How quickly can a new D&D edition take over?

I was fascinated by Troy Press recent piece "D&D Rules, According to Past Players" based on a general survey they did which found the D&D players among a broad sample of the population but also asked when and which edition they had last played - with the fascinating insight in that article that where 20% of the respondents had played in 2026 (the past four months), only 7% of respondents had played 5.5e as their last game.

This prompted me to mention this to the author on Mastodon who further revealed "The sample size for those who played in the last three months is small: n=40. Of those: 10% played 5.5, 66% played 5e, 14% played 4e, and no other edition was in the double digits."

This is fascinating - my first question was then "how does this look for an adoption trend for the new edition?" - how does the share of games being played with 5.5e compare to how many folk were playing 4e or 5e this many years after the launch of those editions?

To get an idea, we turn to the Obsidian Portal campaigns launched - taking annual slices we can get a sense of popularity of editions back to 2008.

To recap - this was done by loading the Campaigns page on Obsidian Portal and noting the campaigns per system for each year available (back to 2008) using the Wayback Machine so we capture from 4e dropping through to now.

Originally inspired by Troy Press writing in 2019 on RPG campaigns played by system and I have been tracking this and updating annually for a few years now (2022, 2023, 2024, 2025)

We also have the now-discontinued Orr Reports which gave us the same insight for Roll20. With that and the Obsidian Portal data we can pull three continuous trends and then chuck on whatever single points we have for 5.5e from various sources for comparison.

Looking at what we get we see a pretty clear rapid-switch over to 5e from 4e when it launched. We see an initial high take-up of 4e that started to fade off pretty rapidly (competition from Pathfinder at that point). Pathfinder 1e had a pretty good start to a solid 60% of new campaigns launched on Obsidian Portal the year before 5e dropped.

Comparing those to what we see for 5.5e - the few dots we can scrape together - we do not appear to be seeing the unambiguous take-off that was obvious at this stage for 5e. One could have maybe told a story last year about how 5.5e was having a 5e-equivalent take off as seen on Roll20 but it is hard to continue that. While fully acknowledging that these points are a grab-bag of sources, they are clustering between 10-45% - this is not the ~66-80% range one might expect to see if most folk were playing 5.5e these days.

So returning to our initial seed - that Troy Press finding of only 10% playing 5.5e - it seems on the low side but maybe a real marker for 5.5e being significantly less adopted than 5e was.

Notes

The Roll20 track above was checked against surveys from each end of that time span and matched up with what else I could find online.

The Obsidian Portal data is no longer useful for this because they do not distinguish between 5e and 5.5e - apparently taking WotC at their word that it was not a new edition but not helpful for this exercise.

Sources:

2026 Survey by Researchscape (N = 1253)

Campaigns page on Obsidian Portal

D&DBeyond poll (Feb 2025)

Facebook Hombrewers poll (Dec 2025)

Reddit r/LFG analysis (2024)

Art of adventure threading for campaigns

I poked one of the mainstay DM's of our local game society for their top tips on how to stitch scattered adventures together to make a campaign:
- Conservation of NPCs
- Tweak the adventures to fit the theme
- Work in meaningful player choices with meaningful consequences to the ongoing story

You can also consider these for any campaign you may be writing yourself or elements to watch for in written campaigns too.

Why think about stitching adventures together?

In short, to give yourself more options than the two dozen or so famous campaigns.

After the dozen or so 5e campaigns from WotC, the hivemind of the web recommends about another dozen 3rd party campaigns. You can delve into the past for yet more but sometimes even then you cannot find quite the thing you are looking for. There are also loosely tied anthology adventures, Adventurers Guild seasons, old Dungeon magazines and other sources that you might find that fit the campaign you want to run. There is a mass of creativity out there - fit to every flavour and preference of table - but assembling them all into something coherent can be a challenge.

Making the various sessions of your campaign feel coherent is also a base requirement to make it feel like more than just random events happening one after another.

