Statistics sound boring. But they don't need to be. I track my roleplaying activities to learn, to reflect and to make visible. I think there are some interesting points in here for others, too, hence the publication of the data and my accompanying thoughts.This is the second part of me looking back into 2018 and what has happened in terms of roleplaying for me personally. Part 1 focused on my activities beside playing. This part is about playing. Part 3 will be the award ceremony for the characters I played.
Part 2 - Statistics of 2018
Basics first: I
played 105 sessions, with 108 different people in a total of 266 hours. That is
30% gaming hours less than 2017 but with the same number of different people. I
played mostly online. The only public events I played was in a gaming café in
San Cristóbal, Chiapas, and the German FeenCon in Bonn. Two third of all
sessions were organized by me.What I played
I played 49 different
games in 2018. As a highlight, I would like to mention the session with Vee
Hendro of her game Our Mundane Supernatural Life. It’s a short slice-of-life
game for two players in which the length of each scene is determined by a die
roll which gives the endings a wonderfully open touch. The Monsterhearts
sessions with Jason Cordova were another delight again, especially his New York
ballroom setting True Beauty (to be found in Gauntlet Codex Joy 2).
The ongoing (?) game of The Tragedy ofGJ237b is a game which still keeps me thinking of its themes. I set up a
rollforyour.party room for the game and distributed the link. The game demands
from you to not enter the room, otherwise the game is immediately over. I
haven’t entered the room anymore. I don’t know if anybody has, what happened
there. It’s actually not my business. But I want to know, because it's inherent to me.
The top system I played was World of Aventurien, my World of Dungeons hack to play first edition The Dark Eye style.
Of it, the most time I actually played a hack of that hack which is the
Schatten-Hack. The Schatten-Hack was specifically made to play one classic
module of the biggest Dark Eye campaign, the Borbarad campaign.
In Schatten im
Zwielicht by Anton Weste, there is an organization of black magic wizards
forming a group of agents going on missions all over the continent to break the
backbones of a sinister cult which is about to conquer the continent with the
help of demonic forces. So, all characters in my interpretation of the module
are wizards from this organization, called the Schatten (shadows). To reflect
on this group composition, I added some elements of the Mage playbook, an
alternative to the DW Wizard playbook.
By now, I had 13 different players in
the campaign – and each of them surprised me nicely how they took the premise
and created a unique and interesting character with it.
Powered by Aventurien is something I
designed for my f2f group. They really enjoy their Dark Eye 5 character sheets
and the Barbie play around them. I though wanted to play more like Dungeon
World. So Powered by Aventurien simply allows them to roll on their long skill
lists but we do the resolution on PbtA Moves designed for our purposes.
Summarizing which
systems I play, it’s by far still Powered by the Apocalypse and the proportions
haven’t changed at all in the last two years. Laogs have been important for
my personal development, but they don’t play a significant role yet statistically.
I tried Blades in the Dark but it wasn’t exactly what I like: too much crunch,
I’m not a fan of flashbacks, I like my dice resolution straightforward without
iterations and settings about violence and modern weapons are generally not
something for me. I might still give it another try if I feel that somebody can transfer
their excitement to me.
How I played
I hadn’t done the
statistics in previous years, but it feels like that I continue to play more
without a classic GM role. Some games have good reason in their design to have
such a role, others would actually benefit from a re-write without that role.
And for sure, there are examples vice versa.
What I appreciate to have, is to have a
dedicated facilitator, someone who knows the game, takes the lead on following
the procedures etc. Keeping the game going is often an assumed GM role and when
that role is not part of the game, the task is not picked up by anybody and
that lets some GMless games look worse than they are.
Given my daily routines, I could afford
playing on different times of the day. To play with friends in Europe or in
Asia, that is indeed very helpful and to have a game with a friend in Hawaii,
me in Guatemala, a friend in Germany and one in Australia as we had it last
year, you need to have this flexibility.
My playtime this year was evenly split
between English and German. I tried a bit Spanish gaming but my Spanish is
unfortunately still not adequate enough for gaming. 
In 2018 nearly a third of my sessions
were an hour or less long and I have to say that I really enjoy short and tight
sessions. Actually, that is only half true. I like sessions where we take the
time we want. One of my favorite sessions of 2018 was a session of Dialect. To
be precise, the very first Dialect session played completely online. We
decided to play two full three hours sessions for it and the game benefited a
lot from this time. Paul Edson, who to my deep sorrow sadly passed away, made
this game especially wonderful: we had moments of stillness, we had time for
prayers and everything else what can sometimes happen at a table when the vibe
is just there.
