Full Survey Results not including comments
Or download breakdown of results by question including comments. The individual questions are in Excel spreadsheets. There's also a PDF of the full results summary.
The results summary shows the headline figures from the survey. I do plan to do some more detailed analysis later on, and to filter the results (e.g. by age, by medium played)...
...to see if that throws up any interesting differences. If there are filters you want to see or if you want to do some analysis yourself and need more data, let me know!
dang
we're old.
oh ho /flicks through this
Oh mannnn
that is super cool
Awesome!
I, I feel remarkably demographically unremarkable for once, wow
Thank you!
wow this is incredible
I'm so dirty. I'm in the sex game group
Like games to be heavily adult generally
only 5% brits? i thought there were more of us....
Then again, I didn't when I started RP. I got into sex games probably years latrer :|a
whoa dwrp is old
4% seems like a pretty low percentage of people who've been playing for 2 years or less.
Although I guess it's quite possible that Dreamwidth just... isn't where people start RPing. I know I didn't happen upon it until a few years in.
/salutes fellow Britperson ;o;7
i also love how most of us have been here almost a decade, we're just sitting here like 
help us
help us
I wonder where people start RPing these days?
It would be weird starting on DW now. Heck, it was weird when I first got on LJ
"Applications? What?"
"OOC comm? Network comm? Logs comm...?"
people start on tumblr these days
most RP is on tumblr, I'd say
It's a lot to take in to begin with
What is a 'TDM' I asked when I first started
i started on msn but only did that for a short while before one of the people i rped with rec'd me to LJ
even though it's remarkably ill-suited in a lot of ways, but tumblr is the platform of choice
I started on forums back when ezboards existed...
Yeah, I happened upon LJ in a similar way
I just started posting because I didn't know what an app was
I started on forums too XD And did PSLs in MSN with friends
:u maybe I'm just old and creaky but how the heckles does anyone keep track of anything while RPing on tumblr
So long ago...
aaaah thank you for doing this! /peruses results
Tumblr confuses me, too
i dont think i could keep uo with tumblr rp
I don't get tumblr RP either...
I suspect people on tumblr are like 'how the heck do people rp on dw'
probably. XD
but fandom activity is on tumblr these days
jkat
is
fandom RP really the most predominant form of RP these days?
most newcomers probably don't even know about RP anywhere else, especially not something like journal RP
I started out during a time when OCs were the standard, and I keep thinking there must still be somewhere out there where that happens!
I don't know, but communities in general is largely on tumblr above everywhere else
COOL! So checking this out later.
I've seen people rping on deviantart, so I guess every platform can be used for it. but yeah tumblr is probably the biggest one now
also joins in the only 5% of brits woa. and us+canada take almost 80%
timezones
that seems like a ridiculously low number of brits, yeah. you used the ip address for location, right?
anyone else remember making facebook pages for your characters though
a lot of people have ip spoofing add-ons like zenmate on so they can tap into content that is only available in the US :|a
if people can rp in youtube comments and on facebook anything is possible
ihasarobot: Yes, the software uses IP address for location. If people use IP-spoofing that lists them being in the US when they're not, I imagine that would fool the software.
<1% location club!
yeah, I'm wondering about that. 5% for UKers just sounds like such a low number
5% may seem like a low percentage, but it does translate into 67 people who answered the survey.
failaga: it's funny you should say this because i actually did have to write a tutorial on how to do dwrp for some of my tumblr friends when they wanted to try it out
true, true
but it still looks too low 
not that I'm speaking of experience bc I'm on the <1% in that list LMAO
a-aol chat room rper here... i went from that to msn/yahoo chats and was baffled when ljrp was starting up. p sure that was before they rolled out 15 icons and you had 6 still.
got roped into a gjrp game and it just rolled from there.
I still remember when LJ only had 3 icons.....
Oh man, the three icon days...
Yeah, it looks like rpg-directory still exists for forum-based games: RPG-Directory that's where a bunch of OC players are I think??? It's been literal years.
"what do i need six icons for?" -us, a decade ago
LMAO
"holy shit, 15 icons!!!" - also us, some time after
PRETTY MUCH. and then GreatestJournal came along and gave you 100 free icons.
and nothing was the same since then 
no. no it isn't. i distinctly remember trying to fill up all 100 icons for fun on gj because i had that power.
