going on in the general gaming sphere. I have been tracking these now for a few years and things seem to have hit a stable state relatively speaking.

This data was collected by loading the Campaigns page on Obsidian Portal and noting the campaigns per system for each year available (back to 2008) using the Wayback Machine. Happily the format never changed to greatly and it is possible to get a roughly mid-year capture for every year. I can only use the categorisation that Obsidian Portal uses, though some dispute where those lines are drawn, particularly for early D&D editions - so keep that in mind.

The raw numbers show overall Obsidian Portal having as many new campaigns in 2025 as 2024; no market conquering growth but let us say it has maintained its presence.

Things are broadly stable year on year but do show a bit of a lift in non-D&D games. Taking these figures at face value we see a ~3% shift towards non-D&D games, pretty interesting for they year of the big new-edition-that-wasn't-a-new-edition. That 3% came straight out of 5e, the fraction playing the other editions stayed flat year-on-year.

The bump in non-D&D can be mostly accounted for by an extra 1% going to each of Savage Worlds, GURPS and Starfinder RPG - old warhorses finding a new campaign. Given that neither Daggerheart nor Draw Steel appears and Shadowdark is present only in the most token sense (2 campaigns) this makes me sceptical of how representative this all is. Are we looking at a static community and its gaming habits? Even if it is just the same people, are none of them inclined to try the new hotness?

Checking in on our edition popularity evolution, the trends continue - 5e looks like it has definitely plateaued; 2/3 of the games played is what it can get to.

Looking at our top-14 non-D&D games things similarly trend in line with last year - flat or a slight fade down for most of these, Savage Worlds, GURPS and Starfinder RPG showing a kick since last year, Traveller, World of Darkness and Call of Cthulhu holding to their upward grind. Dataset is relatively small, take this with a grain of salt but overall it looks like the next tier behind D&D is not changing rapidly either.

Looking into what games did appear and get played in 2025 we have Otherscape and Shadow of the Weird Wizard (4 campaigns each) and Legacy: Life Among the Ruins, Lyonesse, Shadowdark RPG, Shadowrun 2E, Sigil & Shadow, Subversion, Tricube Tales & Tactics, Warhammer: the Old World with 2 campaigns each.

Digging into this I also noticed some games who did appear in 2024 but had no campaigns now getting played in 2025 - Pirate Borg (6 campaigns) and Swords of the Serpentine (4 campaigns) being the big ones followed by 2 campaigns each for City of Mist, Dishonored Roleplaying Game, Truth & Justice and Vast Grimm.

All told that makes ~ 40 odd campaigns on new systems in 2025 out of ~6500 total played; hardly a vast rush for novelty.

All in all it says that 2025 has thus far not been a year to seismically alter peoples playing tastes - people found their games and continue to play them. Perhaps all the folk playing the new stuff are on the VTTs or using Obsidian or something else for their campaign management - certainly a possibility. But in this particular corner of the TTRPG online sphere, things sail along with very little sign of change.

Comparing Grognardia polls to other surveys (pt. 2)

Looking at the second block of polls that Grognardia ran - "when were you first introduced to roleplaying games?" and "how old were you when you first started playing tabletop RPGs?" which are discussed on by them here in part II. I did the same again, comparing them to what we see in other polls and this time around the results are *very* different to responses from elsewhere.

Staring with 'when you were first introduced to RPGs' - the Grognardia readership is *much* older than even other D&D bloggers, even other OSR blogs that I figured would be the old gang. Here be the ancients with half of them introduced back in the 80s and another quarter from the 70s. Compare that to even to the folk replying to Necropraxis OSR Gateway survey back in 2019 - the *next oldest* bunch - and they only had less than 100 folk from the 70s of 2700 respondents compared to 124 who replied here!

I was also heartily amused to see '2000+' as the last category - anyone this entire millenium gets stuffed in one box - which turned out to be the right call! There were only 60 respondents - less from these last 25 years than were introduced to the game in just 77-79! Grognardia obviously knows his audience but I am really fascinated to see this particular group not having some greater influx of post-millenium players given that every other indicators elsewhere says that there has been a big block of new gamers come in and even if only a fraction drifted off to check out the old ways, one might have thought it would be more significant than the three score who turn up. Fascinating.

The other question asked was about age when people first started playing - and we know from lots of other sources that pre-2010, people mostly started playing as teens and the earlier they found D&D, the younger that age range tended to be. And lo - the Grognardia response looks like the 70s/80s gamers the other poll says they are.

All the bars at left are from the OSR survey; the detailed data shared let us split these out to match the categories of the Grognardia survey and batch them by age and era of joining. The rapidly rising age of new joiners can be seen. Interestingly, as we have mentioned before, this means a 30 year old gamer in the year 2000 was likely a 20 year veteran gamer, a 30 year old now has maybe 5 years under their belt.

