D&D Survey Responses and [Brief] Analysis/Overview
This is from my survey that I posted 3 days ago.
After the fantastic 1735 responses, I was able to collect a great spread of data from people that visit this subreddit (thanks to everyone who filled it out).
Here are some of the major stats (this is for the lazy; links are below):
- 41% of the people answered in the 19-23 age category, with the second-highest result (28%) being 24-29; 4% are 40+ years old
- the male (92%) to female (8%) result is not surprising at all
- 43% have played 0-2 years (<1 year 22%; 1-2 years 21%), with 19% having played for more than 10
- largest portion of players started playing 3.5e and prefer 3.5e (largest switch is 3.5e to PF (8%))
- most people (77%) have played 1-3 editions
- 48% play less than 5 hours per week
- 76% would like to play more during the week
- preferred session lengths are 3-4 and 5-6 hours for both players and DMs
- 42% have 6-10 friends that also play D&D
- 74% prefer playing with the same-aged people (within ~5 years)
- 84% prefer to play in person (not surprising at all)
- the surprising stats: 50% prefer to be players, and 47% are more-frequently players; this opposes 21% who prefer being DMs and 41% who are DMs more (it seems like more DMs browse this subreddit imo)
- large spread for class/gameplay types, check Google's charts
- major alignment preferences are Chaotic Good and Neutral Good (the year-old survey on alignments by u/ChickinSammich talks a lot about this)
- 44% prefer the RP elements
- 49% prefer the "Adventure" campaign type
- and 46% prefer DM-created campaigns
Here are the links:
*For the tables I created a formula which essentially finds the most-common responses to two separate questions (essentially a mode for paired data). The number in the right column is the frequency, with the other two being the two responses which were selected together. They've made for some interesting results (such as the prefer player and more-frequently player has 581 people that selected both, with prefer DM and more-frequently DM only 279 people).
A few noteworthy things:
- 9 males who are 14 or younger answered the survey, with no females 14 or younger
- there was a male 60 or older that answered the survey
- 34 people have played every edition of D&D
- 4 people play D&D more than 20 hours per week
- only 5 people would like to play less D&D throughout the week
- 19% of people have introduced 10 or more people to D&D, the highest response to that question
Thanks again to everyone (all 1734 of you) that filled out the survey! I love stats and anonymous responses to surveys, so this was very enjoyable to do (I'm sure some people will love the raw data too). I hope this entertains and informs people of who browses this subreddit.
TL;DR: people like D&D and filling out surveys
Posted May 1, 2014, 9:31 AM UTC · edited
You should compare the age/gender stats against stats for Reddit as a whole, to determine how much of your age/gender bias is due to the composition of Redditors. I think--without much evidence--that females % should be closer to 15-20% in the general population, and there's a strong "young people" bias in the Reddit community. I turned 30 4 months ago and 50% players I've DMed for in the past year are older than 30.
Being an older gent, I found the age stats to be interesting. In our group players range in age from 19 to 45. I'd also wonder about how age correlates to preferred version. I play 1E, which is what I started with 30+ years ago.
I'll provide some stats of my own. For those who are at least 30, and have played for more than 10 years, and who didn't say they had no preference: 167 respondents
percentages exceed 100% because I rounded up just about every one.
respondents 40+, who have played for more than 10 years, and who stated a preference: 42
Original did become more popular, and 2nd. Interestingly, Next is also more popular, which makes sense to me since I think of Next as version 2.5 (in a good way). Also interesting is that 4th edition kept about the same popularity, while 3.x dropped in popularity a whopping 17%.
3.x drop not too surprising. The older I get the less time I have for prep and the less patience I have for crunch. I imagine I'm not alone there.
Age vs Preferred Edition is in the spreadsheet (center-ish of the page). The top one is 19-23, 3.5e with 257 people that chose both.
Yeah, but people 40+ aren't on that at all, but they are in your raw data. People over 40 are tied between Pathfinder and 4th edition at the same % as the entire survey, but there's a huge drop from 35% of the entire survey liking 3.0-3.5, to only 19% of gamers over 40 liking 3.0-3.5. That 16% variance is interesting. The number who like 2e and earlier in the general survey is only 5%, while 26% of the 40+ gamers say they prefer those editions. That's a 21% variance, also interesting.
So, what u/MrHarryReems was interested in--and u/mlinhardt points out--seems to hold true, that the older editions tend to be liked by the older players more than by the younger players. The popularity of Pathfinder, compared to 3.5, is very interesting, as is the popularity of 4e; but one of my players who is 40 GMs 4e for his kids, so there could be some of that going on too.
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