Oh neat, thanks for doing this!
are question 31's results right? it seems weird that people only selected 2 out of the 5 possible answers.
goodragon: Whoops, I forgot to add those two lines, lemme edit!
shame on you, op!!!
goodragon: Edited, thank you for spotting!
you're welcome. 
thank you for putting this all together!
thank you for putting this all together!
You're welcome!
hey escherichia you were interested in this cC:
I know that there's a significant chunk of RP that's entirely or almost entirely original characters – Tabletop, or online playing of tabletop games.
I don't have hard numbers, but it's enough to support multiple companies that put out game lines.
Billie Sue 🌻
says
wow, I feel better about my estimates re: how big the RP community in general is
Billie Sue 🌻
says
I saw people trying to insist there were only like a couple hundred of us and I've been like "I'm pretty sure that's literally not possible"
looking at the responses. very disappointed that nobody answered with something silly like "messenger pigeon." i missed my chance!
I can't believe we have 1300 roleplayers
Billie Sue 🌻
says
I think my guess was ~1500? and considering 1360-ish people at least started the survey, that wasn't far off, especially taking into account anyone who didn't fill it out
Wow, 1300 results.
idk i just have a hard time perceiving the community as that large
OK. WHO IS FROM SLOVAKIA? Asking because I am Slovak, though I live in Vienna and I can't remember which one I selected anymore, but if there's someone else, I'd really love to know
...the most surprising result to me is probably F/F being a rather small subset
Yeah, as someone who prefers F/F it's kinda sad 
When doing dirty stuff I get results from girls more often, but that could be a result of earlier habits.
1/3 isn't that small of a subset. That's still hundreds of people.
but omg, people from Slovakia
IM SO GLAD HUMANIZATIONS HAVE FALLEN OUT OF FAVOR
I've seen an uptick in F/F recently but im not surprised it's the least popular. M/F and M/M are crazily common
games still mostly do this but it's a deal breaker for me
machinisms same. humanization is the worst
I'm glad I'm not alone in disliking it despite the prominence of it
I've always disliked humanizations, too
Billie Sue 🌻
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plus the question is what do you play the most, and idk about anyone else but I love f/f and almost NEVER have a chance to play it because of the characters I tend to pick up
i just want to play my weird nonhumans can't you let me have that
p much
Yeah 
Billie Sue 🌻
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I just don't have anny lady-loving-ladies in my roster lately and it's terribly depressing
if I wanted to rp a human I'd... rp one of my human chars
Right? It's not like we're bereft of choice in that category
Exactly. And I've never been interested in exploring "oh no I'm a non-human now in a human body! 
" conflict, either
" conflict, either
i too am, glad that people dont like humanisation so much any more... and also disappointed about the f/f
like one would hope the gap wouldnt be THAT big....
Billie Sue 🌻
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lol once in a while I get someone asking about whether they have to humanize their characters at eway and they're so surprised when we're like "no??"
rpresearch Thank you for this!
yeah forums are where i usually see OCs nowadays. and there are scads of forums still. the only problem i have with them is that if they last for three weeks you're lucky
yeah. If I wanted to play humans, that's what I'd be playing!
A lot of used used to play a lot of f/f and stopped for a number of reasons. I'm looking forward to checking the full results and reading everyone's comments
In this weird paradox, I stopped playing f/f in public places because I was only getting replies from people who were like "do you mind if my girl has a penis" and I was like "....yes I DO mind actually"
Billie Sue 🌻
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lol we've had giant dragons and at some point in the last two years we had like...a sentient helicopter????
Billie Sue 🌻
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so we're very "sure why not c'mon in"
So we stopped looking for f/f because we stopped playing f/f and I don't know how to de-spiral that
oh no x)
I'd love to play f/f but I'd do that with OCs because I don't really have fandom women characters
now we know who the two Austria and Slovakia people are xD
BTW, if you've got time we could do the icecream thing this week, maybe catch a movie?
yep
Speaking of OCs, i'm a little disappointed that OC games have fallen out of popularity lately.
I think the biggest thing I appreciate as a takeaway from this is actual hard numbers to back up trends vs assumptions based on confirmation bias
It would have been too goof
*good
Don't OC games still happen on Insanejournal? I'm not sure what the culture is like lately, though
re: number of DWRPer, you should also keep in mind that not everyone would have responded to the poll here even if it got passed around a lot
1500 sounds like a reasonable guess to me, but it could very well be higher than that as well :|a hard to say!
if I had to estimate a margin of error, I'd say there were at least around 200 possible non-participants, just based on usual standards
I do admit my earlier years when I discovered memes I was a bit overzealous and usually jumped on anyone who was even remotely interested in F/F
i feel like a lot of people underestimate the population because they only look at their own little corner of the community, their own circles of friends and games, etc
I have since trimmed my neckbeard on that account, and I offer apologies
Billie Sue 🌻
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Yeah! That's what I've been saying!
