Howdy! Some of my players have expressed interest in seeing some numbers of the games, and systems run, and I think in line with the 2 year mark of officially starting this community + 100+ people in the local group chat AND 50+ games run on Startplaying, I think I can run some numbers for y'all to check out!

THE GAMES

This is the easy thing to count!

This year alone, I've run 168 games. The breakdown:

• 132 D&D5e Games (78.6%)
  • 110 Campaign Sessions across 9 campaign groups
    • 2 Curse of Strahd
    • 2 Dungeon of the Mad Mage
    • 3 Homebrew Bathala Campaigns (my Filipino inspired setting)
      • One is on twitch, so it's a bit cheaty!
    • 1 Homebrew Golden Empire Campaign (Nordic X Eastern Asian campaign)
      
  • 16 West Marches (4 White Plume Mountain, 12 Dungeon of the Mad Mage)
  • 6 One-shots
• 36 Non-D&D5e Games (21.4%)
  • 9 Sessions of Triangle Agency 
  • 8 Sessions of Mothership
    
  • 5 Session of Break!!
  • 4 Sessions of Avatar: Legends
  • 3 Sessions of Eat the Reich
  • 2 Sessions of Charm Person
  • 2 Sessions of Brambletrek
  • 2 Session of Alice is Missing
  • 1 Session of CBR+PNK

I've done 10 different systems over the past 4 months, not including two games that I'm working on. 1 in 5 games not being D&D is honestly quite the achievement for me, considering most of my groups are D&D groups. Definitely carried by the Mothership and Triangle Agency campaigns (and will likely get better as the BREAK!! campaigns start).

What I'd like (Games-wise)

I'd love to run another Triangle Agency campaign! Defo one of my favorites so far. It's the anti-GM game, and I think that's what makes me want to run it again. The fact that I've suffered through learning and reading the game and running it, I wanna make use of the space it is taking up in my brain. It is a fun game where the only limits to your creativity is your own creativity. 

 I do love Mothership too - but I'd like to write a trifold or four-fold adventure! Every single Mothership module I've run is a MASTERCLASS in adventure design. Absolute masterclass. In a way, the total opposite of Triangle Agency.

Systems-wise, I'm glad that I'm able to keep up one new system a month - for May, in-person games we're doing Demon: The Fallen and Cain - both "culty" games, as the theme for May. Not gonna even get started on the fact that Break!! has a new kickstarter, and Sword World is also coming out sometime in May. I love learning new systems, and would love to write a post on the best part of each system I've run so far and what can be translated across other RPGs.

The People

One of my players mentioned that they were glad/pleasantly surprised that there were a lot of women represented in my player base, and another player said that there was quite a bit of diversity. I'm a) glad that they feel that way, and b) want to maintain that my games are a safe space for anyone and everyone. To all the players who have helped keep that - thank you. I can merely set the baseline, but for people to follow it and ensure that everybody is comfortable, that requires a community that's willing to keep this space safe. 

Let's break it down to some numbers though, cause numbers:

• Gender. I don't want to assume, so there might be people in the undefined category (not everybody has their pronouns explicitly displayed)
  • In-person games
    • Total of 111 people in the Telegram + 5 people who are in a whatsapp campaign group
      • 40+ female presenting
      • 2 people who are non-binary
      • 2 people who are undefined
      • The rest are male presenting
  • Online games. I'm only counting people who have played in an SPG game this year, and not counting the people who came and left in under an hour (this is a story for another time)
    • Total of 40 players (HOLY CRAP?? I FELT LIKE IT WAS JUST 20 ISH PEOPLE, BUT WE'RE AT THIRTY FIVE IN FOUR MONTHS???) 
      • 8 female
      • 30 male
      • 1 non-binary
• I tried to do racial demographics but... I realized I can't tell like a good chunk of the time. I'll do rough estimates (place them in mixed/unknown/others if I'm guessing too much):
  • In-person games
    • 5+ Malay
    • 8+ Indian
    • 12+ Mixed/Others or Unknown but Asian (Pakistani, Vietnamese, Indonesian, etc.)
    • 4 Europeans
    • 1 Canadian
    • 3 Filipinos (T.T My people no represents)
    • Rest are Chinese (Singapore, China, and Malaysia primarily)
  • Online games. Likely Unknown if they've never turned on their camera/never mentioned their race/are international-presenting.
    • 3 Asian
    • 21 White (both American and European)
    • 2 Latinx
    • 3 Black/African descent
    • 1 New Zealander and 1 Australian
    • 7 Unknown

