Musings on Poll Results (Part III)

I'm going to take a break from these weekly polls. While I have found them useful in getting a better sense of Grognardia's readership demographics, I've found the poll service I've been using somewhat limited in its capabilities. Many of the questions I'd like to ask would require a much more sophisticated set-up and I don't, at present, have access to that. I'll spend the next few weeks researching the matter to see if I can come up with a polling system more suited to what I desire. If you should have any suggestions or recommendations in this regard, I'd be grateful if you make them known to me in the comments.

The poll, "Was Your First Tabletop RPG Dungeons & Dragons?,"  yielded the results I more or less expected:

Since its first appearance in 1974, D&D has been the proverbial 800-lb. gorilla of the roleplaying hobby. That remains true even today, despite – or perhaps because of – the proliferation of RPGs. As you can see, the vast majority of my readers started with D&D, as I did too. It's pretty uncommon to meet someone who entered the hobby through another game, though I currently play with at least one person who did so. 

The poll, "Where Did You Buy Your First Tabletop RPG?," was a bit of a mess, if I'm honest. It was this poll that made it clear to me I needed a better means of collecting data. Even leaving aside the inadequacies of the poll itself – how did I not include "comic shop" as an option? – there are still some interesting results here.

Taken together, "game store/hobby shop" and "bookstore" accounted for nearly 60% of the responses. That's not really a surprise, since those are, in my opinion, the two most obvious places to purchase RPG. More interesting is the third most popular response: "I Didn't – It Was a Gift." Just shy of 20% of all respondents choose this option, which suggests that a significant number of people owe their involvement in the hobby to someone else. This is a case where I wish I could more easily follow up certain answers. I'd love, for example, to know who gave these gifts and also whether or not the gift was requested or an unexpected surprise – hence why I'm going to be looking for alternatives to Strawpoll in the coming days.

Where Did You Buy Your First Tabletop RPG?

(This is a repost, because I am an idiot. I thought I'd included "bookstore" as an option, but obviously didn't. I am now reposting the poll with that option. My apologies to those of you who previously voted. You may now do so again.)

For this week's poll, let me offer a few clarifications. First and most importantly, I'm asking this question about the very first tabletop RPG you bought for yourself and owned, not played. In some cases, these may be different. I want to know about the very roleplaying game for which you had a personal copy. Second, if you didn't buy your first RPG yourself but were given it as a gift, there is an option for that in the poll. Please use it, because I am curious to know how common it was to give roleplaying games as gifts.

For the five main options, I chose places of business that I can recall selling RPGs during my youth. I have undoubtedly neglected to include some possibilities. If you bought your first tabletop roleplaying game somewhere I didn't specifically mention, please choose "Other" and explain your answer in the comments. I'd love to know about some of the more unusual places where RPGs have been sold over the years. 

Musings on Poll Results (Part II)

With two more polls closed, let's take a look at the results, starting with when were you first introduced to roleplaying games? When I posted this poll on March 3,  my initial guess was that most of my regular readers were introduced to tabletop RPGs sometime between 1979 and 1983. As you can see, my prediction was very close to the truth.

The period between 1980 and 1982, corresponding to the tail end of the Holmes Basic Set's run and the launch of Moldvay/Cook accounted for just shy of one-third of all votes, while 1977–1979 accounts for nearly one-fifth. Taken together, they represent almost one-half of respondents. Interestingly, the period between 1983 and 1985, during which the Mentzer's BECM boxed sets were released (I didn't appear until 1986) is a close third. Altogether, then, the nine-year period between 1977 and 1985 represents two-thirds of those who voted.

The fourth place period of 2000+ is worthy of separate mention. Though only 10.66% of respondents chose this option, it's still larger than the other remaining options. This proves, I think, that Third Edition was a consequential edition of Dungeons & Dragons, one that introduced a lot of people into the hobby who have continued to participate in it. Though 3e is far from my favorite edition of the game, I also think it gets a much worse reputation in old school circles than it deserves. (As an aside, I think it's even more notable that the reign of 2e seems to have garnered so few votes, but perhaps that's just a quirk of my readership.)

The next poll, which originally appeared on March 10, asked: how old were you when you first started playing tabletop RPGs? My prediction was that the winning answer would be somewhere in the 10 to 14 age range – and I was correct.

A little less than three-quarters of all correspondents chose either 9–11 or 12–14, with the latter winning by just two votes. This doesn't really surprise me. Most of the roleplayers I met in my youth were within a year or two of my own age – I started in late '79, having just turned 10. What does surprise me, though, is how much smaller than other age cohorts are, especially the 18–20 and 21+ categories, both of which are smaller than the 6–8 category. As ever, that may simply be a quirk of my readership, who largely seem to be middle-aged men who were born in the late '60s to early '70s. Even so, I remember older guys who roleplayed, like my friend's high school-aged older brother, for instance, and the college kids who hung around hobby shops. Where are they now?

Was Your First Tabletop RPG Dungeons & Dragons?

We've got a very simple poll this week: was your first tabletop RPG Dungeons & Dragons? I suspect that the vast majority of people who read this blog entered the hobby through D&D, but I'm nevertheless curious about the number who didn't. If you answered "no," please use the comments to indicate the tabletop RPG that was your first instead and, if you can recall, the year when you first played it. I'm very curious about the other games that might have served as gateways to roleplaying and when they did so.