Billie Sue 🌻
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Plurk kind of isolates us to the same people we see all the time, and friends of friends
i think that most people dont break out of their circles easily either since if you play in memes, you mostly just see other meme players
Plus making OCs who'd jump on more than one kind of adventure - and broadening a fandom characters horizons - is way more interesting.
and if you play in games its so much easier to just follow whatever games your friends go to than to try and branch out to something totally different
like when i first started and was basically just playing with the eway/discedo group for years with minimal branching out...
That's definitely true.
Billie Sue 🌻
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and after that it shifted to a_fac/singularity, but there was very little crossover between the two groups and it always surprised me when i found people from my old circles in the new one
Billie Sue 🌻
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also lol I'll freely admit it was a very lazy estimate with lazy math
DW is my first RP platform, but it turns out most of my answers are similar to what's popular. Makes me wonder if the time we've spent RPing reflects our preferences
and more recently when i came back from a yearlong hiatus from rp i pretty much just joined a game where i knew literally no one and ended up with another new circle of rpfriends 8V
Billie Sue 🌻
says
basically I was like. I took the number of games there are and was like "okay let's assume 100 characters per game" which isn't true but would probably even out when taking HUGE games and VERY TINY games into-
the more i think about it its actually not that different from how forum rps work (since i started on forums back in the olden days)
Billie Sue 🌻
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-account. and the number of games came from the directory on rpanons
yeah, you just have to think of different games as different forums
when it comes to finding new rps through forums, usually it would be people in your current game making a new one and advertising it at your current game, so you end up with "circles" of players that way too
and DWRP as a whole is more like Proboards or Invisionfree or whatever the hell forums kids are playing on these days
Billie Sue 🌻
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then I cut that in half, to assume two characters per player (which again, the amount of people playing one character and playing MULTIPLE characters would even out the estimate)
Billie Sue 🌻
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and then I cut it half again to account for the amount of people in more than one game lolol it was 100% not great math but any time I did it-
Billie Sue 🌻
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- I'd get somewhere around 1300 and I rounded up to try and add in people who aren't in games at all
of course its always possible for a completely unconnected game to advertise at your own and pull people over, but for them to even find your game to advertise there they'd need to end up there somehow...
Billie Sue 🌻
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at the very least it seemed impossible for the number to be in the low hundreds when there's 50-something games out there
so much like groups of dwrpers following eachother to games and sticking to their own circles that way, forums are much the same
lmao yeah i was always baffled by those low counts....
there are so many games and we're not even including people who play in psls and museboxes or private games or games that are just off the radar
tumblr rp is similarly very insular at least when youre not part of a "game" your character just floats around and you kind of chain follow people...
but if you dont step out of your bubble you really only see like .2% of whats out there
yeah, i feel like the same thing can probably be said for all forms of rp really...
Billie Sue 🌻
says
(also actually if I do it that way rn I get 1350 which is pretty damn close, aside from the fact that it doesn't include anyone who doesn't play in games)
rpers tend to find a group and stick to it, which i dont think is a bad thing, but its good to reach out and try new things every now and then
goodhotcocoa: It might even be possible to do a better rough estimate using this data. For example, 25% of respondents aren't playing in any games.
holy shit 1300 people responded to this, I didn't know we had that many people in DWRP
So whatever figure you came up with looking at games, you could assume only represented 75% of the total number of DWRPers.
Billie Sue 🌻
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Yeah! I think that would put the number somewhere around 1800, actually!
Billie Sue 🌻
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also seriously A+ job on all of this - this is all SUPER fascinating and waaaaaaay better than any rough estimates I've ever made
Billie Sue 🌻
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Billie Sue 🌻
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ALSO is anyone else surprised by the number of people into jamjars? I MEAN AS SOMEONE WHO HELPS RUN A JAMJAR I'M PLEASED
Billie Sue 🌻
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but I've been hearing for years that people don't like them as much anymore and that they would prefer other game formats so it really surprised me!