I wonder how much ones sense of 'what is D&D' is changed by it being something you played all through your pre-teen and teenage years versus when you come to it as an adult in college. It feels to me that the increase in complexity of D&D is probably stopping us from ever seeing that experiment run.

Returning to our initial point - because these two questions were posed as separate polls we have no way to properly correlate age and eras of the Grognardia respondents but using comparisons to other polls out there it certainly looks like it is a window into the ancestral gamers, who joined as pre-teens back in the 80s and have been merrily chucking dice these past 45 years.

Key Sources

D&D Gateway survey - survey by Necropraxis.

Kirith - replica of the 1985 Dragon Magazine Survey.

Facebook 5e group - some posts by the mods listed the membership numbers.

Reddit 2014 D&D Survey - data sheet at the bottom of the page.

Mia Gojaks Survey of D&D 5e Facebook group users.

Elderbrain 2020 survey.

Trygstad thesis.

Reddit ML survey.

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.

Year in Review 2024

2024 was a great year for gaming - down from last years banner year but I do not feel in any way short-changed.

On running games

Ducal House (3.5e) - got in another 22 sessions, tailing off toward the end of year. This fifth year began with nailing down the altered ducal succession that had nominally been the campaign goal since session zero, a considerable amount of politics after a lot of time saving the realm and then further venturing forth to thwart a foe/potential allies plot. A venture onto the astral finally levelled everyone up to 11. The bard became heir apparent to the realm, unsought. The sorcerer has become fascinated with the potential of lichdom and the cleric continues to restrain them, in person or as the voice of conscience.

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.

Notes on D&D Meetup Group Experiment

Meetup jacked up its subscription costs (174%!) so I cancelled my own sub, our game group as a whole sees no value in paying for one and the thing apparently drifted from my hands this past midnight. This seems like a good point to do a post-mortem - for all that it may stagger on another month as it auto-pings all the members looking for someone else willing to stump up to take the group over.

The group was conceived in a moment of seeking to get the word out and test whether we could pull of a significant expansion, sufficient to justify the running costs of the formal club structure here in Austria - bank accounts, chairfolk, book-keeping, all that jazz. We figured we needed to bump our regular attendees from ~25 to ~120 to bear the kinds of costs associated with having our own venue and all that. At that point we had not done anything, just had our forum and welcomed anyone who found us. This was an experiment in getting the word out to see what might happen.

We were blessed with two tailwinds, one foreseen, one not - the D&D movie and Baldurs Gate 3. We figured there would be a bunch of folk looking to try D&D following those so we initially set up the 'Night of the Rolling Dice' for after the movie - a ten table session for beginners - and created the meetup group. As you can see below, numbers went up like a rocket. We got 60 sign-ups, 45 of whom showed up, a good time was had. Then we did it twice more - once to capitalise on Baldurs Gate 3 and a last the following February to see if we had the process down to a low-friction playbook.
Each time we launched and event, typically ~ 60 days beforehand, we got a kick of new members into the Meetup group.

The folk who came to the Nights of the Rolling Dice occassionally showed up at our regular nights - 2-3 out of each batch of 45. Our open nights were what we were really trying to grow, getting those weekly Friday night open table games up. After the second one we started to slam the capacity of our venue and fished around a bit for another site. With two sites we could continue to grow and from there ramped up to... almost double our size. Almost.

I took over stewardship of the meetup group after the second event and started to block in our regular Friday night sessions into the Meetup group so people could see there would be a game a few weeks out rather than just ~4 days beforehand. We know people came in through these Meetups because we had regular deconfliction problems between both folk who signed up on the Meetup and no-showed and folk who rocked up to the events without mentioning on the sign-up thread that they were coming. Again, a fair few people said they found us through Meetup but only a handful on any given week.

Even once we restricted attendance, the 'out weeks' were not filling up with lots of folk - no indication that telegraphing that these were regular games that happened every Friday was making any difference to folk beyond an isolated case or two.

Overall the Meetup group probably funneled folk towards us but when I queried the webmaster of our forum, the actual core organising venue for our group, they said that it was mere tens of click-throughs from Meetup versus high hundreds coming off Google.

So all told, the group seemed to attract numbers and where we had big events we could fill them - neither of these converted into people turning up regularly for whatever reasons. Engagement was practically nil from folk who signed up to any mail shots or via the on-site tools beyond a few isolated requests for what was needed for a first timer.

You can probably barely see at the tail end of the top graph, the curve flattens out. This matches to when I stopped booking in events on the calendar, about a month ago when I decided to cancel the sub - having events on the calendar does bring people into the group, but having them in the group does not seem to do much for you.