Players like their knowledge to count, so repeatedly encountering the same NPCs allows what they have learned about those NPCs to be relevant and useful. "The Baron hates cats? How about for that distraction we need, let us set a half dozen cats lose at his coronation."

Working in meaningful choices with consequences actualises player agency - their decisions mattered and continued to matter over multiple sessions.

All these things are basic elements of making a good campaign but they are particularly important at the connecting edges of different escapades. Assuming that a given adventure is decent in and of itself, the trick is to make it feel like part of a coherent whole.

Stitching campaigns together from multiple adventures

The trick of campaign threading has been well deployed locally in our gaming group - both 'pre-threaded' connected Adventurers League adventures and through connecting independent adventures.

One comrade at RPGVienna ran a very nifty campaign based on the Storm Kings Thunder adventurers league season - the low-level cycle around Parnast. Over a bunch of Friday nights we got to Parnast, ran a bunch of quests around it then successfully defended the village from siege with the help of allies gathered in the previous adventures. It was perhaps eight sessions or so but it was a great, highly thematic campaign.

There was also a Ravnica mini-campaign built around the 'Secrets of the Triseklion' adventures bulked out with other appropriate adventures. Both of these were proper campaigns in my eye for having consequences to an over-arching sequence of events carrying over sessions - compared to my own Brancalonia games which had consequences but were otherwise fairly episodic, not really a coherent campaign.

The Storm Kings Thunder series were pre-threaded; written with recurring NPCs and as part of an over-arching sequence of events - but the Ravnica campaign was bulked out beyond the core adventures and needed to be reworked to be coherent. As mentioned above this meant:
- Conservation of NPCs
- Tweaking the adventures to fit the theme
- Having player choices with meaningful consequences

- Conservation of NPCs

We have mention conservation of NPCs before - just make similar NPCs be the same person. This can be expanded to have similar 'table function' NPCs be the same person - traders, quest-givers, etc. - where they have the same interaction with the characters, even if quite different as written.

I retained this in the Brancalonia campaign - but the impact was significantly lessened because the rotating cast of players meant that a given NPC appeared much less frequently to any one player so they did not reach the same level of 'that guy' recognisability.

- Tweaking the adventures to fit the theme

Here we have the work of identifying what fits within a campaign style - what can be easily repainted to lie seamlessly with other parts - and how to bulk out a set of adventures with others that were not immediately coherent or that provide options you need.

The first trick here is recognising that while any adventure can be made to fit into a campaign with enough elbow-grease, some are a lot easier to meld together than others. Terrain is a typical common factor to take but an adversary or location could also be used depending on the theme of the campaign - what is the key part of your campaign. If a common adversary, then that same foe on different terrains could be potentially useful. If a type of play - mountain traversal, ship voyages, urban investigations - then those are the factors you want to seek out.

Often this can be a thing that takes some work - an adventure might be set on a ship but make essentially no reference to that beyond the floorplan shape - so identifying whether an adventure truly contains the factors you want can be somewhat tiresome.

The other side of this coin is figuring out where you have a gap to be filled among the adventures you already have - typically done by using level progression for a first estimate but it can also be linked to state of the campaign - you might need some artic wilderness adventure to serve for if the party decides to trek to a given location rather than taking some other route.

If you can get your hands on a good review archive that helps you determine a) what is good and b) what adventures have what elements within them those are great tools for identifying good starting points to start finishing things.

- Having player choices with meaningful consequences

With pre-threaded adventures this is already done by the writers (one hopes) but in assembling disparate adventures the achievements and consequences of one ought to knock on to subsequent adventures beyond just levelling up.

Note, one or two isolated adventures can be fine as a change of pace or palate cleanser but, to make it feel like the adventures are part of a coherent whole, there ought to be decisions to make and consequences that come from those.

This one is hard to generalise because the decisions to be made are heavily dependent on the individual adventures. How the consequences of those decisions ripple through the rest of the campaign will be reliant on the nature of that campaign. The main lens I can suggest is to note what factions and foes make gains or suffer losses during an adventure and how, then consider how those will affect other things later - even if only through rumours and tales in taverns later on. Other elements like destruction of sites or establishment of new ones can also be big markers of consequence.