The problem with Non-jam jars is you need to find an IC reasons to keep your character in game which can be a problem for some characters.
yeah that problem doesn't really come up with AU games, which is probably why they're the second most popular
aw this makes me feel better. i'm 28 and i was starting to feel like i was too old to rp. that everyone is younger but i'm right in there with the top respondents
Billie Sue 🌻
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Yeah, that makes sense and I totally agree! it was mostly that I've been hearing it so much that I didn't think the percentage would be in the 90s
Billie Sue 🌻
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geekyshoelaces SAME I always used to worry about this but the entire body of RPers got older!
Billie Sue 🌻
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that was actually another one that surprised me - not that we're all older but lol weren't there only like 4 responses from 18 and under?
this is one of the reasons i came back to dwrp because tumblr WAS much much younger and i came back to dw like EVERYONE'S IN MY AGE RANGE... AMAZING
... Am I the only one who doesn't feel 25-30 means we're old...
Billie Sue 🌻
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I remember writing tags before getting on the bus in the morning when I first joined sorting hat way back when!
its old as far as fandom culture goes i think, but not old generally
I think we just feel old cuz most of us started in our teens
Billie Sue 🌻
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I feel like it's getting more and more common for people to hold onto fandom, which is great?
so it's like WHOOOA LOOK AT HOW TIME FLIES BY
Eh, I wouldn't say that; case in point: comics, Star Wars, etc
Billie Sue 🌻
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Like I feel like we're going to be saying this again in 10 years
I think there's a vocal minority who are sick of jamjars, but most people are into it.
Though starting in teens might be partially the reason, yeah
Billie Sue 🌻
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ehhhhhh but those have always been relatively popular fandoms too?
Billie Sue 🌻
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(also I don't want to drag gender politics too much into it but I'm mostly noticing this with the more "feminine" forms of fandom - like fanfiction and all the tranformative stuff)
I meant comparing age in DWRP to fandoms, not these fandoms specifically, just to be clear
looking at the full results, with how many different people I've run in to that play from Homestuck, web comics seems very low
Billie Sue 🌻
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like there's less of a sense that people have to grow up and stop writing fanfiction or RPing or anything like that these days and I'm excited
late to the f/f discussion but iirc there was a time when a lot of creepers hit up f/f threads so I always got the impression that people avoided it bc of that
Billie Sue 🌻
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I am super ready to be an old nerd with a bunch of other old nerds, instead of feeling like I'll be some weird old creep 8 )
That does feel good
Yeah, like.. When I was 17 I went to an art school and my roommate made fun of me mercilessly because I was a fanfic writer. She said it was a mark of an uncreative spirit to be incapable of designing
Billie Sue 🌻
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like the feeling was always that "you have to give this up eventually or you're going to be a creep infringing on the space of younger fans" or at least that's how I felt about it but like
characters of my own. Cut to a bunch of years later and the perception of fandom is entirely different
Billie Sue 🌻
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I run into enough older fans these days that I never feel like that?? Even in fandoms that WOULD have a younger fanbase
Billie Sue 🌻
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YEAH I GOT A LOT OF THAT TOO
Billie Sue 🌻
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I remember the first time I heard someone bring up fanfiction on TV in prime time and I almost spit out my drink
animemonster: it does specify current medias played from, so considering the decline of HS i think its still about right :|a
Billie Sue 🌻
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like fandom itself is a lot more mainstream these days and it makes it easier to hang around even when we're getting older
HS was huge back in its heyday but barely anyone plays from it now. i cant remember if i included webcomics or not when i filled it out, but i havent rped a HS character in years...
and there arent a lot of huge popular webcomic fandoms in dwrp besides ye olde homestuckes
I still see tons of homestucks around when I'm looking for memes, maybe there's only a few of us and we all just have multiple muses (I know I still have multiple HS muses)
i'd be curious to see games with different mechanics.
Billie Sue 🌻
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I would too, tbh!
personally speaking, one of the things that frustrates me about DWRP is how much of it is just chitchat, and I'd be really curious to see certain mechanics from plot-driven tabletop ported into the DW setting
eachdraidh tried that, to varying levels of success
I think increasing the diversity of styles of games would help encourage new players.
