D&D General What are your D&D gaming practices?

[SothFan]

Also on internet, it says 80 million D&D players

Where please? All I saw/heard was 50 from those investor calls.

 

[Lanefan]

The poll results right now are really telling - only about a quarter of respondents use DDB. That's a distinct difference between EnWorld users and typical players. I feel like that explains a lot of the threads we see.

What you want to look at is the percentage of those who use DDB vs those who play online, which right now sits at 31 of 35 (mainly) or 31 of 60 (mainly plus mixed).

By this poll, over half the respondents play mainly at the table and thus would have considerably less, if any, need for DDB or other online platforms.

Personally, even though I voted "mixed" online-table (I play online and DM at table), DDB is useless to me as it doesn't support the edition I play, nor anything even vaguely close.

 

[brodahisou]

I pay a monthly subscription for Owlbear Rodeo.

 

[el-remmen]

I am surprised there's not more YouTube viewers, honestly. Many people have mentioned SLyFlourish, which I do not know. One has mentioned the Dungeon Dudes. None have mentioned D4 (D&D Deep Dive) and Treantmonk, as well as Pack Tactics, DnD Shorts, the Twig, etc. I would have expected them to be more popular. Some others, I know, primarily are click-baiting and scaremongering rumours; I don't mention them.

I used to watch a lot of them and even once started a thread for people to share favorites, when I was looking for more. But even the best of them got repetitive and/or too far in to the business side of D&D which I am really not much interested in (except in a broad historical sense). As I mentioned in my original post, I am still up for a Matt Colville video and have been watching James Intracaso's MCDM videos about their upcoming dungeoncrawl TTRPG Crows. Sometimes I'll catch an odd video of Jorphdan's when he is covering some lore I am curious about. I recently tried Mystic Arts, and he has solid advice - but I didn't find any of it to be of personal use at this point in my GMing. I just can't get into live-play and the style of play from what I have watched does not appeal to me.

 

[haakon1]

I have a lot going on with D&D.

For “modern”, I’m a player in 5.5e Ravenloft game that’s run on Discord and Roll20, with D&D Beyond for character sheets. It’s entirely online including rules references, played 8-10 times a year. I didn’t say I “subscribe” to DDB, because I don’t pay $0.01, but I have an account. Our group is one DM + 5 players. Our DM has said he plans to run it until he dies; I’ve been in and out with these folks since 2004. All but 1, I really only interact with in the game. We’re in two Pacific & Eastern time zones.

For “older editions”, I’m a DM of two related campaigns of 3.5e in Greyhawk. Each has 5 players; one player is in both campaigns. 7 of the 9 players I know well in real life - college friend, ex-coworkers, etc. We play entirely by email. Which means I’m thinking about it every day, multiple times. I check rules on paper, PDF, or d20srd.org. I use FR wiki to check which book (I have a large collection) has info on monsters across the editions. I run 3x, AD&D, OSR, or 5e adventures but convert to 3.5e.

I’m also a player in my niece’s 3.5e homebrew. She prefers it to 5e, which she plays with her high school gaming group. Due to grades and pressure from other activities (cheer and softball), she hasn’t run it in about 6 months. Everything is electronic for this. We play on Zoom. DM + 7 players, all family. One player is also in one of my email games.

 

[haakon1]

In addition to that, I’m nearly done with a 2020-now project to read and review every adventure in Dungeon.

And I occasionally work on “whole Oerth” idea of filling in the rest of the Greyhawk planet with abandoned settings, including Chainmail (2002) which was meant to be western Oerik, “D&D: Wrath of the Dragon God” which has Greyhawk/AD&D modules references, and the setting from Willow which was created when AD&D/Greyhawk were at their peak and oddly had an unofficial book for use with an unnamed RPG with Fighters and Magic-Users.

Both began as ideas for use in actual DMing, but grew into larger projects. They still pay dividends in what I DM over the email campaigns.

 

[GrimCo]

Also on internet, it says 80 million D&D players so DDB is in the 10-20% range? Obviously estimates.

I think numbers floating around are estimates based on sales of 2014/24 phb/dm, subscriptions to DDB and vtt platforms, looking for group adds on platforms, few online polls. But real numbers i would say is at least double or triple, conservatively. None of those sources they based estimates take into account people playing older editions. And for those folks, DDB is useless.

 

[the Jester]

I am playing in one 5.5e game, running two 5.0e games, playing in two 5.0e games, and run two games using my homebrew system- you left out that as an option.

 

[Lanefan]

.... and run two games using my homebrew system- you left out that as an option.

I just counted that under "an earlier edition".

 

[DammitVictor]

Mostly at the table, mostly physical books, mostly older editions. I do more online than I do offline... but not playing.