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.

Year in Review 2023

2023 was a great year for gaming - a recent, if not all time high

On running things
Ducal House (3.5e) - ran 24 sessions to take us up to 102 during the year, covering mostly the long road home from closing out a major quest and its fall out. I've written an in-flight retrospective from DM'ing it here. I have a dig into all the plot arcs, problems solved and in-world events to come. Below, behold the sorcerer, drawn by the bard.

Spelljammer - Light of Xaryxis Remix (5e) - 19 sessions running a sand-boxed Light of Xaryxis, smoothing out as we went through the year and settled onto a regular schedule. Ramped up from 4th to 8th level, closing in on the campaign finale. I have stayed a bit quiet about this since it is a big arc in progress but I have been having fun

Spelljammer Academy (5e) - 12 sessions of episodic campaign, mostly a vehicle for venue tests about the city. Ludicrous hi-jinks intercut with some dangerous fights and tours of much of Realmspace. Campaign retrospective here.

Southern Reaches (Brancalonia, 5e) - 22 sessions of open table, light-hearted west-marches type campaign. On hiatus since my evening playing slot has become a lot more tricky, perhaps to be resurrected at some point in the future. Campaign retrospective here.

Bay of Princes (Brancalonia, 5e) - 10 sessions to date of running through the published Brancalonia adventures at my local games society regular Friday night open tables. Using this as the vehicle also to hang newbie induction from Meetup. If judged by the fact that I'll get sign-ups from our regulars any time I run a table, then this is going well. I am enjoying the challenge of working through all the adventures.

On games played during the year
Rime of the Frostmaiden (5e) - continuing with the same crack group of adventurers as Out of the Abyss, 13 sessions saw us progress to level five, traversing Icewind Dale solving problems for every Tom, Dick and Harry and trying to piece together what the hells is going on.

Empyrean Dynasty (FKR) - final wrap up of the epic galactic politics game - bizarrely, my faction-group sort of won? We achieved our goals of becoming the universal religion at the cost of multiple worlds and bitter galactic war.

Scarlet Heroes - some old school open table dungeoneering - henchmen and a sparse handful of hitpoints all that stands between gold and glory or an early grave. Great fun creeping through corridors and then employing flaming oil and caltrops for any edge against a foe. I really liked the fray dice mechanic.

Tyranny of Dragons (5e) - 7 sessions to close out the first book, significant traipsing about the wilderness, an epic fight with a wizard and its minions, duplicates, clones and various other head-fakery, and slowly uncovering the contours of the conspiracy we faced.

Spire (Spire) - played a pair of sessions of this, one shots part of building up a drop in campaign - now four sessions in and the in-house testing team has been getting great fun out of it.

Grand Planar Adventures (5e) - newly joined planescape campaign; running through some 2e classics to level up and synchronise with an existing planar party.

As shown here, monthly sessions played this year was higher in each month than any month in the previous five years. Not sure this tempo will be sustained but a *lot* of gaming got done this year.

The other big thing has been trying to on-ramp some of the legions of D&D interested folk attracted first by Honor Among Thieves and then Baldurs Gate 3. I took on a Meetup group to try and catch those folk and they have been turning up at our tables. I ran a little survey to see what exactly people want and those results seem to have encouraged folk to kickstart some new campaigns and fish for players on the RPGVienna forum which is great.

On blogging content

Since 2022 (blue) total posts are stable at 2/week plus the weekly links. Interestingly for 2023 (orange), pick-up by the Glatisant is no longer my key driver for views - pick-up on the front-page of ENWorld turned out to be the planet-buster numbers spike - the seismographs are still twitching from that *four months* later. Upticks in day-to-day readership is driven by Lemmy and Sly Flourish's TTRPGs feed. Overall, chopping out an estimate of what was leakage from cyberwarfare and AI scraping, it looks like ~ 63% rise in views/year. Who knows how much of that is real people - you are, at least.

Blogging this last half year has seen a switch in focus - from frameworks and ideas to lessons learned and write ups as I have run more stuff and had less time to write creatively. In particular the logistics of wrangling folk for the Meetup group has sapped the exact same well of time to sit at the computer and write that would previously have turned into blogposts.