Plan to test

I will be trying these principles out with the old Dungeon Magazine Spelljammer adventures and will write up how those go. I had the great good fortune to find a copy of 'Under the Dark Fist' being sold by someone apparently divesting themselves of their whole D&D collection (!) and so I may even try and work in some of the official materials too.

Shiny TTRPG links #276

Interesting links from about the interweb. For yet more, see last weeks collection or the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Bloggie-nominated. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch, delinked by request.

Heltung Storytelling hosts gives us Table Jam 26

The Rpg Gazette writes The Five Boxes: BECMI and the High-Level Problem That D&D Never Solved

False Machine gives us I Read Generators of Underground Worlds

MOMMY'S BIG GLASS OF WINE ALONE TIME BLOG MOST FOUL shares Searching for the free games ecosystem (and designing for desire paths)

Aggregate Cognizance posts An Analysis of Blades in the Dark Criticism

Kreggar Wandering writes Downtime as an Emergent Emotional Hook

Whose Measure God Could Not Take gives us Ten Years of GLOG (and! the Tomb of the Khan)

The Dolent Chronicle shares On Railroading

𝕲𝖗𝖊𝖓𝖉𝖊𝖑'𝖘 𝕾𝖙𝖊𝖕𝖉𝖆𝖉 posts XP and Advancement in Crow’s DCC Keep

Xeno & Kraft writes A colour wheel model of RPG systems

The Black Citadel gives us THE ALIEN/MYSTIC/MYTHIC FANTASY MANIFESTO: On the Tone of Fantasy I Enjoy

Sly Flourish shares Quantum Ogres and the Eight Steps

Was It Likely? shares the wood where the moon will be born

Denes Szanto Blog shares Stop using TTRPG Taxonomies Wrong!

@talien on EnWorld posts RPG Evolution: The Mook, the Bad, and the Ugly

ATMOSPHERIC UNDERWORLD writes Into the OSR, or, How I Learned to Stop Signposting and Love Cthulhu Heltung Storytelling hosts gives us Table Jam 26

Ars Ludi writes Making Peace with Microscope

Field Report: Vienna Fantasy-Con 2026

Fantasy-Con is the annual convention of Fantasy-Schmiede (Fantasy Forge) another Vienna based hobby organisation - this one with a more general focus that includes a lot of authors and artists as well as LARPs and TTRPGs. The 2026 con was on the last weekend of April and I trotted over to have a look.

Arriving and getting a ticket on the door was easy - I threw in a neat sticker for myself. It was already pretty active when I got there in the morning and got busier as time went on, never getting overcrowded, just nicely busy.

First Impressions

I think the venue is a dedicated exhibition space - there was a main atrium with a bar, a hall with a stage to one side that had all the artists and authors, and two rooms to the other side that had the various games groups - the usual suspects of Paradice and Athenaes Siegel and some others I had not seen before - the striking new one for me was PopCircle Austria - who are running "D & Dinner" evenings at a restaurant.

The poster itself speaks to the priorities - Books & Authors first, Collecting and Culture second and then Boardgames, Roleplaying Games & LARPs - which broadly maps to the space assigned - the big hall for the artists and authors, the entry atrium for the 'people' clubs and the two side rooms for the gaming groups who need space to spread out. Noone was cramped, everyone had plenty of table space. This was not a con with scheduled game sessions - you found those out from the individual booths and groups and pieced together your own schedule.

There were also a good few streamers and podcasters - both talking shops and actual plays - and a schedule of talks and workshops, including a kids corner with magic shows and the like.

For me, after cruising the whole location to see what was going on, I had a good chat with the Paradice gang, poked about the artists alley, noted all the books, bought some stickers. I was a little surprised again at the lack of anyone to sell me some RPG books - plenty of opportunity to commission character art or get various player-side merch but noone (I saw) selling books. A copy of Imperium Maledictum appearing in front of me would have been a very easy sell but never mind.