Billie Sue 🌻
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deepfamilysfish you might be into knights of legend if you're not in it already!
btw, when I mean tabletop mechanics, I don't mean dice-rolling or arcane AC point scoring systems - I'm thinking more along the lines of the stuff that Jason Morningstar does in his games.
i think the problem with that is tabletop and dwrp are two completely different beasts, so finding a way to mix the too is tough
yes, the pacing is so totally different.
goodhotcocoa Never heard of it - what's it about?
yeah since scene can takes few moments or hours in tabletob. in dwrp it can be played for days if not weeks
tabletop is oriented primarily around the overarching plot/setting decided by the GM, and players are, in a way, expected to try and "win" at it
but I'd still be curious how it can be done, the mix that is
well the thing about tabletop mechanics is that it doesn't port well to DWRP because of the game size.
but dwrp is mostly about characters and character interactions (the survey even listed character-driven stuff as the most important to most players) rather than game setting and plot
Isn't KoL a game that tries to do tabletop RP in a DW format?
yeah, size is also a huge issue
A tabletop DM has to cater to like, five to a dozen people.
yeah. i'm a game mechanics nerd but not a prolific enough RPer to be a mod, sadly.
Billie Sue 🌻
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I'm not in it so I'm not a super great source of information, but I know some people who are and from what I hear it borrows a lot from tabletop, yeah
You start a DWRP game with twelve people and it's considered a failure
deepfamilysfish: I was in a game called Rakuen years ago (the game since closed) that had a lot of table top mechanics, it was hard keeping track of everything on DW
Whoa, thanks OP for these stats. Very informative!
(and for once I don't feel like I'm an odd man out either)
tabletop tends to be very small and contained which makes it easier to hold those game plots while still making it important to each character in the game
neat 
good work
good work
tea’s gone cold
has
anyone here played the tabletop game Fiasco?
but dwrp games can be anywhere from a couple dozen players to hundreds of players and characters and at that point its just not feasible to create that kind of experience you get in tabletop
Billie Sue 🌻
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Never heard of it!
i think there'd be a good place for more tabletop-style dwrp games in the form of shortrun games that have become more popular recently, though :|a those don't all need to be murder mysteries!
Billie Sue 🌻
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man I've always wished I was more into tabletop though. Every time I try it just makes my head spin.
BlueFlewFedUQueen yeah, IA.
goodhotcocoa it's a CR-based tabletop with minimal rolling Fiasco Facilitation Cheat Sheet – Bully Pulpit Games
goodhotcocoa it's a CR-based tabletop with minimal rolling Fiasco Facilitation Cheat Sheet – Bully Pulpit Games
Billie Sue 🌻
says
oooo Cr-based /CLICK
as in, you don't create characters in the game, you create relationships, and then decide the characters backwards from there.
that's interesting!
i do want to emphasise i do not want all DWRP to suddenly start obsessing over dice rolls. I like DWRP as it is.
Billie Sue 🌻
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oh my god this is really neat actually +-+
Billie Sue 🌻
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lol yeah I mentioned KoL before it was clear you didn't necessarily mean dice rolling
Billie Sue 🌻
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whooops
Please ignore the comment I just left about the raw data, I am tired and didn't see the full survey results link ^^;
goodhotcocoa if you ever have the opportunity to try Fiasco out I really recommend it. it is one of the few things I obsessively evangelise and will do until I die. it actually makes you a better writer.
Billie Sue 🌻
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I would LOVE to play this tbh; it's just a matter of finding a few people to bully into playing with me 
i occasionally run online sessions, but they're a nightmare to schedule. you can try asking around at the roll20 forums?
/looks up Fiasco
metathepanda: No problem!
i think another thing I'd be interested in seeing DWRP do more is something that bakerstreet is really good at, where it's almost like an acting exercise and you just do a Scene.
Billie Sue 🌻
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oh man, that's true. I've gotten some really great isolated stuff out of bakerstreet.
...so you want more memes? Or meme comms?
Because man I'd kill for both
I love that stuff and I'd love to see a more structured game incorporate that kind of flash, 'character A is [blank] and B is [blank]' sort of play.
I wish there were less stupidly specific shipping memes, and more on actual scenarios, such as history, situations of danger, comedy of weirdness, potential afterlives...
I'd kill for a ) memes that aren't smut/shipping, b ) people actually tagging those
which is something a lot of games try to negotiate with events, but the danger of stepping on other people's toes means it can't be too spontaneous.
yes! i don't like shipping my characters, but I love running around corridors fighting monsters and solving murders with them.
Didn't someone try to do something more with non smut/shipping with memezilla?
What happened to that?