Blogging projects that got done nonetheless:
- Glass Candles GLoGtober '23 - contributed a list this year
- Campaign retrospectives - following the format from Against the Wicked City
- Monthly RPG Blog Carnival participation and one month hosted

Notable blogposts from the year by views were:
Class/Race archetypes in 1.2 million D&DBeyond characters
Player Class Stability from 1M D&D Beyond Sheets
Reach of the Roach God
Review: Historica Arcanum - The City of Crescent
Class / Race choices in Baldurs Gate 3 vs tabletop 5e
d30 Things Above a Mindflayer World
Campaign Spin-Up VII - When One-Shots Sprawl
Review: Swords of the Serpentine
Masquerade as social depth-crawl (RPG Blog Carnival)

Goals for the coming year

- Continue Ducal House, run out Spelljammer LoX - see what to replace that with afterward (Planescape Turn of Fortunes Wheel?).
- Run more Brancalonia at the Friday night drop in games.
- Run an event, see about doing some DM'ing 101 to get more new folk happy to try and DM their first game.
- Play more Rime, Planescape and perhaps Scarlet Heroes.
- Should things massively break my way timewise I have a notion of some sort of silk-roads campaign.

Overall a focus on gaming at table and trying to help the new folk sloshing into the hobby to get started.

Thanks for reading along, hope you find more to interest and amuse in the coming year. If you have any suggestions or requests, drop them in a comment below or ping me on twitter (while it lasts) or on mastodon or on bluesky - I even have a bunch of invites for that last if anyone else wants one.

Class / Race choices from 4 months of Baldurs Gate 3 vs tabletop 5e

Larian Studios, makers of Baldurs Gate 3, released an update to their player stats after four months of play including class and race choices of the players. They let us see these immediately after launch and they looked different to the typical tabletop choices despite being a pretty faithful implementation of the 5e ruleset. There were a bunch of theories kicked around at the time, in the comments here and elsewhere that boiled down to a strong hypothesis that people were running charisma-focussed characters since mechanically driven social interaction is much more important in a computer game than at the tabletop.

So here is the rerun of that number crunching - with the launch weekend and 4 month stats.

On class the broad patterns stay the same - way off what the tabletop surveys show but with fighter, rogue and barbarian climbing the leaderboard as paladin, warlock, monk and ranger drop. Clerics also became more popular though still standing last.

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.

What comes after the Nights of the Rolling Dice?

I have ended up running a D&D Meetup group and have been trying to figure out what to do with it.

We ran two big events - Night of the Rolling Dice and Night of the Rolling Dice 2: This Time By Daylight - both 10 tables of DM + 5 using DM's from RPG Vienna. Packed out, 40-50 players turned up for each, with waitlists too. All good.

I feel people can be better served than by occassional big set piece gaming meetups. We have regular Friday night open tables (as discussed before) and I have been putting them up on the meetup with low response on the Meetup itself (2-3 folk, maybe, often none at all) but we do seem to get twos and threes rocking up at the door.

Class preference among games society new-joiners

Trinity College's tabletop gaming society posted a photo from their latest Freshers week where they polled new society joiners on what was their favourite D&D class. I snip the relevant bit below:

They got another 50 odd folk between this photo and wrapping up and kindly stuck the numbers up on their discord - recovered here and compared to the patterns we have seen elsewhere.

Two thoughts - first - that is not a fit with either of the dominant trends - fighter first or spellcaster first - this is a new thing - outdoorsy led with ranger and druid having a strong showing.

Second thought - if this is how people joining games socs are posing, where is our exploration pillar stuff? The people cry out for the chance to run around in the wilderness!

All this of course with a grain of salt, sample size is what it is, etc. This was my old uni games soc... a bit ago so I when I saw this I thought it was fun.

New Campaigns on Obsidian Portal (2023 Update)

tl;dr: but for a slight growth in Pathfinder 2e, system popularity seems to be very similar to last year.

As Roll20 has just stopped publishing the handy Orr Reports, 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 then I used the Wayback Machine to take capture the number of campaigns back through time through 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. 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 pretty straight line trend this time - no great shift in behaviour, 5e still dominant.

I reality checked what we were seeing against Roll20 numbers for as long as those were available (2014-2021) so it seems to be coherent for digital players.

If we normalise these varying number of campaigns, so we just see what fraction of new joiners each year go for which system, we can pick out shift in preferences a little more clearly. Here we see Pathfinder 2e continues to grow, the share of 'non-D&D' continues to fade, everything else pretty much goes sideways.

Class / Race choices in Baldurs Gate 3 vs tabletop 5e

Larian Studios, makers of Baldurs Gate 3, released stats from the first weekend of the game being live including class and race choices of the players. Given that it is a pretty faithful implementation of the 5e ruleset I thought it would be interesting to compare against what data we have for peoples choices at tabletop. I was surprised to see a big, big difference in classes and near enough same old, same old for races.

The big difference is the preference for paladin as the top class choice - typically not even top 3 for tabletop players. I am surprised at the big seperation between wizard and sorcerer also - how is one full caster perceived as so different from another?