 

Musings on Poll Results (Part I)

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.  

How Old Were You When First Started Playing Tabletop RPGs?

This is another poll whose results whose results will greatly interest me. I had just turned 10 when I discovered Dungeons & Dragons during the Christmas break of 1979, but all my neighborhood friends, who formed the group with which I regularly played, were younger than I was, by a year or two. I eventually came to know roleplayers who were older, like a friend's brother and his buddies, but we never gamed with them very often. 

Like previous polls, this one is necessarily limited. I lumped anyone under the age of 6 into a single category on the assumption that very few people first play tabletop RPGs at that age. Likewise, anyone age 21 or older gets put into a single category. In both cases, that's a function of my own experience of entering the hobby. If enough people vote for either of those categories, I may do a subsequent poll that expands upon them, but my gut tells me that most people who read this blog probably started roleplaying between the ages of 6 and 20, with the vast majority being somewhere in the 10 to 14 range. We'll see if I'm correct in this assumption.

 

When Were You First Introduced to Roleplaying Games?

The ongoing results of the polls I've posted here over the last month have been very instructive in giving me a better understanding of Grognardia's readership. I've still got several more polls (at least) in the works before I attempt to draw any conclusions. Among those polls is today's, which I consider an important one: when were you first introduced to roleplaying games? My assumption has long been that most of my regular readers are middle-aged, the vast majority of whom entered the hobby during the period between 1979 and 1983, when Dungeons & Dragons was at the peak of its faddishness. However, that's just an assumption and may well be wrong.

So, for today's poll, I've presented lots of three-year periods – from 1974 to 2000 – in which readers can identify the period when they first started roleplaying. My apologies to anyone who entered the hobby from 2000 on. I've compressed the last quarter-century into a single option, both for my convenience and out of a sense that it'll still be a minority choice. If I'm wrong about that, I can always do a follow-up poll to distinguish between the various three-year blocs of the last 25 years.

How Long Are Your RPG Sessions?

I'm going to continue posting polls each Monday for a few more weeks, because I'm very curious about how the other half lives, so to speak. I know my own experiences gaming, especially over the last decade or so, are quite unusual, so gathering this data gives me a bit more insight into what my fellow roleplayers are doing (at least those who regularly read this blog). As always, please feel free to use the comments to clarify or expand upon your vote.

I've kept both of the previous polls open for now, so, if you haven't yet voted in those, please consider doing so. The more votes they receive, the better the picture I have. My intention is, sometime after all the polls are closed, to do a brief analysis of the results.

How Big Is Your Gaming Group?

As a follow-up to last week's poll – which is still ongoing, by the way – I'm curious as to how many people with whom you presently play roleplaying games. This time, there are more options, since I want a more refined sense of just how big most readers' regular gaming groups are. As usual, feel free to use the comments to clarify or expand upon your answers, since that's also useful data. In the event that you play with more than one group of people, go ahead and use your largest group as the basis for your answer.

How Big Was Your Gaming Group?

My post over the weekend generated a lot of comments and discussions, for which I'm grateful. I'm always very interested in learning more about readers' experiences gaming over the years. One topic that came up several times was the size of one's gaming group and how that influenced whether or not one player, one character was employed. Quite a few commenters noted that, when they first started roleplaying, they didn't have a large gaming group and so it was often necessary for players to take on the role of more than one character. 

That makes sense to me, but I hadn't really considered it, since my earliest gaming group was relatively large – seven of us, including myself. We were occasionally joined by others, so our numbers would occasionally creep up closer to ten. In the circles in which I traveled, groups this large weren't uncommon, though I wouldn't go so far as to say they were the norm. In my experience, four to six players (including the referee) was more typical. Even so, I can't recall ever coming across anyone whose group consisted of only two or three people. That's completely outside my own experience.

With that in mind, I thought I'd create a little poll to gather some data about this question. Please take a moment to answer the question below, bearing in mind that it's about your earliest gaming group, which is to say, the one with whom you first played after entering the hobby. At the moment, I'm not interested in data about your current gaming group, so please keep this in mind when answering. Feel free to include any additional details you think relevant in the comments to this post.

Note: I opted to use another method of polling. Let's see if this one works better. Apologies if you voted in the previous version. You'll need to vote again.

Maximum and Ideal Party Size

In light of the discussion in the comments to this post, I find myself wondering about readers' experiences with party size in their play of various RPGs over the years. In particular, I'm curious about both the maximum number of players with whom one has ever played successfully and what one considers the ideal number of players. I realize that one's ideal size might vary from game to game. A game like Dungeons & Dragons is much easier to run with a large number of characters, while one like Top Secret probably has a smaller number of ideal players. Nevertheless, I think most of us who've gamed for a long time has a general sense of what works best and I'd like to hear about it in the comments.

For myself, the largest group I've ever played with successfully consisted of ten or eleven players. This was a D&D game and the players were surprisingly well organized in their actions and ability to communicate it to me as the referee. That was the exception rather than the rule, though. Most of the successful games I've played in since have had probably half that number, which may explain why I tend to consider five to seven players to be ideal in most circumstances.

What about yourself? 

Poll: New Feature

I've made a poll (located on the right hand side of the blog) for the name of the new feature. If you don't mind, take the time to vote and let me know which one you like the best. If you have any further suggestions beyond the four I liked best, please put them in the comments of this entry.

And thanks to everyone for their suggestions.