As much as I love memes, I'm not entirely sure I'd enjoy a game that's about that sort of thing myself
doctoransem: This is the first time I've heard of this and I checked it out, but unfortunately it seems pretty dead :c
Billie Sue 🌻
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8c I'm still sad about memezilla
Billie Sue 🌻
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sometimes 221_b has stuff too, but it goes dead for long periods of time :c
it's like we grew up together i guess :3
I'm sure there's an interesting AU game premise to be had there, but imp it feels really hard to balance properly
Snowblind feels more like tabletop than most DWRP games -- no dice rolls, but there's an overarching mystery/mission and heavier mechanics than most games.
*imo
Tracking movements, searching areas, managing inventories
FELLOW BRIT 
Random encounters with "anomalies" (read: monsters) based on what movements and search requests you submit.
Alpha Complex is based on a tabletop rpg (Paranoia)
Billie Sue 🌻
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omg that's so cool
there's like, dozens of tabletop based rpgs. DOZENS. probably
Yeah, Snowblind's the first one I've played in that's like that, but Idk if it's because they're newly popular or if I was just off in a corner of DWRP that didn't do that.
As dumb as the question may be, what kind of system do they use, the tabletop based RPs on dreamwidth, particularly if they deal with canon chars?
it'd depend on what game they were adapting from
and how table-top-y the mods want it
Billie Sue 🌻
says
Yeah, I know KoL is really detailed about how they do it but I couldn't explain it myself 8D;
though speaking from experience, it's not that hard to take canon characters in actual table top sessions, I've done it before
So glad to know I'm not the only old fart who does DWRP. LOL. 
I'm late as heck but as a player at maison de portes I am sad facing at everyone who didn't mention us for tabletop related games
we dice AND we have exploration and player affected plots
no one knows about portes but portes players [single tear]
I'm surprised at the relatively low horror percentage in 17...
augh i'm over the hill
or at least over the centroid by more than a standard deviation
Exacerangutan: as I imagine the age data makes a bell graph, "over the hill" is still a visually useful description
This is epic
haha yeah it's a pretty nice normal distribution actually plus an old tail...
Hah. Still an old fogey at 45
oooh this is pretty fascinating to look at, thanks for putting this together!
also there are definitely more people in DWRP than in the survey, laughs
It's nice to see the results! This is pretty cool!
On the subject of tabletop-style games.... DWRP actually shares a lot more in common, organizationally, with LARP, in my experience.
I never heard about this survey until the results were posted
Rather than a small tightly-plotted group game, you need to have scale-able plots for dozens or hundreds of folk.
Direct attention on any given player can be done, but it's harder.
I like the idea of DWRPers taking a shot at smaller, plottier, more mechanical and hands-on games outside of the murdergame genre! There's a lot to be done with that!
That's what my home game is like.
I'm one of the younger people.
grandscale plots are harder to maintain without having like ten million people working on it together
i do like them in a way but the moment a mod gets harassed or drops then the whole thing falls apart
i'm not surprised by any of this xD
Old people unite! I'm not over 40 but I'm definitely over the median bump. Buncha younguns.
We were all young once, we knew what we were getting in to.
so many younguns
Cool! I'm above average in age too.
GW Wolf
says
joins the elder crowd
i am part of the younger 20%...
so does this mean that rp is at risk of becoming a dying hobby?
who knows what may happen?
And part of the older 20% here. At least it's not quite like it was in my LJ RP days where it seemed like everyone was significantly older than me, and I was just like
"Ahahaaaa.... how old am I? .....Doesn't matter. 
"
"
it really doesnt matter though some new blood will be nice to see
I am actually quite surprised by the lack of under-18s who took the survey. ten years ago when I started RPing on DW there were a lot of 20-somethings, sure, but there were still a lot people in the 14-17 range
though if it's just that those that young all start out on tumblr these days.... yeesh. that is sad.
LJ use to have both fandom and RP on it
DW doesn't have that. the fandom stuff either has stayed on LJ in small amounts or moved to tumblr
and i think that its through fandom that people find out about RP?
Do we need a fandom renaissance on DW then?
Because Tumblr has been... not so great lately.
Not to mention it may or may not go away since Verizon bought Yahoo, who owned Tumblr.
I'm not sure you could revive fandom on DW tbh, people like reblogging and gifsets and so on, all of which is either no possible or more complicated
The strength of dreamwidth is the ease to use text and follow up on it. Tumblr's ... was the use of images, which sadly seems to be what people prefer the most in the end.