*For players who are technically in both categories, I've only included them in the In-person games section!

**I'm doing this sleepily, so the numbers may be off by a bit - I don't wanna delve into EVERY SINGLE player's details, just get rough numbers to see how "diverse" the community really is!

Are we more diverse than expected?

I am guessing that overall, I'm closer to the general population than not, but let's dive right in!

Gender Diversity

Based on D&D estimates, there's roughly 39% female, and 60% male, and 1% non-binary and other genders. 

Local games have about 36% female, 1.8% non-binary and 1.8%undefined, and 60.4% male. The local games have more or less the expected amount. It's close enough that I don't think it's statistically significant.

The online games have about 20% female, 2.8% non-binary, and 77.2% male. The online games have a relatively small sample size, and I expect it to normalize as we get more players, but for now, not so diverse gender-wise.

Racial Diversity?

Locally, we'd expect roughly 75% chinese, 15% malay, 7.6% indian, and 1.7% others. However, we have 4.5% Malay, 7.2% Indian, ABOUT 9% Mixed/unknown (so this could skew the measurements), and ABOUT 9% "known" others (Europeans, Canadian, Filipinos, Pakistani, etc.), leaving roughly 70% Chinese. Slightly diverse, but I'd reckon not statistically significant, though Malays are underrepresented in the community, and "others" are super super over represented. 

Internationally, I couldn't find any numbers that were reliable for Dungeons and Dragons players but this is what we've got:

• 52.5% White
• 7.5% Asian
• 7.5% Black/African-decent
• 5% Latinx
• 5% Australia/New Zealand
• and the rest are unknown

Sadly... I don't think we're more diverse than expected

The numbers look statistically average for both gender and ethnicity. This doesn't however account for intersectionality of people who are of both marginalized race and gender, etc.. 

That being said, on a game-by-game basis, I would note that most games with women in them tend to have more than one woman in the group (this is from scanning the past 30 or so games I've run that were not campaigns). 

I think that the numbers skew as I do have campaigns where there are only male-presenting players, and no groups with only female presenting players. That being said, I'm guessing that the appearance of diversity comes from the safe space of expression within the groups they are in - e.g. One of my most diverse online groups has an asian woman, two black women, a latino man, and a white non-binary. The two people I didn't mention are an Australian man and a white woman. That's incredible diversity in one group. One of my local groups has a European, 3 mixed-ethnicity, and an Asian - and two of them are women. I think that if I started to count the numbers on a game by game basis, the numbers would look different. 

Conclusion

These are just numbers, and they don't matter in my games in the end; I can't "change" the number of people of a certain gender or race who are playing in my games. What I simply hope to do is provide a safe space for all of us to have collective hallucinations together about having fun adventures, dramatic moments, and epic tales. I hope that I get to continue to tell more stories with everyone, and that I get to meet more people to tell stories with. 

I do want to meet people of all kinds of backgrounds and diversify who I meet. For instance, there aren't many people of African descent in Singapore, so I don't get to meet people from Africa and America much (there are quite a few Europeans, Australians, and Southwest Asians that I've met here, I think!). I'm grateful to everyone I've met, and for anyone who's come back for more games. Bless y'all, and may we all roll nat 20s forever.

Don't forget, who's awesome? You're awesome.