The Data Behind D&D

The Dataset

Archivist records TTRPG sessions from Discord, uploaded audio, and notes. That leaves a longitudinal record of real campaigns: timestamps, transcripts, cast lists, system tags, and a campaign compendium that fills itself in as the party plays.

How to read these numbers

How Many NPCs and Locations a TTRPG Campaign Accumulates

Archivist extracts every named person, place, faction, and object as it comes up in play. The average TTRPG campaign holds 20 NPCs and 19 locations. Campaigns that last keep adding names, and the pile grows faster than a single average can show.

A campaign that reaches ten sessions is carrying 79 NPCs and 75 locations. At twenty it is past a hundred of each. The few that reach fifty hold 209 named characters. That growth doesn’t happen in bursts, either: on average, a single session adds about 17.5 new named entities to the world.

How Long Do TTRPG Campaigns Last?

30.6% of Archivist campaigns log only one session. That mix of one-shots and abandoned first nights is why the averages below leave them out. Among campaigns that come back, the average is 6 sessions over 86 days.

Clear the first session and 60.4% of those campaigns reach a fifth. 1.4% ever see session fifty. 28.1% run six months or longer.

Groups who record are self-selected. Setting up recording takes effort, so lifespan here likely runs long relative to the hobby at large.

How Long Are TTRPG Sessions?

The average recorded Archivist session runs 3 hr 0 min. Last spoken timestamp minus first, marching-order arguments included. Two-to-three-hour sessions are the norm, at 43.7% of the total.

Self-reported surveys of past U.S. players put four-hour-plus sessions near 30%. We measure 10.5%. (Troy Press, 2026, recalled habits, n=204.)

Recording format barely moves the number. Discord voice and uploaded audio land 3 min apart: 2 hr 52 min against 2 hr 55 min.

How Often Do TTRPG Groups Play?

The average gap between Archivist sessions is 11.0 days. Sunday is the most common night to play, at 19.1% of sessions. Saturday is next. Play runs all week.

Party Size and GM Talk Share

Every table is a cast of players and one GM running the show for them.

In a typical analyzed Archivist session the GM speaks 46.5% of the words. Cast Analysis turns that into a number you can see for your own table. You cannot count it while you are also running the game.

That share is mostly the GM narrating the world so everyone else can react to it. Ask a GM to guess their own number, and they'll usually guess low.

A GM at a third of the words is rare, and so is a GM at two-thirds. Tables settle around 40–50% across systems, party sizes and play styles. Your own recordings will put you on that curve in an afternoon.

What TTRPG Systems Are Groups Running?

D&D 5e dominates, which will surprise nobody. Share figures with a method behind them are harder to come by: no publisher releases audited play data, and the community estimates in circulation aggregate surveys of wildly different quality. Our campaign tags at least come from groups actually running the game.

What Changed After Daggerheart Launched

A single share is a snapshot; the useful question is which way it moves. Daggerheart launched May 20, 2025, so quarterly session share gives a clean before/after read — a campaign reports its system once, but a group that keeps playing reports it every session.

Twelve months either side of release, D&D of some edition went from 77.4% of captured sessions to 71.9% — a 5.5-point drop.

The three cards are the real story, not the headline. D&D 5e shed thirteen points; D&D 2024 picked up seven and a half of them — most of what D&D lost, it lost to itself. The dashed line barely moves after 2025 Q3: 72.3, 72.3, 71.8, 71.2, 72.1. An edition changeover that looks dramatic split apart is almost invisible on the total.

Daggerheart is the part that actually left D&D: of the 5.5-point drop, it accounts for 2.1 points; the remaining 3.4 went to Pathfinder 2e and everything else on the chart. It now holds 2.1% of sessions and 2.6% of new campaigns since launch — small, and it stopped moving fast.

Daggerheart’s bars hit 2.3% in the first full quarter after release, then hold: 2.3, 2.0, 2.3, 2.0, 2.0 — no spike, no decay. Whatever share it could take from groups who record sessions, it took in one quarter and kept, which is neither a fad’s pattern nor a slow challenger’s.

