Friends/family still largest gateway to TTRPG

tl:dr; despite conversation about importance of streaming to bringing new gamers to hobby, friends/family appear to still be largest 'gateway' to gaming.

Scouring the web for information we do not find many polls but those that do exist say more or less the same thing - friends or family are the primary channel for new joiners to get into the hobby ~ 2/3 of players find their way to the hobby that way.

Review: Slumbering Ursine Dunes

tl:dr; a great Slavic acid fantasy setting and a master-class in creating a point-crawl and driving pace and tension.

One of the classic OSR books giving "65 pages of mayhem and wierdness in this Slavic mythic-inspired (with an acid fantasy twist) mini-sandbox". I picked this up a while back and then continued to collect the rest of the series - Fever Dreaming Marlinko, Misty Isles of the Eld, and What Ho, Frog Demons. Each one has been a joy to read.

cover art by David Lewis Johnson

This is a great, strange little setting where a bunch of odd factions are dwelling in the bizarre terrain of the dunes. The Dunes themselves are nigh-untraversable and following the paths between and around them is much simpler. Therefore the region is presented in the point-crawl fashion with sites linked by the routes between them and an assumption that each route takes ~ 30 mins to travel. Aside from the content the book is a guide to the mechanics of point crawls and exemplar of how this method can be used.

Uncounted 4th pillar of game play - character building

tl:dr; character creation is the missing 4 pillar of gameplay, second favorite after roleplay.

A twitter poll by VanishXZone asking "What is your favorite part about DnD 5e?" included character creation alongside the 3 pillars of gameplay described in the D&D books - Exploration, Roleplaying and Combat. The results give a nice quantification of how important character creation is - second most important aspect of the game after roleplaying.

Shiny TTRPG Links Collection #1

Stealing the idea of a weekly round up of interesting things this week from weaver.skepti.ch on the grounds I'll never find these things again otherwise.

Truth spoken: "You don't have to be fancy to play D&D" - particularly since we now live in a golden age of free online resources with more by the day.

Geoffroy Hassoun and Samia Aci-Sèche are the authors of the RPG Les Oubliés - Geoffroy answers a few questions on weaver.skepti.ch.

Great podcast from The Adventuring Party on using festivals in your games.

Interesting world building article on swapping out archetypes within your game. A great perspective for showing the variation within similar fantasy groups.

Vayra Asks: 10 Setting Questions

Responding to Vayras 10 Setting Questions post - and using it as a convenient setting refresh, idea spinner for my next session.

1) What class knows the most martial arts? Are they real martial arts like kung fu, or made up ones like krav maga?
The most martial arts would be known by monks - though for any martial-leaning archetype (fighters, clerics of war gods, etc) I would be happy to talk about how they know some sort of style. These styles are going to be heavily modified from 'real world' ones - perhaps keeping the principle (such as a redirecting momentum into throws Judo-style) and modifying the moves. This is because there are lots of species with different physical structures that imply different styles: what can you do when your limbs are longer/shorter? When you have the muscle mass of a aaracokra or an orc? A goliaths fighting style should take advantage of their height, an aaracokra is going to need to work hard to not take blows given their flight-capable bone structure. Lizardfolk have tails and tough hides - what kind of style takes advantage of that?

Spelljammer encounter tables

As an exercise in sparing myself work I wanted to see what could be rapidly pulled together from online sources to build out an Aerial / Spelljammer encounter list. My first thought was r/d100 which had a partial (25/100) list: Airship/Spelljammer Encounters

Next two glorious antiques were revealed - what appears to be a compilation of encounters from the old Spelljammer products and a revised version of the same. These are great and comprehensive but a little light on the flavour for what I was hoping.

Searching a little more gives a few articles and lists with a couple of ideas each:
Pirates and encounter ideas for Spelljammer
Random encounters at spelljamming speed
Fun & weird encounters for a spelljammer 5e environment

Age of D&D new joiners jumped ~5 yrs since 2015

tl:dr; comparing surveys, it seems the average age of new gamers has shifted from mid-teens to college age over 2010-2015.

Sparking off this twitter survey of when people started playing TTRPGs and seeing the most common age is post-teen I dug into old datasets to see when this had happened. Old surveys from Dragon and White Dwarf in the 80s put the average age of TTRPG gamers at ~16 years old. Something huge changed, but when? Looking at the OSR Gateway survey from 2019* we can find some answers.

Raw tracks of respondent age by era joined.