I think that if we do bring the fandom to DW we will probably see more people looking at search tags, find games and then be all 'this looks cool'
more likely, something new will come along when tumblr blows out
but yeah it's the gifsets and contents people like abotu tumblr
There's a BNF in my fandom, one who writes extensive analysis of stuff, and while he has a tumblr, the place where he writes his stuff and gets comments... is wordpress.
thanks a lot for this!!! there's a lot of really interesting stuff here and it's way cool of you to have put it all together
Billie Sue 🌻
says
I don't think we're in any serious danger of dying out. tbh I've seen people saying this form of RP is dying for the last like, 6-8 years. I was seeing people say it before the migration
I think what happened is boomeranging and lots of big games simply got lessor.
so it feels less, but there's still quite a bit.
Yeah. I remember when 300+ was normal and 100 and under was considered small
my first panfandom game had had a cap of 400 and was constantly at 350-400 for about three years. my second one had no cap but constantly had 300-800 characters for several years.
(this was 7-10 years ago)
That sounds like a nightmare, oh my god
800?!
yep. to be fair, in its earlier years that game had had no AC except for if you wanted to app a sixth or higher. so there were a lot of characters that weren't being played that normally would get swept via
AC were there actually one.
some players had as many as 12 characters
yeah i remember back then it was normal to play more than three or four at any given time
in the former I usually had six at a time. in the latter I often had five to right. then things just petered off and I went down to one or two. been most comfortable with that since
Yeah, I do think long term we might have to look for new blood, but we're still pretty strong, and people have been able to bring Tumblr users over to DW just by reccing it
But Tumblr allows for faster sharing of imagery while DW keeps stuff segmented. Which is truthfully what works for DW stuff.
Much agreed.
And plurk fills in some cracks with communication that DW doesn't have.
Aww, I kind of expected the AU-liking group to be higher.
I think an AU PSL is easier to do than a full AU game, and a lot of people might be going to jamjar/more "regular" games and keeping their AU stuff to off-to-the-side things? That seems common.
Also, Plurk seems to have taken the place of AIM in the old days, where it's got more of the fluidity and friendliness for group planning.
I've seen several attempts to get tumblr rpers to come to dwrp, but there's always the issue of trying to explain how it works in an easy way.
I know there's the dreamwidth rp ads on tumblr that goodrpersock recs, but does anyone have any good guides written up for how to get started rping on dreamwidth?
also I keep wondering if tumblr fandoms will eventually come branch out onto plurk as well since aim and skype are so annoying to use in that fashion.
I wonder if people won't use discord more instead.
since I've noticed it growing in popularity.
I hope Discord grows. it's pretty handy and offers chat rooms in ways that plurk can't (i.e. server and chans that are always there and don't require friending fellow players to talk to them)
i really like discord for cast chats and whatnot, but i think it would be difficult to manage on a larger scale
i just remember the old days of game aim chatrooms and if you'd had a long shift at work or something you could spend up to an hour just trying to catch up on what's been said
I always just jumped into those and didn't worry too much about what happened before.
I remember leaving aim open all day and trying to figure out if any plotting with my cast or cr went on while I was busy...
cast chans/chats would be good, esp since they could be kept on the same server.
reminds me of my CFUD days. CFUD used IRC as its primary game-wide chat client. there was a main chan, and a bunch of cast chans, as well as a chan for playing Apples to Apples.
Discord is great cos if the chans have been too talkative you only see the last so many responses without deliberately scrolling up past those.
The funny thing is, I started my gaming on IRC and used to run tabletop there. That was how I got involved in RP- I gave LJ RP a try when my tabletop group collapsed and I wanted something to take its place!
I linked a DWRP guide on the original survey plurk - on my phone so not finding it again, but it's the one on rpanons' resources page
I find it interesting that the number of people who enjoy sex games is about the same amount that find sex games to be a deal breaker.
Fun fact: The survey location data includes the individual United States. We have respondents from 49 out of the 50 US states! Can anyone guess which state isn't represented?
(With the caveat that this data is based on IP address, likely to be questionable, etc.)
Hawaii?
Rhode Island?
Billie Sue 🌻
says
lol it's not RI /from there
Billie Sue 🌻
says
uhhhh Wyoming, maybe? :|a
Massachusetts.
I'mma guess North Dakota!
Nope, we have respondents from all those states!
Hawaii>
?*
waves hand I'm from Mass, so
Georgia?
alaska?
Iowa
Alabama?
Billie Sue 🌻
says
Idaho!
we have to get it eventually. there are only 50 options XD
No one has gotten it yet!
Utah?
