GM GUIDES · ARCHIVIST RESEARCH
The Data Behind D&D
Archivist captured 25,000+ TTRPG sessions and extracted 385,000+ named characters, places, factions, and items. Session length, campaign lifespan, and table talk are all measured from that same archive.
Published August 20, 2026 · 12 min read
By Greg H. & Greg W., co-founders of Archivist
← Back to GM GuidesThe Short Version
- 25,000+ sessions captured through Archivist, holding 385,000+ named characters, places, factions and items.
- The average session runs about three hours, and only around 10% of them go four hours or longer.
- About 30% of campaigns log only one session, planned one-shots and drop-offs both. Those that come back run a typical six sessions, and some make it all the way to session 25.
- The typical table has 5.5 people on it, GM included, and the GM does about 45% of the talking.
- Around Daggerheart’s launch, D&D’s share fell 5.5 points. Daggerheart took 2.1 of those points, and other systems took 3.4.
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 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.
SESSION LENGTH DISTRIBUTION
From the timestamps on each spoken line. Sessions we have not analyzed, and sessions that were only ever typed up as notes, have no timestamps and are not counted. Half-hour bins; sessions under an hour are one bar, six hours and up are one bar.
Anonymized and aggregated. Individual campaign data is never shared.
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 day to play, at 19.1% of sessions. Saturday is next. Play runs all week.
SESSIONS BY DAY OF WEEK
Discord voice sessions only, dated by when the session was recorded. Audio uploads are left out, because the date can still be the upload day until the GM corrects it.
SESSIONS BY CADENCE
Bucketed by each campaign's own median gap between sessions, not by individual gaps, so a handful of prolific campaigns can't drag the split toward their own rhythm.
Same population as Sessions by Day of Week. The 1x/week share matches Campaigns on a weekly cadence above exactly, since it's the same 5-9 day band.
Party Size and GM Talk Share
Every table is a cast of players and one GM running the show for them.
PARTY SIZE, GM INCLUDED
Counts everyone with a speaking role, on campaigns with two or more sessions. Tables above 10 are rare enough that the chart stops there, which is why the bars sum to 93.4%, not 100%.
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.
GM SHARE OF TABLE TALK, ANALYZED VOICE SESSIONS
GM share covers voice sessions where a GM could be identified; an untagged table would otherwise register as a 0% GM share. Ten-point bins, even splits.
Eight in ten tables fall between 31.3% and 61.6%. Total words spans every analyzed format, including uploaded audio and transcripts; the averages above are voice sessions only.
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 show you where your table lands on it.
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 figures below leave them out. Among campaigns that come back, the median is 6 sessions over 86 days.
HOW FAR CAMPAIGNS GET
Share of all campaigns, including one-shots. The 1-session bar mixes planned one-shots with campaigns that never returned. Nothing in the data separates the two. Milestone rates among campaigns that logged a second session sit in the cards below.
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. Cutting the other way: a live campaign is counted at whatever session it’s on today, not the session it’ll eventually reach, so newer campaigns that haven’t had time to run their course pull the figures down.
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.
Campaign system tags across the Archivist dataset, covering groups who record their sessions. That is a self-selected sample rather than the hobby at large.
Anonymized and aggregated. Individual campaign data is never shared.
What Changed After Daggerheart Launched
A single share is a snapshot. What matters is which way it moves. Daggerheart launched May 20, 2025, and quarterly session share gives a clean before-and-after read: a campaign reports its system once, but a group that keeps playing reports it every session.
ARCHIVIST · SYSTEM MIX BY QUARTER, SHARE OF CAPTURED SESSIONS
Active campaigns, dated by session. D&D 5e and D&D 2024 are broken out individually because most of what moves here happens inside D&D, and the dashed line is the two of them added back together. Pathfinder 2e is folded into All other systems, which holds roughly flat across the window. Daggerheart has no line before it launched: those quarters are blank rather than drawn at 0%, since it didn't exist yet, not exist-at-nothing. The dotted line marks the launch date. The final quarter runs to the snapshot date and is partial.
Early quarters carry a much thinner base than recent ones, so a few groups can move the line before the archive scales up.
D&D 5e lost 13.4 points of share over that year. D&D 2024 picked up 7.5 of them, a little more than half, which is why the dashed combined line doesn’t fall nearly as far as 5e’s own line does. Combined D&D still dropped 5.5 points. The chart below splits that remaining drop: 2.1 points to Daggerheart, 3.4 to everything else.
ARCHIVIST · SYSTEM MIX MOVEMENT, YEAR BEFORE VS. YEAR AFTER LAUNCH
Same twelve-month before-and-after window as the trend chart above, in points of share moved rather than share itself. The three bars net to zero. Whatever D&D lost, Daggerheart and every other system picked up between them.
Daggerheart holds 2.1% of sessions and 2.6% of new campaigns since launch. Its quarterly share plateaued almost immediately and hasn’t moved since, five quarters running.
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.
COMPENDIUM SIZE BY CAMPAIGN LENGTH
Average named entities. Each group is every campaign that reached at least that many sessions, so 50+ sits inside 20+, and so on. The 1+ group is every campaign, one-shots included, which is why it reads far lower than the rest — it's dragged down by campaigns that never got the chance to build anything. Bars within a group are averages and do not add up to a campaign total.