I ended up spending a good chunk of my time over coffee and cupcakes with another of the DM Supergroup, mostly talking video games in this instance and turn-based ones suitable for frequently interrupted play sessions. Come to think of it the catering was a little microcosm of the whole - one kind of really good cupcake.

Closing Thoughts

What I find interesting about Fantasy-Con is the cross-section of people pulled together by it - what the priorities of the local community are, I guess. I come from a TTRPG convention culture (back in Ireland) built around university games societies with many smaller ones which are focussed on the trinity of CCGs, Wargames and TTRPG/LARP. Those were specialised and the audience was niche. Here in Austria, the organisations that hold cons seem to be a much broader church with TTRPGs appearing at the side of more mainstream events - books and artists having a much greater presence.

Apparently all this was sponsored by Chaosium which was neat but also odd that there did not seem to be stuff on sale.

I was pretty time constrained this year but for next I might try to get more organised and try and get in on some of the games Paradice or others might be running. Certainly the whole place was buzzy, lots of folk, costumes, people in good cheer, things going on. I might not travel to Vienna for it if I was not nearby but I would certainly say it is worth stopping by if you were in town the weekend it is on.

How deep the bench of legacy D&D players?

Troy Press published a piece "D&D Rules, According to Past Players" based on a survey they did - and I am fascinated by the 'mentioned in passing' implication of a huge amount of non-active D&D players in the USA - something like 1 in 6 USA folk have played D&D at some point, apparently. Does this make sense?

We poked at this before in "Comparing TTRPG player surveys in US and Germany" where we looked at the previous surveys from the same outfit - Researchscape 2022 Survey and 2019 Survey which also look at who among the general US population has played TTRPGs.

Here they pulled in 1,253 US adults and found 16% - 204 people - had played D&D at some point. They mention "the data was weighted to the U.S. population by 9 demographic questions. The credibility interval for closed-end questions answered by all respondents is ±4 percentage points" so we could conservatively say 12% or 1-in-8 is more representative of general population. If you want to go wild, you could say 20%, 1-in-5 have played D&D at some point but that just seems implausible.

If we stick with the 1-in-6 estimate and take the Census.gov estimate of 342.5 million in the USA, this implies about 55 million folk in the USA with D&D experience?

This is *fascinating* to me - because the perception is that the TTRPG industry is niche - in my lived experience, folk have never heard of a dice that is not six-sided, never mind thrown a d20 in anger. WotC themselves made an estimate of "over 40 million fans around the world" in 2020 - M.T. Black tried to sweep up this and other estimates of how many D&D players there are back in 2021 and ended up with 48 million from taking WotC at their word on growth rates.

One possible way to reconcile the 'feel' of this is the point that this '1-in-6' group are folk that ever played D&D in their lives - if we tease out when they last played things change a touch. Of those surveyed:
20% played this year
23% in 24/25
15% in 2020-2023
41% have not played this side of the pandemic

So roughly half of that are active, half are folk who have played a but no longer do. These are still chunky numbers - 23 million folk who played back in the day, 32.5 who played since the pandemic - 11 million who are playing this year. This survey was taken in April and we know that there is a good chunk of folk who do play on an annual basis so some slice of the 24/25 players are probably still active, just have not gotten their games in this year yet.

There are a couple of other stats they pull out that chime with numbers we have seen elsewhere - 20% of male respondants have played D&D, 13% of female respondents - there is the 60/40 male-to-female ratio we have seen before.

So where is everyone?

We get one additional clue in the editions breakdown at the end - 7% of the respondants had last played the new 5.5e, while 35% had last played 5e. That says, assuming everyone who ever tried 5.5e back in 2024 is still playing today, there are nearly double the amount of folk who are playing today, who have not made the jump to the new system. At the most generous, those folk are all playing 5e - so they were buying new books of WotC up to two years ago. I am sure a bunch of folk are still playing previous editions so that number is lower.

