The first three polls are now closed and I'd like to share the results. The first poll was How many people – players + referee(s) – were there in your gaming group at the time you first started roleplaying? yielded the following, based on 342 votes:
These results were a little bit of a surprise to me. Remember that the question was about your first gaming group, not your present one. When I entered the hobby in late 1979, my gaming group had seven players and that didn't seem to be all that unusual. Most of the other groups I encountered had more than six players, with quite a few having 10 or more. However, based on the results above, that wasn't quite as common as I had imagined, with 4–6 players being far more so.
The second poll was How many people – players + referee(s) – are in your gaming group at present? and yielded results consonant with the first one, based on 417 votes:
As you can see, the numbers aren't much different, with 5–6 players representing almost half of all voters. The biggest shift is at the high end, where the number of voters whose gaming group has 7 or more players has grown from slightly less than 15% in the first poll to slightly more than 20% in the second one. I'm actually rather heartened by seeing that, as I think larger groups are generally better than smaller ones.
The third and final poll I'll discuss today is How long are your RPG sessions?, which yielded the following, based on 467 votes:
These results did not surprise me. Slightly more than two-thirds of the votes were cast for 2–4 hours, which has been the typical length I've observed for the last decade or more. In my youth, we used to have marathon sessions that lasted 8 hours or more, but I'm far too old to do that anymore and have been for some time. In addition, lots of us play online nowadays, so anything longer than 4 hours staring at a screen is generally too much. That said, there were still people who voted for sessions of 6+ hours, so not everyone is as lacking in stamina as I.
This is all useful information to me, if only to get a better sense of Grognardia's readership. It's also helped me formulate some additional questions that I'll post in the future, such as "How often do you get together to play?" and "In how many campaigns are you currently participating?" If there are other questions you'd like me to ask in polls, please let me know in the comments.
When I entered the hobby in late 1979, my gaming group had seven players and that didn't seem to be all that unusual.
ReplyDeleteSome of your results will be skewed by the wording of the question. My first gaming group had four or five people in it. It was a small town, and my brother’s friend just invited his own close friends (my brother invited me). I wasn’t entering an existing group, but a newly-formed one. Later, at college, the pool was bigger and so were the groups. Seven was pretty much the minimum size of a group then, although subgroups might get in a throwaway game just because we happened to be in the same place at the same time.
But the question was “first gaming group” and that might often be a newly-formed group of close friends that would grow (as our high school group did, although rarely if ever above seven people; it was just too small a town and we were not exactly outgoing).
For future polls, it would be interesting to learn, "What percentage of your regular group is female?"
ReplyDeleteSomething I am personally interested in, are questions like 'what was the first TTRPG you ever played', 'what is your favorite TTRPG', and 'what TTRPG are you currently playing in your main group'. But these don't necessarily lend themselves much to the 'poll' format because of the extremely large number of possible answers. A better approach might be to ask questions like these in a post, and then let people provide free format answers in the comments ? Just my 2$ here.
ReplyDeleteI missed this poll but my initial gaming group 3, 2 players and a (rotating) DM. We added a 4 regular within a year though, and there were periods where we had 6-7, but that was beyond the core group.
ReplyDeleteMy current group is 5 plus myself as DM. Half are women.