One caveat, and it cuts in the trend’s direction: a campaign that never picks a system defaults to D&D 5e, so its share includes everyone who skipped the question. Groups have been tagging a system more often over time — non-5e tags roughly doubled their share from early 2025 to mid-2026 — so some of 5e’s decline is better tagging, not fewer 5e tables. D&D 2024 and Daggerheart aren’t affected: nobody defaults into either one.

Fighter Isn’t Special. Human Still Is.

Character sheets are a different story. Class and species live in structured fields that GMs fill in by hand, so coverage is thin: 8.0% of player characters have a class recorded. That is a small and self-selected slice, so we publish shares rather than a ranking.

“Is Fighter still number one?” has no answer in this data. Cleric leads Fighter by a single point, and the top six classes span under three points end to end. At that spacing the ranking would reshuffle if a few dozen more GMs filled in the field. No class dominates on this sample, and a league table built off numbers this close reports noise.

Species data behaves differently. Human takes better than a quarter of tagged characters and runs four and a half times ahead of Elf. That gap survives the thin coverage. Human is still the default, even with every other ancestry on the sheet.

Nobody Is Playing The Murder Hobo

Alignment is filled in by hand like class is, on a similar slice of characters, and it is the one character field where the margins are not close at all. Among D&D player characters with an alignment recorded, 63.0% are Good and 1.8% are Evil. Chaotic Evil, the alignment carrying the hobby’s entire reputation for table-wrecking, accounts for 0.3% of the sheet.

Neutral Good alone takes 37.4% of the base, more than double the next entry. Add the other two Good boxes and the picture is a hobby of people playing broadly decent characters who are relaxed about the rules. All three Evil boxes together do not reach one in fifty.

The chaotic neutral rogue who torches the tavern for fun turns out to be a real archetype and a rare one. Among characters carrying both a class and an alignment, 1.9% are chaotic neutral rogues. It is the most common class-and-alignment pairing on the disruptive end of the sheet, and it describes roughly one player in fifty. Within Rogue itself the figure is 18%, so the archetype is real. It is just not what most tables are made of.

Rogue is genuinely the least wholesome class in the data, and even Rogue is not what the stereotype claims. Just over a third of rogues are Good, against 84.6% of clerics and 74.5% of paladins. But the class that most often gets played as a liability still records more Good characters than Evil ones by a factor of nine.

Class Preference Holds Across Rulesets

Splitting the class field by ruleset is the kind of cut that invites a headline, so here is the headline-resistant version first. Under D&D 5e, Paladin is the sixth most recorded class. Under D&D 2024 it is second, ahead of Fighter and Wizard, and among characters created in 2026 it is first. Bard moves up alongside it; Fighter, Wizard and Druid move down. Read those moves on their own and it looks like the new rules are reshuffling the class meta. The numbers say something closer to the opposite.

A chi-square across all thirteen classes puts the two distributions at p = 0.81 — statistically indistinguishable. Paladin’s climb is 0.9 of a point, with a 95% interval running from −2.5 to +4.4. Fighter’s fall is the largest single move in the table and it still does not clear the noise. So while the rank order shifts a little from one ruleset to the next, the shares underneath it do not move by more than a sample this thin would produce on its own — another way of saying players carry their class preferences with them when a new ruleset ships, rather than picking classes to match it.

One signal does point toward Paladin specifically moving, independent of ruleset. Sorting the same field by when the character was created rather than by ruleset, Paladin runs at 5.8% of characters made before 2026 and 9.4% of those made during 2026, and the rise shows up inside both rulesets separately rather than only in the newer one. Two weak signals pointing the same way is a reason to keep measuring. It is not yet a finding, and we would rather publish it as the former than dress it up as the latter. We will revisit it when the 2024 sample has doubled.

The Wider Hobby, For Context

Our dataset covers groups who record, so it says nothing about the size of the hobby overall and we won't pretend otherwise. The public numbers are what exist for that, and nearly all of them are extrapolated from surveys instead of counted.

Subscriber counts are not player counts. The 16% figure includes people who last played years ago. Neither is a substitute for captured sessions.

How Was This TTRPG Data Collected?

Questions, Commentary, and Citing This Data

Every figure on this page comes from one database snapshot taken on August 19, 2026. If you are writing about the hobby and want a cut we have not published, ask us. We can usually run it.