I am going to posit here that D&D's general cultural footprint suffers from the fact that for a lot of folk, they just need to buy the tools once, then they're set up. I can throw no rocks, sitting with multiple editions racked up around me, but even I balked at 4e and 5.5e. People can buy the gamebooks once, whatever edition, and never surface again - merrily playing away with their own game table, invisible to the outside.

Apart from 5.5e it is not clear who could be playing which editions - if we can take a hint from what we see on Obsidian Portal I suspect of the older editions we would find 3e/3.5e, BX and AD&D most likely to still be played.

There was a Techraptor report in Jan 2025 that said 3.6 million characters had been created on D&DBeyond for 5.5e after its first year which aligns quite neatly with the 3.9 million 5.5e players suggested by that 7% of respondants. There is almost certainly some fuzz around that - folk making multiple characters, folk trying 5.5e and reverting to an older edition - but it is coming to the same order of magnitude at least.

We see 58% of folk who ever played D&D have done so since the pandemic - and at least a quarter of them are playing older editions because a max of 42% have last played 5e/5.5e - what are the other 16% playing? Those folk are also not on D&DBeyond because older editions are not supported.

At a minimum it says there are a third again of players out there playing offline for whatever number of players are appearing online through use of D&DBeyond. I think that figure is probably far higher since folk on D&DBeyond create multiple characters, so that online footprint represents less actual people and thus the offline ratio is much larger.

All told a fascinating glimpse into that 'silent majority' of offline players out there, playing away and not interacting with the online nexi of RPG discourse, never counted in any of the 'community polls'.

Additionally, it suggests that there are likely a bunch of ex-D&D-players around in the US that no longer game. All our surveys and the like suggest that most of that is driven by lack of group and lack of time, not lack of appetite for the game itself. Perhaps there is an angle to be worked there for drop-in pick-up games?

Sources:

2026 Survey by Researchscape (N = 1253)

2022 Survey by Researchscape (N = 1074)

2019 Survey by Researchscape (N = 942)

Shiny TTRPG links #275

More links from about the internet. For yet more, see last weeks collection or the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Bloggie-nominated. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch, delinked by request.

Vulcan Stev's Database launches the May RPGBlog Carnival topic of Inspiration! Where Does Yours Come From?

A shrike for my dreams shares Don’t prep hexcrawls, prep hexframes

Levi Kornelsen posts The Praxic Compendium

Courtney 🌻 The Sunflower Court writes TTRPG Character Creation Challenge Jam

Modified with the approval of creator Evlyn Moreau

@thydungeongal shares manifold issues with the secondary industry around D&D

AMONG CATS AND BOOKS posts Against Maps

Rise Up Comus writes Tolkien-Style Maps

Valeria Loves writes A Sicko’s Guide to Prepping D&D

Backwards Tabletop gives us Essay: The Problem with Production Value

ZOtRPG ! shares From mechanics to topographics: when the map becomes the medium of the conversation

derekb posts On Pointcrawls

Actual Test: Dungeons of Knock #1

I have been using Knock #1 as my go-to resource for the Hexcrawl25 campaign - the dungeons in the "Extraordinary Excursions" section were my source for complex sites and I got three of them to table. These dungeons were The citadel of Evil by Stuart Robertson, Praise the Fallen by Graphite Prime and Zaratzarats Manse by Nabok the Censored. I used these for two cultist lairs and a random wizards manse stumbled upon. This still leaves one last dungeon for use if needed - all told great value for the size of the book.

I used all of these dungeons as "I need a dungeon in a hurry because the players went off on a side quest" and they worked pretty well. Even the Citadel of Evil, which I initially thought seemed small, turned out to be very worthwhile. All of them got serious use - at least two sessions apiece from each of them with Praise the Fallen needing one big initial session that was a prisoner break-out then a later three-session return to clear it out completely.

