D&D General As of 1998, 4,007,685 people played AD&D in the US, as estimated by Ben Riggs.

[GreyLord]

I think it's impossible to estimate those numbers without international numbers.

I think the posit is not exact simply because I KNOW there were many groups that did NOT use a DMG.

The most popular form I saw that didn't use the DMG were those that started with the BX sets or the BEC sets. These groups used the tables from BX or BECMI and got an AD&D PHB in many cases and continued on with that. Sometimes they got the MM in addition.

I've seen some of those sets get a LOT of use from DM's, some having gone through two, three, or more groups with each group being 4-5, and sometimes larger (I've seen groups up to 8-10 on the regular back then among really young gamers).

It IS interesting that the number is specific for 1998. I think other numbers have posited 1/10 that number (so more, like, half a million).

I don't know how they arrived at that number either (TBH).

I'd agree it is probably controversial. Interestingly high. I'd imagine based on that, the assumption of the number of players would be lower than the estimates for the mid 80s to mid 90s, but higher for the mid 90s to the 00s if we use a similar guessing game for the other years?

Of course a counter argument could be that if they were using the BX box but using the PHB and MM, were they REALLY playing AD&D...or was it actually an enhanced form of BX or BECMI?

Edit: Of course, it is ONLY the AD&D number, not D&D in general. 4 million in 1998 seems...high, but 4 million BY 1998...seems kind of low as well. I'd probably favor a number more akin to 8-10 million overall for the entire period...BUT...who really knows!? At least for the total AD&D player base. I'd imagine the D&D (BX and BECMI) numbers would be far greater though, if we are basing these on overall sales...especially when tossing in international numbers.

 

[Parmandur]

Well, the beauty of the Fermi Estimation is that your assumptions don’t necessarily need to be accurate, as long as you’re “in the right ballpark.” And as long as you understand that what you’re getting is not an accurate answer, but a reasonable range. Some of your estimations will be too high, and some will be too low, but as you multiply these factors, the over-estimates and the under-estimates tend to cancel out and you end up with a result that’s “close enough” (that is to say, within about an order of magnitude), which makes it a useful tool for checking your calculations that are meant to produce an accurate results against. If the calculations you use to try and find an accurate answer produce one that’s off from your Fermi Estimate by more than about an order of magnitude, there’s a good chance that there’s a flaw in your methodology.

Very interesting. Reading up on this new-fangled black magic practice, I found this following quote on the Qiki lage that gets at the heart of whybIndeel a couple of these assumptions could be improved:

"Although Fermi calculations are often not accurate, as there may be many problems with their assumptions, this sort of analysis does tell us what to look for to get a better answer. For the above example, we might try to find a better estimate of the number of pianos tuned by a piano tuner in a typical day, or look up an accurate number for the population of Chicago. It also gives us a rough estimate that may be good enough for some purposes: if we want to start a store in Chicago that sells piano tuning equipment, and we calculate that we need 10,000 potential customers to stay in business, we can reasonably assume that the above estimate is far enough below 10,000 that we should consider a different business plan (and, with a little more work, we could compute a rough upper bound on the number of piano tuners by considering the most extreme reasonable values that could appear in each of our assumptions)."

 

[Zardnaar]

Well with the WotC 5.5-6 million number late 90's/early 2000's I assume they guesstimated an attach rate to PHB sold via surveys I suppose.

There's also a difference between active players vs everyone who ever tried it.

 

[John Lloyd1]

I remember WotC claiming 6 million players 1999 or so. They probably just attached a number of players to each dmg perhaps including the floaters.

Do we have any idea on the methodology they would have used for the 6m figure? Have they done they own fermi estimation?

 

[Charlaquin]

I think it's impossible to estimate those numbers without international numbers.

I think the posit is not exact simply because I KNOW there were many groups that did NOT use a DMG.

He isn’t claiming to posit an exact number though. He’s pretty explicitly making a guess that is almost certainly not correct, but is also very unlikely to be off by that much. Were there actually 4,007,685 people playing AD&D in 1988? Almost certainly not. But on the other hand, it’s similarly unlikely that there were fewer than 40,0768 people or more than 40,076,850 people playing. In fact, I would even dare to say we can safely assume an even tighter range than that! Perhaps between 2,000,000 and 8,000,000?

