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As of 1998, 4,007,685 people played AD&D in the US, as estimated by Ben Riggs.
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<blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8780482" data-attributes="member: 82106"><p>Meh, this entire thing is nothing but a series of guesses piled on top of one another. We have no idea how many people actually owned a DMG, and even though we can speculate that some owned more than one (I certainly owned a DMG and a 2e DMG) its really impossible to know how many were passed on to others, shared, never sold at all, etc. etc. etc. Any attempt to come up with a number here is pure unadulterated arbitrary guesswork. Beyond that, I think the guess as to how many people 'experienced D&D' at the hands of any given DM is a whole other layer of guesswork. I personally know (and am myself one) who has GMed for hundreds, maybe as many as a thousand different players in my lifetime. Now, many of those also played with other people, so to even make a wild guess as to the ratio of players to GMs is completely impossible. I think the idea to guess '4' based on the idea that an 'average' game of D&D has 4 players and a GM (also not established, but whatever) is completely misguided, as this has nothing to do with the total people who ever played even once! </p><p></p><p>Thus the whole 4 million number is simply a random guess, the true number could be 1 million or could be 40 million. I mean, I would never propose to know where in that range the actual answer lies, but I'd be surprised if it isn't somewhere in those bounds. I don't think foreign language editions are being counted here, either, and the math for them could be quite different from the US, as people in at least some other countries are more likely to have shared books around, etc. given how hard they were to come by and expensive.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="AbdulAlhazred, post: 8780482, member: 82106"] Meh, this entire thing is nothing but a series of guesses piled on top of one another. We have no idea how many people actually owned a DMG, and even though we can speculate that some owned more than one (I certainly owned a DMG and a 2e DMG) its really impossible to know how many were passed on to others, shared, never sold at all, etc. etc. etc. Any attempt to come up with a number here is pure unadulterated arbitrary guesswork. Beyond that, I think the guess as to how many people 'experienced D&D' at the hands of any given DM is a whole other layer of guesswork. I personally know (and am myself one) who has GMed for hundreds, maybe as many as a thousand different players in my lifetime. Now, many of those also played with other people, so to even make a wild guess as to the ratio of players to GMs is completely impossible. I think the idea to guess '4' based on the idea that an 'average' game of D&D has 4 players and a GM (also not established, but whatever) is completely misguided, as this has nothing to do with the total people who ever played even once! Thus the whole 4 million number is simply a random guess, the true number could be 1 million or could be 40 million. I mean, I would never propose to know where in that range the actual answer lies, but I'd be surprised if it isn't somewhere in those bounds. I don't think foreign language editions are being counted here, either, and the math for them could be quite different from the US, as people in at least some other countries are more likely to have shared books around, etc. given how hard they were to come by and expensive. [/QUOTE]
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Community
General Tabletop Discussion
*Dungeons & Dragons
As of 1998, 4,007,685 people played AD&D in the US, as estimated by Ben Riggs.
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