D&D General Wildly Diverse "Circus Troupe" Adventuring Parties

[Kurotowa]

I point out that ECMO3's groups are typically very focused on optimization and not, I think, that representative of typical groups.

I'm increasingly suspicious of the idea that a single "typical group" even exists.

With online multiplayer video games, there's a feedback loop because everyone is in a single shared community. People share information, people copy what's successful, trends emerge, social pressures exert themselves, and "the meta" develops where certain choices or play patterns become dominant. But that only happens because everyone is in the same play pool.

With a TTRPG, only a minority of players go out and get involved in online discussions. And even then they're usually just bringing home tricks and tips. When it comes to playing, it's still with their one or maybe two groups in real life. So every group is developing in isolation, and like remote islands full of weird mutations all sorts of highly specific local play patterns. The "meta" is limited to a particular group; how they interpret certain rules, what sort of campaigns they run, what social behaviors they encourage or discourage.

So I don't think a "typical group" exists except in the broadest of data driven trend analysis. And that's something no one outside of WotC really has the data to do.