Last week we said 28% of sessions don’t roll initiative and the intuitive response is clear: those must be roleplay focused TTRPG campaigns. While that theory might be reasonable, we decided to look for these two distinct types of campaigns: the combat focused ones and the roleplay focused ones.
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.