The Learning Curve or Cutting New DMs Some Slack

tl;dr: campaigns that fail are part of getting good at DM'ing.

My big point here is that folk who joined before the 5e era joined younger and got in a lot more practice before arriving in their 20s (now). Someone starting in their 20s today is being presented with high expectations from Critical Role and other places straight out of the gate. If you are starting today, give yourself room to try things and fail in interesting ways.

In short, if you are setting out as a DM:
- go easy on yourself, less than perfection is still a good time
- be ready for things to go horribly wrong
- brief your players on what they are in for
- flag things you are testing and let decisions on new rules, mechanics, direction be two way doors

I had some thoughts that struck me in the small hours of the night as I pondered what the age up of new-joiners means.
- for the first decades of the game (70s-2000s), people joined as early teens
- a teen gamer, something like I was, has lots of time to pour into their hobbies
- once I found a group to game with, we put 15 hours a week on our TTRPGs alone - mostly in marathon sessions given our transport issues
- by the time I hit 18, I probably had ~2000 hours of table play time done
- once I hit college, I got straight into the games society, got involved in more games and did more, shorter games
- exiting college, I had probably added another ~1500 hours of gaming at least
- taking the ~10,000 hours-to-mastery rule, I was about 1/3 of the way there

Today, according to all these surveys, someone coming to gaming in their 20s:
- is typically getting in a weekly game of around 5.5 hours per session
- this puts them playing ~ 300 hours a year, assuming they play every week
- as a rough estimate they will be 27 by the time they have clocked the same table time as that teen gamer had when they hit 18

You can see the numbers to back this up below, but skipping to the 'so what' for now:

Shiny TTRPG links #51

Links from the link mines! More can be found on the previous list found here. The original inspiration for all of this - weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links. You can find even more links on the weekly blogroll on r/OSR.

The D&D Research Wizards Tabletop RPG 2021-2022 Survey which is open to the end of January.

Gorbels on Goblinpunch. Wizards bootstrapping interaction with the 4th dimension and its terrible hazards. Always read Goblinpunch.

Knight, or, rehousing the murder hobo on Rise Up Comus.

The Lizard Man Diaries writes up their entertaining FKR game in "Empyrean Dynasty Game 1, Turn 1, 10'000 years of Post Earth History!"

Sum of Misunderstandings on Weaver.skepti.ch - or why the PCs are the heroes, not the NPCs

17th Century Character Starter on The Luminescent Lich - a great set of backgrounds

What are the Peasant Children Doing? (d84) on Chartopia

Tumblr RPG community Recommendations from Lawful Goodness

The Hobbit and how it describes something very like OSR play on Wandering Gamist

Review: Calidar: In Stranger Skies

tl:dr; an evocative setting for swashbuckling sky adventures in this first Calidar book.

I came across the Calidar supplements come from Bruce Heard, creator of the magnificent Voyages of the Princess Ark from Dragon Magazine back in the day as a vehicle for him to continue with flying fantasy ships. Given that Princess Ark is one of the original D&D Flying Ships (*the* original?) I grabbed the Calidar books because I love me my flying ships. Reading the intro this is "a story, and background information for any system" - though probably the best overview and high level pitch for the setting is "What is Calidar?" on the authors blog.

Cover art by Ben Wootten

Overall I liked what I got - in particular I think they nailed the tone of the game this setting is for - high kinetic swashbuckling with lots of potential for dramatic scene changes. This all sets up for a certain style of gaming, one where adventurers bestride the world and treat with gods on a fairly regular basis. Throughout the book are great maps and graphics and lovely evocative artwork that pulls together to create Calidar as a setting for high-skies privateering. There is no system for sky-ship combat in the book but you can pull a complete set of mechanics down off the authors blog.

Smaller slices of a bigger pie - older D&D editions on Roll20

With another year past we can update the trend in editions of D&D as played on Roll20.

What we are looking at here is the share of D&D players for the various editions only from among Roll20 (so ~ 60-75% of the total players on Roll20 depending on the year). I have taken the % of campaigns for each edition for the last available report in each year and made that stack 100% in each year so we can see what % of D&D players are playing which edition.

Answering a question from Axian Spice on twitter, the following are my very dirty estimates for absolute numbers of users - with the caveat of noting the pre/post 2019 reporting method changed hence the 'step' in the last 3 years. It is not large so I think our general trend is not bad but still, exercise appropriate caution. Particularly with the 2021 number which is based on an extrapolation ofthe growth in Roll20 users.

Shiny TTRPG links #50

The gold hebdomadariversary of these weekly links! More can be found on the previous list found here. The original inspiration for all of this - weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links. You can find even more links on the weekly blogroll on r/OSR.

Continuing to point to the D&D Research Wizards Tabletop RPG 2021-2022 Survey which is open to the end of January.

Hex Junkie writes On the contradiction in player agency between OSR and 5E D&D which makes a good points - if there is only one reasonable action, do you have much choice to hand?

The Orc Rehabilitation Commission writes [OSR General] AI-Generated Monsters.

Deathtrap Dungeons gives us the Simple Adventure Builder - a really neat generator to get the creative juices flowing.

Monsters and Manuals are "Now Accepting Submissions: Volume 1, In the Hall of the Third Blue Wizard" - a new magazine which publishes hexmaps, dungeons and adventure sites for ‘old school’ fantasy games; art; and fantasy fiction.

Review: A Practical Guide to Medieval Warfare: Exploring History through Wargaming

tl:dr; a great source of detail for medieval warfare that can enrich your TTRPG games.

"A Practical Guide to Medieval Warfare: Exploring History through Wargaming" by Richard Brooks and John Curry was something I stumbled onto trotting about on the web at Weaver.skepti.ch and was seized by an excerpt that tried to reality check behaviour on medieval battlefields using modern analogues as well as original sources. This is both an interesting read and a great source for anyone describing melee combat in TTRPGs. I am reviewing with my table-top GM hat firmly in place, war-gamers will probably get a lot more out of this. I thought it was great even when I was not the target audience.

The kindle version I got has some proofing issues, nothing that made it unreadable but there is an editing pass missing. With that out of the way, this is exactly what it says on the tin - a practical guide. Deeper books of scholarship are certainly out there but to get you up the curve from 'I know nothing' to 'I won't make ridiculous errors' this is great bang for buck.

Player Stats for AideDD Character Builder 2020-2021

AideDD published their Character Builder stats and there are some really interesting trends in those 27k users. I recorded the same data reported in 2020 so let us look at what happened in the past year.

Overall it looks broadly similar to what they had in 2020, consistency in classes choice is coherent with what we have seen elsewhere - general player population is not bouncing around between classes. We have more artificers since that was added later.

Checking against the patterns for apps or forums, we see it maps solidly onto the Apps archetype - favouring fighters and rogues. This is the same pattern seen on D&D Beyond and the OGANM character builder tool. It repeats the pattern we see of character building tools with large user bases showing a different preference for classes than forum surveys. I read this as another point confirming that the general player base (as seen on this tool) has different preferences to those who frequent online forums.