All told, I am sure we got a few people into our group through Meetup because I have heard people say it - all of the metrics otherwise say it was a waste of time and certainly not worth ponying up extra cash. When I pulled the plug on it, the immediate response from Meetup was 'we have made it easier to charge your members dues!' which is just mean passing the corporate screw-over down the line. The main thing that changed that I can see between this year and last is they slapped on a bunch of AI tools for auto-generating events which is a completely unhelpful - you don't need randomly generated events, you need to just get the details right and up there. That and getting taken over by 'Bending Spoons' who also took over Evernote and also jacked up the prices there by a giant amount.

So, for us, nothing useful was added to a service that was not core to our operations, I had taken a punt laying down a subscription in the first place to see if it unlocked some large untapped pool of potential players - so all the above and near double the price was not worth it. We already have our venue charge, small and reasonable. The idea of layering on charges to pay off some corporations random price hikes? Not happening, not rewarding corporate bad behaviour like that.

All told, we tested the potential for fast growth and managed to get to double on a good day - I think proving up there was some growth potential for us but not massive x6 amounts. I am intrigued as to whether we will continue to get new folk wandering in once the Meetup evaporates; I reckon yes but let us see.

Class/race choices from 1 year of Baldur's Gate 3 vs tabletop 5e

Larian Studios, makers of Baldurs Gate 3, bless their transparent little hearts, have released another update to their player stats - now after a year of play. Once again we get class and race choices of the players. We got two previous updates - the weekend after launch and an update after four months of play that looked different to the typical tabletop choices despite being a pretty faithful implementation of the 5e ruleset.

So here is the rerun of that number crunching - with the launch weekend and 4 month stats in with this 1 year set and the patterns from a bunch of forum surveys and 5e character building apps.

On class the broad patterns stay the same - since the 4 month update - a completely different pattern to the tabletop game with Paladin and Sorcerer much more popular, wizards, warlocks and clerics way down off what the tabletop surveys show. What is especially interesting is that we now see a steadying of choice between the 4 and 12 month surveys compared to the launch weekend. Paladins and rangers launched well but faded off a bit - though paladin still stayed top of the heap. Clerics and fighters were less preferred on launch weekend but became more popular over time.

New Campaigns on Obsidian Portal (2024 Update)

tl;dr: very stable on 2023 - 5e still 2/3 of campaigns, Traveler muscles onto non-D&D leaderboard, absolute number of campaigns down 50% of long run average

With the old Roll20 Orr Reports fading ever further into the past , we have to look elsewhere to get a sense of the ebb and flow of games popularity. It has been a whole year so we can turn once more to new campaigns on Obsidian Portal to try and read the tea-leaves of what is going on out there. This was initially sparked by Troy Press writing in 2019 on RPG campaigns played by system and I have been tracking this for a few years now - and we have a 2024 update.

To recap - This was done by loading the Campaigns page on Obsidian Portal and noting the campaigns per system for each year available (back to 2008) using the Wayback Machine. Happily the format never changed to greatly and it is possible to get a roughly mid-year capture for every year.

Looking at the raw numbers of new campaigns added since last we looked, we see a chunky drop off in actual numbers, worse than we've seen post pandemic - now half down off the average for the past ~ 15 years.

If we normalise these varying number of campaigns to see just the relative change in popularity of systems we see things pretty much continue to go sidewayseverything else pretty much goes sideways, slight uptick in 5e share, Pathfinder stable, slight down-tick in the 'smaller' stuff outside the top 10.

OSR Kickstarter Trends

Ben Milton of Questing Beast did some neat work tagging kickstarter projects as OSR or not and played out some of the trends over time - see video. He generously shared his data - [edit: building upon the original dataset by Hans Messersmith] and I wanted to dig through and see what else we can see.

From the data-sheet - classification was done by:
Original = Adventures/supplements/etc. explicity for old forms of D&D; New games that are direct or near directly clones of D&D (e.g. OSE, OSRIC); adventures, supplements for those direct clones
Scene = new games considered to be part of the "OSR scene"; new games inspired by older forms of D&D; adventures/supplements/etc for those games
If a project is listed with multiple systems/games, it will be categorized as Original if at least one of the systems is Original, otherwise Scene
Reprints of actual older D&D products (e.g. the recent reprint of Caverns of Thracia by Goodman Games) are included in Original
Includes projects that started between January 1, 2014 and December 31, 2023, inclusive. Therefore, some projects that started late in 2023 and ended in 2024 are included.
Listed year is the year the project started, not ended

Sticking on my analyst hat we can pull out some interesting trends. First, to recap what was shown in Questing Beasts video and give ourselves a baseline, we see an overall increase in projects for every category.