Montana
Billie Sue 🌻
says
Kansas?
Maine
well I know it's not Nebraska (unless my IP address is really fucked up) sooooo Delaware?
DELAWARE! Correct!
Wow
YAAAAAAAY!
And now I wait for someone to tell me that they filled in the survey from Delaware...
gold star for me
All right, anyone want to take a guess at which state had the largest number of respondents?
This one surprised me
ordinarily I'd guess Texas, but if you were surprised, then probably not?
Washington state?
Billie Sue 🌻
says
congratulations!
yeah my guess is washington
there's so many of us here it's crazy
Billie Sue 🌻
says
and my guess for most responses is California!
Colorado.
Billie Sue 🌻
says
oh wait it surprised you hmmm
Billie Sue 🌻
says
Massachusetts then!
Ohio
No one has gotten it yet...
Michigan
Billie Sue 🌻
says
pennsylvania
Iowa?
North Carolina?
Nah I'm in NC
So amused that Philippines (where I'm originally from) and Japan (where I currently live) actually made it to 1% of respondents 
I doubt it's Iowa, I'm from there
The question is which state had the highest number of responses! Delaware was the state that had no responses. No one has guessed the state with most respondents yet...
Florida?
California?
Billie Sue 🌻
says
Georgia
Yeah, I was absolutely sure that it was not Rhode Island. 
I'm pretty sure it's not Nebraska, seeing as I'm from there too.
/hi5 Nebraska
No one has guessed the state with the highest number of respondents yet!
/Cornhusker fistbump 
New York? New Jersey?
Alaska, because what else do they have to do? XD
NEW JERSEY! Correct! We had 107 respondents from New Jersey.
California was the second biggest at 98, and Florida third at 58.
daaaaaang, Jersey, look at you go!
If you're interested in seeing the full breakdown, I've uploaded the results as an Excel spreadsheet to the results Dropbox
I was kind of expecting Jersey actually! I'm big on organizing meetups and there always seems to be someone who's like "oh shit you live down the block from me "
"
/former Nebraska RPer fistbump
ahaha yeah I moved to Jersey from Michigan so. /waves
Not pumping our own gas gives us a lot of time to RP from the car >>
YAY more Nebraska people! 
Good Life woot woot
I'm pretty sure I know RPers in Delaware
or who used to live in delaware
do i count if i visit it semi-regularly because i have family there???
as a new yorker I can safely say it makes so much sense that the majority were from new jersey. full of awesome people with nothing to do.
re: trying to teach people RP, I wrote a guide aaaages ago and I think it's fairly comprehensive in discussing terms and stuff
Neat! Thank you!
For those of you interested in what the total DWRP population might be, I've made an attempt at estimating the game population...
...and total population based on the survey data plus total number of games on the DWRP Masterlist.
What I'm missing is a good estimate of the average number of players in a game. The estimate is based on 30-50 players per game. Thoughts welcome! (Hopefully my maths is correct...)
Billie Sue 🌻
says
/BOOKMARKS THIS
Billie Sue 🌻
says
thank you for the better math +-+
reineke
is
there information somewhere on how many exactly there are from each of the little countries? xD under 1% club is curious
^ I'm curious about that one, too (as another 1% club member)
I haven't shared that information, but the <1% countries are all 6 respondents or fewer
any way to share that? if it's not too annoying
Done! Added it to the Dropbox.
thank you! omg, 4 from Austria!
Whoa 8 from Poland I'M SHOCKED
Thank you for sharing!
how many respondents were from Minnesota?
inthetatras: 17! You can see the full breakdown via Dropbox
thanks! I hadn't seen that yet.
< checks the data as a 1%er
Oh wow. 12 and 11 percent from the Philippines and Japan respectively. I'm pretty curious about the Japan set. AFAIK everyone who I know who RPs and lives in Japan is an expat from somewhere else.
Still, I'm really amazed by the diversity of the countries in the 1% and >1% groups!
I escaped the wilds of cottage country! If you're still willing to share some batch data, rpresearch, I can do some more detailed analysis by age category, etc.
I also though of taking a look at sorting by preferred media type, prefered game type, etc.
I'd basically need the raw results in a table so that I can link an answer in one question to the demographic data in another.
"Nearly three quarters of respondents have been RPing on sites like Dreamwidth for 7 or more years." we need fresh blood...
wheeze the age group. I used to be the babby of the RP group and looked forward to one day not being but there aren't much babies coming in so I'll never be the Ancient One