That flat average has two very different players inside it. Sort players by what they get into most (a combat fan is a player whose rating runs clearly higher during fights, a roleplay fan is the reverse) and split the nights into last week’s five shapes. The roleplay fans rate 0.83 or 0.84 in every one of the five. Simmer or Cold Open, they show up the same. The combat fans go from 0.60 on a Simmer to 0.74 on a Cold Open.

The roleplay fans are the half of this worth underlining. Part of the combat-fan swing is built in (sort a player by their combat rating and of course they rate higher on the fightier nights). Nothing about the roleplay side is built in. If any player was going to drift on a night that opens with an ambush and stays in initiative for an hour, you’d guess it was the one who came for the talking… but they don’t. The Cold Open has the least talk of the five shapes, and the roleplay fans give it the same 0.84 they give a night with no fight in it. Whatever the night turns out to be, they’re in it.

Every table has a least engaged seat, by definition. What’s striking is how little the night changes that seat’s rating: about 0.60 in a Simmer, about 0.60 in a Cold Open. The Cold Open lifts the combat fans. It doesn’t lift the seat at the bottom, and neither does any other shape.

So does anything move the least engaged seat?

Not how much the DM talks. Players at a table where the DM does under 30% of the talking rate about the same as players at a table where the DM does over 70%. What moves it is how many players are at the table. At a table of two, four seats in ten are rated 0.9 or higher, all the way in. At a table of seven or more, one in five. The typical seat drifts from 0.79 to 0.75 along the way. And the bottom barely moves: the share of seats rated under 0.5 stays near 4% from two players through six, and edges up to 7% at seven or more.

Bigger tables also tend to play longer, and longer nights rate a little higher, so the length of the night is certainly pushing the other way. One caveat though - at a table of seven, each player gets a smaller slice of the night, and a player we hear less from is also a player there’s less to go on for. “Rated a little lower” and “harder to read” can’t be pulled apart from here.

So a bigger table shaves a little off everyone’s rating without adding to the seats near the bottom. The least engaged seat sits near 0.60 whatever shape the night takes.

Trace how much of each twenty minute stretch is combat, from the start of the night to the end, and five recurring shapes cover almost every TTRPG session (or at least more than nine sessions in ten..).

The Simmer (28% of sessions) Combat never really arrives. The night is talk, plans, and a persuasion check that turns into forty minutes of scheming. This is the single most common session in the data.. and “never really arrives” is generous (in more than half of them, nobody rolls initiative all night).

The Slow Burn (21%) Story for most of the night, then a fight late, once everything has been set up.

The Two-Peak (18%) A fight in the middle, a breather, a bigger fight near the end. The adventuring day as the books imagine it.

The Centerpiece (16%) One big set piece in the middle of the night, and a long wind-down after it.

The Cold Open (10%) The night that starts hot, the ambush already rolling. Rare and the fightiest of the five (with nearly half the night spent in combat). It’s mostly a short night’s shape (one session in five under ninety minutes starts hot).

The remaining sliver splits between the Steady Mix, the even blend from a few weeks ago, and the Late Peak, which is a Slow Burn that waited even longer.

The shape correlates to session duration. Two hour sessions are the Simmer 39% of the time. Five hour sessions are the Two-Peak two times in five. Short nights and long nights reliably take different shapes, which is most of why last week’s average curve looks the way it does.. it’s these five blended, and the most common one has no real fight in it.

It follows the system too, at least a bit. Pathfinder sessions run longer than D&D sessions, which pushes them toward the Two-Peak on its own. Hold the length fixed and the gap is still there: among sessions of three and a half to five hours, two in five Pathfinder sessions are Two-Peaks, against three in ten for D&D.

So which shape is your campaign? Probably several. Among campaigns at least five sessions in, the median campaign has already used four of the five. Nine in ten have used at least three. A table’s most common shape accounts for about 42% of its nights, and campaigns whose nights all come out the same shape are so rare we didn’t bother naming them.

In closing, campaigns have a repertoire of structures to leverage here and they in fact use them frequency (though the length of the night might help them decide).

To see why, we can start at the other end. Pick a random moment from the first twenty minutes of a session and there’s about a 10% chance the table is in combat. Move that moment later into the night and the odds climb, steadily, until about forty minutes before the end, where the odds peak at 28%. In the last twenty minutes they fall back to 18% (queue session scheduling?).

How high the odds climb depends on how long the night runs. Two hour sessions peak around 25%. Four hour sessions peak around 34%.

Longer nights start slower too.. in the opening minutes of a five hour session the odds of a fight are under 6%, in a two hour session about 11%. So the length of the night changes where it starts and how high it climbs.

It doesn’t change where it lands. In the last twenty minutes the odds sit between 16% and 20% whether the session ran ninety minutes or five hours. Longer nights open slower and peak higher, but every length of night winds down to the same place.

