Straight up, nothing more than that, just a basic "how many years have you been playing" question.

My join date on DDB is my first day of play.

 Genuinely don't remember which side of 30 I'm at, but I voted 20-30 to feel younger.

I don't want to math this, 1st game in jrHS about 1985, 1st regular gaming group 2002, 1st time DMing 2008

So there are my numbers.

That would be “39”. 😉

So, I asked this same exact poll on r/dnd, and the difference is stunning.

Quote from AEDorsay >>

So, I asked this same exact poll on r/dnd, and the difference is stunning.

 Link please?

 Nvm, I found it.  I think the r/dnd poll is probably far more accurate. My mom has played for a long time and my dad had been playing for many years before he died.  But I and most of the people that I know that play all started with 5e between 3 and 10 years ago.

https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/s/heE9EF3Q3f

Three years.

Interesting that I'm now out of the "youngest" bracket.

As for the difference in result, it's probably down to numbers. Judging that the results here are all in multiples of ten, I'd guess that right now, 10 people have voted. 900 people have voted in Reddit, giving a more representative number.

Since 1987. Started as a player with Oriental Adventures. Started being the DM shortly after. Mainly played using BECMI.

Just worked this out and nearly freaked out. Played for the first time in my first year of secondary school, so...........42 years for me!

I also remember we quickly changed over to RuneQuest and I spent most of that term trying to prevent my dragonewt's maul from breaking in combat.

I'm a relatively new player at 4 years. I think like a lot of people I needed an excuse to meet up with friends online during the Covid lockdowns and D&D fit the bill perfectly. It's almost made me greatful for the experience because I absolutely adore the hobby and it's taken over my life

I avoided dnd and tabletop rpg's in general as some kind of last bastion of nerdiness that I could always say "i may be a nerd, but I'm not THAT kind of a nerd..."

That was until 2012, my sophomore year of college, my friends played 3.5 in the common area of my dorm and I fell into it, immediately asking myself "why did I think this was a bad thing to do??" upon starting and proceeding to have the time of my life playing belligerent Gnome wizard/alchemist Hamish "Haggis" MacSweeny.

The rest, as they say, is history...

Playing and DM'ing since 1982 Red Box Set

1979-80 not sure exactly. coudnt find an opponent for a ww2 1/76 wargame in the school wargaming club. saw a few peeps with weird dice got an invite and voila. i was 14 ish iirc.

So, some thoughts on doing this.

When I set up the poll, i did it here and in r/dnd on purpose -- it is a good comparative.

There are two separate populations in the forums here: Active and Necessary. Necessary folks hop in to say "it broke" and then there's the folks like us, and 54 is a really good selection of the whole for active-engaged forum members.

Because there's only a couple hundred really engaged members, and then a few thousand somewhat engaged members -- forum wise. DDB is not a place where folks go to the forums much. 

And wow, does the forum skew towards folks who are inherently going to be older. That older can vary quite a lot, but still, in general, older is a thing.  More importantly, the DDB forums skew towards greater experience.

The site itself is not stagnant (which some folks might perceive it as): that we know from the broader stuff, but the forums having a higher degree of experience (and even differing experience) is a fairly positive sign in terms of them being a good place to go to ask for advice. It is still the internet, so YMMV, but yeah.

over on the reddit poll, though, it skews less experienced. Which speaks to the quality of advice there, but it also shows the overwhelming popularity of the 5th Edition in a scale that matches what information is available on the game base as a whole.

Scaling the reddit side down, to match, we get:

• 11 for up to 2 years
• 29 for 3 to 10
• 8 for 11 to 20
• 5 for 20 to 30
• 4 for 30 to 40
• 2 for 40 to 50

This compares to our DDB basis of 

• 2 for up to 2
• 12 for 2 to 10
• 4 for 11 to 20
• 7 for 21 to 30
• 15 for 31 to 40
• 14 for 41 up.

The basis that the overwhelming number of folks playing the game do not have any connection to earlier editions -- but such a huge margin that they are double the size of all the previous generations still playing it -- gives a huge insight into the underlying connectedness functions of the community as a whole.

This is way more than some "ok, boomer" type of things, since the gaem is also known to have grown steadily with each edition and over time -- as much as 4th was considered a failure, it still sold (and continues to sell) and still brought new folks into the game. 

THis also speaks to the tone and nature of things here -- the Adohands chaos notwithstanding, the organization of the forums could likely be improved upon to increase engagement, but it might be difficult since a few of us are more likely to expend digital ink on pointing out the errors of the haters than we are to offer good advice, and any venture into the more general forums will reveal some really interesting conversations.

Which means that someone can learn a lot from just reading the forums here, simply because of the collective knowledge of the game being much, much higher than someplace like reddit -- specifically, the largest D&D subreddit.

And while we don't have any statements in relation to it, something else of note is that the answers here aren't being fed into an LLM that is being used for something other than, well, to work on D&D. 

On the other hand, we also know that the DDB forums are genuinely useful places, sice it means that they are able to mitigate some of the impact of that overwhelmingly inexperienced user base -- basically, the traditional knowledge is here.

Even if it serves only to reinforce a bias in the designers and the team, we know they are at the very least observing it. Not only the complain windows, but the broader forum, and this is outside the testing.

A personal observation is that the folks I have identified as having over 11 years experience are the ones who are less likely to fall into the hype machine, but still get as giddy about it as everyone else.

ah well...

Thank you to the folks who did answer the poll. This was really kinda fun, and I learned some cool things.

Wow, if you'd have asked me my estimate, I would've said DDB users would skew younger. I've been playing on and off for over twenty years.

I’m in the 41-50 range although I haven’t been playing consistently over those years. Mainly 1E, a little 3E (bit stopped before 3.5, and now 5E

I think the format is also representative. Older people online use more classic forums like this, while younger generations are more experienced with the style of reddits "forum". Not to mention that looking for gaming advice, more experienced people would likely look at the dedicated forums first (also stuff like ENworld). While a quick google search for "dnd rules xyz" might turn up reddit as one of the first results, and thus funnel younger users into that type of place rather than forums.