Comparing Grognardia polls to other surveys (pt. 2)

Looking at the second block of polls that Grognardia ran – “when were you first introduced to roleplaying games?” and “how old were you when you first started playing tabletop RPGs?” which are discussed on by them here in part II. I did the same again, comparing them to what we see in other polls and this time around the results are *very* different to responses from elsewhere.

Staring with ‘when you were first introduced to RPGs’ – the Grognardia readership is *much* older than even other D&D bloggers, even other OSR blogs that I figured would be the old gang. Here be the ancients with half of them introduced back in the 80s and another quarter from the 70s. Compare that to even to the folk replying to Necropraxis OSR Gateway survey back in 2019 – the *next oldest* bunch – and they only had less than 100 folk from the 70s of 2700 respondents compared to 124 who replied here!

I was also heartily amused to see ‘2000+’ as the last category – anyone this entire millenium gets stuffed in one box – which turned out to be the right call! There were only 60 respondents – less from these last 25 years than were introduced to the game in just 77-79! Grognardia obviously knows his audience but I am really fascinated to see this particular group not having some greater influx of post-millenium players given that every other indicators elsewhere says that there has been a big block of new gamers come in and even if only a fraction drifted off to check out the old ways, one might have thought it would be more significant than the three score who turn up. Fascinating.

The other question asked was about age when people first started playing – and we know from lots of other sources that pre-2010, people mostly started playing as teens and the earlier they found D&D, the younger that age range tended to be. And lo – the Grognardia response looks like the 70s/80s gamers the other poll says they are.

All the bars at left are from the OSR survey; the detailed data shared let us split these out to match the categories of the Grognardia survey and batch them by age and era of joining. The rapidly rising age of new joiners can be seen. Interestingly, as we have mentioned before, this means a 30 year old gamer in the year 2000 was likely a 20 year veteran gamer, a 30 year old now has maybe 5 years under their belt.

I wonder how much ones sense of ‘what is D&D’ is changed by it being something you played all through your pre-teen and teenage years versus when you come to it as an adult in college. It feels to me that the increase in complexity of D&D is probably stopping us from ever seeing that experiment run.

Returning to our initial point – because these two questions were posed as separate polls we have no way to properly correlate age and eras of the Grognardia respondents but using comparisons to other polls out there it certainly looks like it is a window into the ancestral gamers, who joined as pre-teens back in the 80s and have been merrily chucking dice these past 45 years.

Key Sources

D&D Gateway survey – survey by Necropraxis.

Kirith – replica of the 1985 Dragon Magazine Survey.

Facebook 5e group – some posts by the mods listed the membership numbers.

Reddit 2014 D&D Survey – data sheet at the bottom of the page.

Mia Gojaks Survey of D&D 5e Facebook group users.

Elderbrain 2020 survey.

Trygstad thesis.

Reddit ML survey.