One more thing happens across the night.. the talking slows down. Tables run at about 120 words a minute in the first hour and about 110 past the five hour mark, and the decline is gradual the whole way, still going while the odds of a fight are still rising. Fewer words, more dice?

We can’t see from a transcript whether the last twenty minutes are the DM landing the plane or the table running out of evening. We can see that it happens on the short nights and the marathons alike (and then everyone goes home).

That’s measured across whole nights and the middle of the distribution is quite tidy. Half of all tables land between roughly 40% and 60% DM talk time. Whatever else varies from group to group, the share of the evening coming out of the DM’s chair mostly doesn’t.

It barely moves across the night, either. The DM’s talk share runs a touch higher in the first twenty minutes (the recap has to come from somewhere!) and drifts down as the hours go by, but the whole slide is about five points over four hours. The night starts as mostly the DM’s voice and stays that way, more or less, until the end.

One table in ten has a DM under 30% of the talk time. One in ten runs past about 70% (most of the night in the DM’s voice). A lot of the extremes is just table size. A DM running a single player speaks about 70% of the night. Add players and the DM’s share falls, but slowly. 53% with three players, 49% with four, 40% with seven. In fact, it seems that adding players takes a bite out of the other players’ talk time and only a small amount out of the DM’s.

One more thing about the extremes. Tables with a talkative DM spend about as much of the night in combat as tables with a quiet one. Where they differ is roleplay… about a third of the night with a talkative DM, about a quarter with a quiet one.

Overall, it seems like half of the session is what you get when one person plays the shopkeeper, the villain, the weather, and the rules.

Add an hour to the session and the no combat share drops to about a third. Keep adding and it keeps falling until we get to the 3.5 to 5 hour session mark where we see only 20% of session have zero combat. It’s one of the steadier lines in this whole data set and it intuitively makes sense - the longer the table plays, the more likely our adventurers find themselves drawing swords.

Calling back to a previous post, we said 28% of sessions that never roll initiative. Part of that story is further revealed here.. a good share of those are the short nights.

However, the marathon sessions break the curve. If you play longer than 5 hours, counter intuitively, the share of no combat sessions climbs back up to one in four. We had certainly assumed the longest sessions would be the fightiest but that does not appear to be the case.

My only guess here is that these long sessions are those lazy all day games, where no one has anywhere to be, and the party inevitably spends an hour naming the inn they just “acquired.” But just a guess.

Half of the shortest nights, a quarter of the longest, and the stabbing concentrates in that four hour evening.

We did not find them. Instead, pick two nights randomly from the same campaign and on average there’s a 18 point difference in the amount of combat seen. It’s the same group of people, the same campaign, same DM, crazy different session experiences.

That swing isn’t just the few chaotic groups bringing up the average. About three-quarters (77%) of campaigns that have 5 sessions or more in the data set have already had these types of nights: one with less than 5% combat and one with more than 30% combat. There is a quiet night one week and a big fight night the next within the same campaign. The combat focused table and the roleplay focused table occur within the same campaign week after week.

Do tables split the difference? A little combat, a little story, a good mix every session? Turns out that session exists, but in only 5.8% of cases. And campaigns that do that every week? In all our data, we could count those groups on one hand.

A single campaign spends one week fighting through a burning fort and half of the next session haggling over the price of a stolen chandelier. Both of those appear to be the game.

There has been a certain level of discussion and assumptions about this question since the beginning. A majority of source books and character sheets have to do with combat, don’t they?

In their landmark player survey in 2000, Wizards of the Coast reported 86% of players had played “combat oriented” games, a number based on what players have ever played, yes or no. A reasonable question for a survey but clearly limited in its scope.

Twenty-six years later, we looked at anonymized data from a set of ten thousand sessions to answer the question the survey could not: what actually takes up the hours of a session? (methodology described here)

Turns out, only about a fifth of them go to combat.

And 28% of sessions never roll initiative at all. Not a single fight. More than one night in four, the dice do plenty of work but none of it happens while in initiative order.

That said, both the survey answer and our findings can certainly be true at the same time, they are answers to different questions. ‘Have you ever played a combat oriented game?’ and ‘what did your table actually do last Tuesday?’ can both be answered honestly by the same player: one with a clear yes and the other with two hours of tavern scheming and a single Persuasion check.

This post starts a weekly series that aims to understand the nature and behaviors of TTRPG & D&D tables based on what they actually do… which nights skip the fight, what takes place instead, what fights actually look like, and even things like why the last bit of every night looks weirdly familiar across all tables. Some of it we hope will help people run better sessions and some of it we don’t fully understand yet, but are confident the community is filled with people smarter than us that perhaps can help fill in those gaps and work out the implications.

So, is D&D a combat game? While the rulebook is mostly combat rules, 28% of the time no one touches them.