Origin Story and Game Master Survey

Hi there! Welcome to Roleplayful. In this post I'm going to talk about Roleplayful and how it came to be.

Roleplayful is a simple tool to find people to play tabletop roleplaying games with. You can search by location (online or physical), the game (e.g. D&D, Pathfinder, etc), and more. Then, save your searches and automatically get notified when new matches appear. I'm hoping that Roleplayful can be a useful resource for folks who don't have an existing network to tap into or want to find new people to play with. Head on over to the homepage to try it out, no account necessary.

I've been playing tabletop roleplaying games for about a decade. My usual group tried out having a professional game master because it was our first time playing remotely and to give our usual GM a chance to be a player. The process of finding one was a bit haphazard and made me wonder:

1. Could there be a better way to find folks to play with?
2. Is professional GMing starting to become popular?

So, I set out and made a survey. I asked some friendly folks at reddit and some discord servers to fill out a survey and promised to share the results. Well, life kinda got in the way and I had a roller coaster time including changing jobs (multiple times), losing my dad, getting married, and moving across the country in the midst of a global pandemic! Silver linings and such though, the pandemic has given me some time to work on this.

Without further ado, here are the results. For context, there were about 1600 respondents. You can check out the full dataset here.

I think the coolest thing here is how many folks are just starting their GMing adventure. Also shout out to those of you with 13+ years. The results are a little goofy here, I had to edit this survey a few times while it was open because people pointed out problems with the ranges.

Approximately 63% of respondents said they only game master Dungeons & Dragons and 93% of respondents had Dungeons & Dragons as one of their games. It's worth noting that this survey did have the highest engagement on r/DnD. Other popular games included Pathfinder (12.7%), Star Wars by Fantasy Flight (5.5%), Shadowrun (5.2%), Call of Cthulu (4.6%), and Vampire: The Masquerade (4.2%).

42.3% of respondents play at least some of their games online. It looks like we may be nearing an inflection point where a majority of games are played online.

Unsurprisingly, a whopping 96.3% of players find players through existing friends. The next most popular options were Discord (12.7%), Local Tabletop Groups (11.0%), Reddit (7.5%), and Roll20 (6.9%).

This question certainly stirred up some strong emotions. Only 1.3% of respondents said they sometimes are paid to GM and no one said they are always paid. 55.2% of players said they would never GM for for money. The top reasons were:

1. They just play with friends.
2. It's a hobby, not a job.
3. Changing the dynamics of the group or expectations from players.

A few people were so enraged by this question they filled out the survey multiple times telling me how much they disliked the survey with colorful language. Overall, it doesn't seem like there's much interest in paid GMing at this time. Interestingly enough though, the majority of respondents said they would consider it.

Thank you so much for reading and I hope you enjoyed the results. Additional thanks to those who filled it out and waited (very, very) patiently for results. It was a fun experiment to design the survey and building Roleplayful has been a great learning experience. Hopefully it can be a useful resource for the community. If you have any feedback / ideas / questions, feel free to send an email to info@roleplayful.com