Then there are these short sessions of
thirty minutes. Tuk Fast Tuk Furious can be played that fast, as can Cheat Your
Own Adventure, and both deliver so well in this short time.
The two long sessions in 2018 were
again my f2f group playing a complete weekend on our long Dark Eye campaign. That brings
its own excitement. But as I wrote here on the blog before, this is only working for
me, since we take care for our health by having enough sleep, taking breaks,
fresh air and eating well and healthy.
There wasn’t much change
in terms of typical group size. Three player sessions are on record-highs which
had to do for one with the number of GMless games I played but also that I
didn’t mind so much to be in sessions with only ‘half the players’ there, i.e.
a normal four players plus GM set-up with two cancelations. Sessions with fewer
players are anyway often more to my liking.
The tone in the
sessions I was in, was relatively similar to previous years. This classification
still is helpful for me since I do some cross-analysis with other information
with it. That helps me to identify what kind of stories are actually fun for me
and of what stories I should try to get more into my life.
Same goes for settings played in. 2018
saw a return of fantasy for me which was mainly an effect of my Indie SchwarzeAuge project. My never aging wish to play more sci-fi wasn’t fulfilled in 2018.
Contemporary settings are more and more appealing to me and that shows in the
numbers. How playing was
After updating the
form from previous years, I dropped the satisfaction rating of a session. Instead I broke it down into three elements: quality of the
story, quality of the technical set-up and joy with the system.
I still decided that I can compare what
I called satisfaction before with the quality of the story since this is what I
mostly meant with it before. The chart shows that I’m less over-excited by
sessions but generally very happy and never unhappy with my gaming.
Playing from
Guatemala with 2Mbit Download and 1Mbit was always a challenge, but most
sessions went well technically. Sometimes, I had issues with my laptop.
Beginning of the year, I finally bought a proper microphone (Blue Yeti
Snowball) to improve my audio quality. Overall, given that I can play with
friends from all over the world for free, I’m very satisfied with the low level
of technical issues I had.
Different systems
have a different appeal to me but most systems I tried were either great or
good. I have already mentioned several systems which worked especially well for
me. But I want to add that Star Crossed really flew for me. And also in 2018
The Quiet Year worked so well again. Both games I also played with people to
introduce them to the hobby, and I think they were both doing a great job
showing what RPGs can do. 
For the first time, I
tracked the relevance of violence in my games. I kept it purposefully open what
I meant with violence and analysed each session on an appropriate dimension:
was there structural violence, physical threats or verbal abuse? As it turns out,
yes, fantasy games are very often violent.
But at least for a third of my playtime
violence was not present at all or at least not integral to the experience.
Another factor I have measured per
session was play intensity. I asked myself how intense the most intense moment
of the session was on a scale from 0 to 5. Nearly a third of my sessions had highly
intense moments in them. That could have been a tight dialogue with a fellow
player, a dramatic situation to which the story turned or moments of tension
without anything happening. For example, in one Monsterhearts Mercy Falls 83
session, my character spent half of the session in locked in a coffin alone in
the forest. Scenes were around various people visiting me but leaving again
without help or me talking to myself about my destiny.
For playing online,
having a shared document for notes is a tremendous advantage and something I
dearly miss in f2f sessions. Most importantly, having a character keeper is
fantastic with information from all characters plus NPCs at one place. I also
continued to use rollforyour.party as my dice and cards tool of my choice since
it’s log in free, doesn’t track my data, is boiled down to the essentials and still
easy to use. Especially cool was using Google Street Maps for Tuk Fast Tuk
Furious. You decide at the beginning in which location you want to race and
then people randomly drop in there on Street View level to create obstacles on
the course of the track.
Safety
Not noted statistically, but worth a
point to discuss briefly, is safety. The Gauntlet has safety techniques like
the X card obligatory and I highly appreciate that. Normalizing safety tools is
super important. I’m happy that 2018 was the year that the German scene finally
also opened up to safety tools. Even in the Indie scene there was
some weird resistance in the years before.
I haven’t used the X card in any game.
I should have though. There were three sessions in 2018 in which I felt that I missed
the moment it was relevant. I’m not going into details but the cases would have
been clear situations in which an X card could have saved the moment and
instead I struggled through the rest of the session.