 

[Zardnaar]

Do we have any idea on the methodology they would have used for the 6m figure? Have they done they own fermi estimation?

They used to do surveys no idea beyond that.

 

[GreyLord]

He isn’t claiming to posit an exact number though. He’s pretty explicitly making a guess that is almost certainly not correct, but is also very unlikely to be off by that much. Were there actually 4,007,685 people playing AD&D in 1988? Almost certainly not. But on the other hand, it’s similarly unlikely that there were fewer than 40,0768 people or more than 40,076,850 people playing. In fact, I would even dare to say we can safely assume an even tighter range than that! Perhaps between 2,000,000 and 8,000,000?

There was another discussion a few years back that posited that in the late 90s there were only about half a million active D&D players (that's for that time period, not all of the players ever).

I think the 4 million is total players (which I think is a bit low, 8 million is still on the low side of what I'd think ,but it falls within the 8-10 million AD&D players of my own thoughts).

However, off the top of my head now, I do not know where that half a million D&D (that wasn't just AD&D, that's D&D players total during the late 90s) number comes from. I know the late 90s were a bastion for other RPGs that were taking AD&D's thunder, the high point for Werewolf/Vampire, but also you had GURPS, RIFTS, Champions, and a few others eating D&D's lunch.

 

[John Lloyd1]

They used to do surveys no idea beyond that.

Those surveys something about the players, but not the number of players. You could ask a bunch of random people if they have played ad&d, but that would be expensive. Or fermi estimation. I'm not sure what other options there are.

 

[Zardnaar]

Those surveys something about the players, but not the number of players. You could ask a bunch of random people if they have played ad&d, but that would be expensive. Or fermi estimation. I'm not sure what other options there are.

Ask them how many players you have get enough responses and extrapolate.

Altit of political polling is 1000 responses or so.

I have no idea how they did it but this is one possibility.

 

[Charlaquin]

Very interesting. Reading up on this new-fangled black magic practice, I found this following quote on the Qiki lage that gets at the heart of whybIndeel a couple of these assumptions could be improved:

"Although Fermi calculations are often not accurate, as there may be many problems with their assumptions, this sort of analysis does tell us what to look for to get a better answer. For the above example, we might try to find a better estimate of the number of pianos tuned by a piano tuner in a typical day, or look up an accurate number for the population of Chicago. It also gives us a rough estimate that may be good enough for some purposes: if we want to start a store in Chicago that sells piano tuning equipment, and we calculate that we need 10,000 potential customers to stay in business, we can reasonably assume that the above estimate is far enough below 10,000 that we should consider a different business plan (and, with a little more work, we could compute a rough upper bound on the number of piano tuners by considering the most extreme reasonable values that could appear in each of our assumptions)."

This is where we get the Fermi Paradox from. Even given extremely conservative estimates it seems absurdly unlikely for the number of planets that host intelligent life in the universe to be 1. But also given similar estimations it seems absurdly unlikely that we wouldn’t be able to see any evidence of other intelligent life if it existed. So, clearly our estimates are flawed in some way or another, and we must ask ourselves wherein the flaw(s) lie. Is intelligent life far rarer than we would assume? That’s possible, but it would make us an extreme outlier, which is yet another sign that there may be a flaw in your methodology. Is intelligent life inherently unsustainable? That’s also possible, but a rather depressing thought. Similarly, it could be that interstellar travel is actually just impossible, but we’d like to hope that’s not the answer. Are all the aliens hiding from us for some reason? Maybe, but, like, why?

Another interesting piece of the puzzle is that statistical modeling can be used to demonstrate, pretty much inarguably, that we are more than 90% likely to be among the first 10% of intelligent species to arise in the universe. This, again, marks us as an exceptional case, which is always cause for skepticism about one’s assumptions. One interesting proposal that resolves this problem, while being much more hopeful than the possibility that all life goes extinct before achieving interstellar travel, is that life forms which do achieve interstellar travel are likely to take control of large portions of the universe and prevent other spacefaring life from developing within that territory. In other words, if we assume most aliens would be colonialist, then it becomes more likely that, as intelligent life forms, we would be among the first to have developed, since later in the universe’s life, all the territory in which new intelligent life might develop will have already been colonized. And we would likewise expect not to see aliens, since if they were close enough to see, they would probably already have colonized our system and prevented us from developing within it.

…What were we talking about again?