I did some work to extract the median and top quartile values of project per category to get a sense of what most projects are doing, conscious that the very large projects at the high end skew things significantly otherwise. These are in tables at the bottom of this post. We have seen the median value of project jump about but broadly converge towards the lower end of the $5k-10k bracket.

This I found somewhat surprising - I would have thought that 5e or 'other' categories, representing broader pools of players, would be higher.

Time spent running and playing editions of D&D

A curious thought came to me - how much of each edition have I played? It feels like I have been playing a lot of 5e recently - have I in the grand scheme of things?

Starting off my time was split with different campaigns more or less being different systems - the three big starting ones were World of Darkness, WHFRP and AD&D 2e - that was my teen gaming; threw in a smattering of one shots here and there but that was the bulk of it

Hitting Uni - I ran 3.5e, played more World of Darkness and WHFRP plus some freeform nonsense from time to time.

Post college it became almost all 3.5e - run as PBEM or played as Living Arcarnis - but all the same system. 4e happened but I never picked it up; work was ramping up and my social circle was both smaller and not interested.

Rolling off that into recent years I saw 5e happening but I was buried under career stuff so did not bother to make the leap to the new system. I kicked off a campaign in 2018 using 3.5e and another in 2020 which is still grinding along.

I finally picked up 5e in 2019 when I started going to my local games club - since then I've run and played quite a lot of it there and as part of pandemic-driven online campaigns.

Post-lockdown I've gotten in a few other games - Spire, Scarlet Heroes - but mostly D&D.

So which system have I put most hours on? I went back and checked (best estimates before 2018) and...

...it looks like I *still* put more hours in running AD&D than 5e - and that 3.5e dominates both of them. I guess when you have no other committments as a teen you can really crank those long form campaigns.

Tracking "Strict Time Records" in a campaign

tl;dr: reviewing time records from an urban/wilderness campaigns highlight how time is the key resource in cities

Nudged into action by Vladars blog on Strict Time Records I dug out the data for my home campaign. My feeling was it was a less meaningful thing since we started as an urban campaign where the resource is not torches or food but time - and because every half hour was precious we progressed relatively slowly down the calendar. The party was happy to split up to get things done *in space* but not in time - reconvening regularly to compare notes and plan next steps every couple of hours.

I took a look at how we progressed down the calendar over the course of the campaign - each in-world month is 30 days.

After Action Report - Night of the Rolling Dice 3

We ran another of our open table events recently and got a bunch of folk in for it. We use Meetup as the 'on-ramp' and can reliably fill a 50 place event with a waitlist.

One key thing is venue - we found a place with a large back room that is happy to give it to us of a Saturday night with enough warning and without a deposit. At this point we are in virtuous circle territory - the venue is happy we'll fill the venue, so they're happy to give us the space to fill. The first event to prove this is the trick.

DMs are the other limiting factor - scrounge up enough DMs to run the tables you want plus a spare or two - book them in well ahead of time and then make their life as easy as possible - they should turn up ready to run something, you feed them players.

The other key thing is advance planning - get your venue booking in early, and put up the event place holder on Meetup to get that trickle of people started.

We get ~ 15% fade out of people before the event - plans change and confirms turn to no's - but we have a big enough waitlist that they fill automatically. We expect no-show on the night but that should be manageable by running tables with four in place of five players.

Catastrophic Success: Venue Capacity Management

tl;dr: at the limit of venue capacity, how to spin out another venue to avoid turning people away?

We had to do our first turn-aways from our regular Friday night sessions because we simply did not have the chairs in the venue, which sucks but is also kind of impressive. Membership of the Meetup group has been climbing steadily - we're still not seeing more than a tiny fraction of them but even that fraction has been enough to drive up our attendance - and in particular it is the problematic aspect of people not reading the instructions.

Our venue capacity is 25 and a bit - the bit being contingent on how busy the other people who use the space are. If they're not up to much then we can fit another table - if they are busy then we're 25 as a hard limit. We dinged 37 a week or so back - and then some extra folk turned up and we could not accommodate them.

D&DBeyond: Bad Stats, No Biscuit.

tl;dr: frustrated salt post. Why publish spoiled data?

DndBeyond published an article "2023 Unrolled: A Look Back at a Year of Adventure" and I thought "Cool, stats!" - until I found they messed with axes of the only graphs they put in there and now who the hell knows what they say. What the hell guys - 60, 80, 100, 200, 500, 700...? Where did you get that number sequence from? I showed this to the in-house testing team and they were similarly baffled.

Le freaking sigh. Ok. Let us see if we can salvage anything from this mess. I think this is what the Species numbers are.