Anonymized and aggregated. Individual campaign data is never shared.
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, added at an average of 17.5 new named entities per session.
What Are D&D Characters Like?
Class, species and alignment aren’t system data — they’re recorded per character, by hand, on campaigns already tagged D&D. 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.
Fighter Isn’t Special. Human Still Is.
ARCHIVIST · CHARACTER DATA, PC ENTITIES
Shares of the characters with the field filled in, not of all players. Class is rebased on the thirteen official classes, so it sums to 100 and free-text entries like a bare ‘spellcaster’ sit outside it. Species has no closed list, so the top fifteen shown here do not sum to 100. Spelling variants are normalised.
CLASS
SPECIES / ANCESTRY
Tab-separated, ready to paste into a spreadsheet. Attribution to Archivist appreciated if you publish anything built on it.
Cleric edges out Fighter by a single point, and the top six classes, Cleric, Fighter, Rogue, Bard, Wizard, and Druid, all sit within three points of each other. Class choice is close to even at the top. Nobody runs away with it, not even Fighter. The mix also holds across D&D 5e and D&D 2024: class shares do not meaningfully shift between the two rulesets.
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.
Evil Alignment Is Rare On The Sheet
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, 58.7% are Good and 1.6% are Evil. Chaotic Evil, the alignment carrying the hobby’s entire reputation for table-wrecking, accounts for 0.3% of the sheet.
ARCHIVIST · PC ALIGNMENT, D&D CAMPAIGNS
Shares of the D&D player characters with the alignment field filled in. Free text, so abbreviations and spelling variants are normalised and the first value is read where a GM listed two. The nine boxes cover 91.9%; the rest recorded a law-and-chaos axis with no moral half, or wrote a personality note in the alignment slot.
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. All three Evil boxes together do not reach one in fifty.
The chaotic neutral rogue — shorthand for the tavern-torching troublemaker — is a rare tag, not a common one. Among characters carrying both a class and an alignment, 1.9% are chaotic neutral rogues, the most common class-and-alignment pairing on the disruptive end of the sheet, describing roughly one player in fifty. Within Rogue itself the figure is 18% — a real pairing, just not what most tables are made of.
Rogue has the lowest Good-alignment share of any class in the data, and even that share doesn’t match the stereotype. Just over a third of rogues are Good, against 84.6% of clerics and 74.5% of paladins — but Rogue still records more Good characters than Evil ones, by a factor of nine.
ARCHIVIST · SHARE OF EACH CLASS RECORDED AS GOOD
Characters carrying both a class and an alignment, which is a thinner slice than either field on its own. Classes too sparsely covered to report are left out, because on those a single character moves the figure by more than two points.
No class in the data is majority Evil. No class in the data reaches 5% Evil.
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?
How should I read these numbers?
Scale totals (sessions, NPCs, locations) cover every session Archivist has captured, including campaigns their groups have since archived, and they are rounded down. Rates, medians, and distributions use active campaigns with at least one logged session, so a campaign that ended years ago does not drag a median. Archivist started capturing sessions in 2025. Play from before then is in this archive only if a group backfilled it with notes. If they did not, that history is missing. Groups who record are self-selected, which shows up most in campaign lifespan. Everything is anonymized and aggregated. Individual campaigns are never shared or attributed.
Where does this D&D session data come from?
Archivist records D&D and TTRPG sessions from Discord, uploaded audio, and notes, then turns them into recaps and a living campaign compendium. Every figure on this page is an anonymized aggregate from that archive, taken on August 19, 2026. Nobody was asked to remember how long they played.
How does Archivist measure session length and campaign length?
Session length is the last spoken timestamp minus the first. Campaign length is the count of dated session logs. One-shots are reported separately so they do not pull the median down. Notes-only sessions have no timestamps, so they are left out of duration figures.
Does Archivist share individual campaign data?
No. Everything here is anonymized and aggregated. We do not publish campaign counts, user counts, or anything that would identify a table. Recaps, transcripts, and the compendium stay in the campaign that recorded them.
Is this sample representative of all D&D groups?
No. Groups who record with Archivist chose to set that up, and that shows up most in campaign lifespan. Session length and talk share are still a direct measurement of what happened at those tables. We flag the selection effect wherever it would change how you read a number.
Can I cite these figures or request a breakdown?
Yes. Quote them with attribution and a link back. Suggested citation: Archivist, "The Data Behind D&D," August 2026, myarchivist.ai. For a cut we have not published, email contact@myarchivist.ai.
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.
QUESTIONS AND COMMENTARY
Email contact@myarchivist.ai with methodology questions, corrections, or a request for a specific breakdown. Journalists and researchers can pull logos, screenshots and background from the Archivist press kit.
CITING THESE FIGURES
Quote and republish anything here with attribution and a link back. Suggested citation: Archivist, “The Data Behind D&D,” August 2026, myarchivist.ai.
Your Campaign Adds to This Data
Every session you record with Archivist adds to this dataset, and gets you clean recaps, searchable lore, and a living compendium in return.
Archivist data is anonymized and aggregated. Individual campaign data is never shared or attributed. External statistics are cited with source and methodology notes.