What I want to do is practicing the use
of Safety Tools in my games more often. The Election of the Wine Queen has
workshops to practice at the beginning for that reason. These exercises shall
be fun and interesting on their own and not a burden to get through before the
‘real’ session starts.
I had the X card used against me twice.
Once was for bringing in an anti-Trump political joke which a fellow player
didn’t want to have in the game. The other time a player brought it up against
me as the GM since they were feeling that their character’s integrity was
touched too hard the way I wanted to resolve a miss. We rewound and found a
better way to resolve the Move.
Who I played
I played more men than women this year. Especially for NPCs, I still often fall into the default
trap when not planning a bit ahead. That goes especially for fantasy monsters: too many
orcs, goblins and the like have a he/him pronoun on them before I even think a
second time.
About who I played in detail, I
recommend the Award Ceremony in the next article. I played wonderful characters again
this year. Those who stayed especially close to my heart even after a while were those I
played with my whole body, i.e. larp style. That doesn’t need to be a larp. For
example, the Killer of All, the organizer of the Tuk Tuk race in Newcastle,Australia, was one of those characters I played with a bit of a costume, and my
voice highly pitched.
With whom I played
In terms of facilitators, I was back in
the seat: I facilitated two third of all the playtime I had. Jason Cordova, who
was number one last year is still on second place. Playing Fall of Magic with
empathetic Yoshi, Masks in Lisbon with the highly energetic Lloyd, Blades in
the Dark with the best educator Mark D. Truman, and playing her own games Girl
Underground and Yuri on Ice with visionary Lauren was equally cool.
My sessions were mainly with the
Gauntlet but personal friends and family make up another good portion of my
gaming life. I call Indie-friends game sessions with people I only know from
the internet and still could become friends. These sessions usually came
together through Google plus and Twitter.
The most sessions I
played with somebody was with Sabine with whom I played an incredible number of
19 sessions. And moreover, we met for the first time last in 2018 in real life
which was so cool. Sabine is a player who usually knows what a session needs
and plays towards it. She also is somebody who is giving me honest feedback in
a way I can accept it and that is a real treasure.
Mathias is the best diversified player
in terms of RPG communities and that means he knows how things can be done
differently. His blind spots are much smaller than mine and that is something I
really appreciate.
My son Milan is my life at the moment
as a full time parent and that he still wants to game with me is making me
really happy. He is not a fan of rules and the older he gets the less
interested is he in dice rolling etc. He loves his gaming freeform and is
brilliant in throwing complications in.
Tina has a great analytical perspective
on new games and is able to clearly state that something is not working for her
and then usually it doesn’t. In gaming, I love to have her in sessions for her
dry humor and getting us others back on track without us noticing.
From the 108 people I
gamed with, there were nearly two third I played with for the first time with in 2018.
Another third were recurring players from the year before and only 7% of my players
were with me already before 2017. That is really exciting since new players
always demand changing perspectives, bringing other experiences with them and
so on.
Unfortunately, diversity keeps staying
a problem in my groups. Part of it for sure is, that I’m a white, middle aged
cis-man. Which means that in a group of 5 players, there is already a
proportion of 20% non-diverse at the table. Still, the percentages aren’t
great. And the number for non-white players for somebody pretending to play
truly international are devastatingly low.
Part of an explanation is that I game so
much more in German (which means with the German speaking scene). That scene is
much less diverse than the US scene, as far as I can see. I hadn’t had a single
non-white person in my German language sessions in 2018. My German gaming wasn’t
very queer neither.
My lesson for 2018: making game content
more inviting is one thing. Changing power structures, i.e. where the money goes
and supporting diverse people in the industry actively through hiring,
scholarships etc. is something super important for the German scene to start
soon. 
Looking at where I
met the 108 players I had this year, I see the largest portion again coming
through the Gauntlet. 28% of my players were not cis-men, which is an increase
from previous year. Interestingly, my general satisfaction with a session
increases with the percentage of non-cis-men in the session. Unfortunately, the
sessions with 50% or more non-cis-men only make 14% of my sessions. And even
worse, 41% of my sessions had only men in them. Another interesting
observation: in games with a tone of drama, non-cis-men were over-represented,
in adventure games, underrepresented.
That’s it for dry statistics this year.
Were they so dry? What did you see in them what I didn’t identify? How would
your own look like?
