Is the average RPG campaign only six sessions long?

[Umbran]

This. A lot of people seem to confuse what "average" means.

Yeah. Mean, median, mode, and "typical" are not the same.

IIRC, back when 5E came out, WotC said that the typical long running campaign met once a week or every other week from August to May before ending or being abandoned: in other words, the school year. Hence their Adventure books being placed so as to fit in thst school year time frame.

This makes a lot of sense considering the college crowd. The group is only in physical proximity over the school year.

 

[Sir Brennen]

For ever weekly game that goes for three months (12 sessions), you need only one game that has one session and flops to bring the average down to about six.

Short-run failures crop long running game fast in the averaging.

Yeah, I think the tweet the vlogger mentions of gives the wrong impression. It's not that most campaigns go six sessions before ending, just the average. The average is pretty meaningless. It'd be more interesting to know what the median is. For datapoint clusters, I'd guess you'd probably have a bunch of games that only go a session or two, another larger group that lasts 9-12 months (school year) and those that go for multiple years.

EDIT: ninja'd like, twice over, on statistical terms
EDIT2: Corrected intended statistical terms

 

[John R Davis]

Yeah. Only last 1 or 2 sessions isn't a campaign?? A campaign must late at least 6 sessions to be called that?

 

[Umbran]

The average is pretty meaningless. It'd be more interesting to know what the mean is.

The average is the arithmetic mean.
The median is the middle value in the range.
The mode is the most frequent value.
The "typical" doesn't have a set definition in mathematics.

The average itself doesn't tell you much. The standard deviation would help. Actually seeing the distribution graphed out would be even more helpful.

 

[Umbran]

Yeah. Only last 1 or 2 sessions isn't a campaign?? A campaign must late at least 6 sessions to be called that?

Arbitrarily cutting off the data means you lose information about play. That a great many groups try, and fail, is terribly important to folks trying to support play.

 

[J.Quondam]

It's interesting that "research" is cited. I'd like to hear more about that.

But I recall hearing this nebulous "fact" 15 or 20 years ago, in the 3e era. In fact, that is what prompted me to start designing certain campaigns ("campaignlets") using ultralite rules and focused storylines, with the specific aim of only lasting 20 to 30 hours of play. (Which also happens to be a pretty good number for a long weekend "gaming getaway" campaignlet, too.)

Also looking back at my own experience (most face-to-face gaming), whenever a regular D&D campaign has petered out, it usually has done so after 5 or 6 sessions. Typically, I think this has been mainly because a critical mass of players new to the game or table just decided it wasn't their thing and moved on. (I don't personally recall any campaigns that didn't make it past one session, though I can imagine must happen a fair bit, especially online.)

 

[John R Davis]

Arbitrarily cutting off the data means you lose information about play. That a great many groups try, and fail, is terribly important to folks trying to support play.

Yeah. But it's not a campaign if it don't last more than X sessions

 

[prabe]

Yeah. But it's not a campaign if it don't last more than X sessions

That's not an unreasonable position, that's not what they're measuring. They're measuring how many sessions a given table plays in a given sequence, and they're calling that a "campaign" because they need to call it something.

 

[Umbran]

Yeah. But it's not a campaign if it don't last more than X sessions

But picking X because you feel it is right is crummy statistics and research.

We shouldn't assign what a campaign is. We should look at the data, and discover what it is.

 

[Staffan]

It would be interesting to see the campaign length weighted by the number of sessions (which I guess would be campaign length squared, or something?). So if you have one group that's having five rapid-fire campaigns of five sessions each, and another group that's having a single 25-session campaign, that would be 25 sessions worth of 5-session campaigns and 25 sessions worth of 25-session campaigns, for an average of 15 sessions.

That would probably be a better measurement of "if you're part of a campaign, how long can you expect that campaign to last?"