Running through them in order encountered by the players:

Praise the Fallen has 15 A5 pages with lots of interesting bits and pieces within. They got to do a bunch of creeping around some of the nice old school spooky things like statues of angels and so on. Some proper old-school traps like compulsions to fling yourself on a blade were good and unsettling even where saves were made.

On the initial excursion the party missed most of the really nasty stuff - they probed the front bit, got into a big fight with a gathering of cultists and prevailed by bottling them up in a room and liberally using flaming oil. Solid tactics and good use of terrain. They did a bit of further creeping around, decided the spookier, deeper rooms were way over their heads and withdrew with the prisoners they had rescued.

The dungeon lurked in the background, oft mentioned, for much of the rest of the campaign until the party finally decided to go in and neutralise the threat. This return was supposed to be a quick raid (according to players plans) plunging deep into the temple to root out the cult leadership. The first session of this 'final' raid went well for the party as they ambushed cultists, sneaked about and bluffed their way past scattered lowly cultists with stolen robes and their acquired lore. The second session, as they ventured deeper they managed to pass many of the set piece wards and guardians using 'pass-pendants' before rousing a very large cave monster and having to fight them on treacherous terrain which left them low on resources and hit points to end the session. They staggered from that into a next set of guardians for the third session, fighting their way through and then getting into another big fight to stop a summoning. This brought out the dungeons arch villain who was invisibly nibbling them to death with summoned minions before they finally managed to reveal them and land the killing blow, just above the initiative tick where the villain was about to flee and become a recurring pest.

The dungeon itself is really nicely done. You get an intro on one page, some notes on rules applicable for the whole dungeon then a random encounter table and the main villainess. A small, total map is then followed by section-zooms with room-by-room detail. There are nice touches like the numbers of the rooms on the margins - a one two three up in the top corner so as you are leafing through you can quickly see where your where your room is. Stat blocks appear on the page where where you should be using them, descriptions are pretty terse, BX-style. The map is doing a lot of work with proper detailing of stairs up, stairs down secret doors and the likes. Good information density overall. I ran it pretty much straight out of the book.

My only advice is to be enthusiastic about rolling encounter chances - you will not always get them and even when you do, not all of them are going to be serious challenges, so roll often to keep the pressure up.

The Citadel of Evil was an identified location that the party knew they were going to go to so went relatively prepared and this ran over three sessions - one getting to the site and scouting from outside, one session of full-on dungeon-bashing and the last spent scouring the now-pacified wreckage for lurking remnants and/or loot.

They worked their way in through the base, up through the mysterious rooms in the middle, focussed on rescuing prisoners of the inhabitants so less on prying up flagstones and loot to start. The whole thing was a nice combination of slightly mysterious design requiring some careful scouting, non-traps that still needed navigating and then lurking cultists for active danger.

My party spent a session working their way up to the core then got in a fight with the main villain and managed to set a serious fire in the staircase that leads up to the citadel above. They did accelerate that fire but effectively they got into the basements and set the whole thing on fire above while they rescued people and fled. This bypassed some fighting in the upper structure but those foes were mostly guards/not the most interesting thing going on.

Then they did another entire session of poking through the ruins, interacting with traps and dangers and the hazards involved with the burnt out husk and the things rising from the dead and so on.

The dungeon is written to cover two pages so this was incredible bang for buck. Very good stuff, got two solid sessions, ten hours of play out of one side of A4.

The last one was the one on the dust cover, Zaratazarat's Manse, where a wizard was wizarding and cooked up a hazardous artefact that has gotten out of control. On this occassion the artefact is he's made "Ragga Gyxy’s Random Encounter Table", basically a monster summoning slab. This was a place the party was pointed at when they asked a settlement 'what kind of problems have you got' and then decided to poke into it.

I did not use the external village as written because I dropped it into an existing campaign but apart from that, I used everything over two sessions. One was an initial reconnaisance by a semi-open table group and the other was by the rest of the party to clear it out.

In both cases I used the mechanics provided - the big random-encounter table, the per-room encounter ladders, the 'find-the-wizard' rolls, the reaction rolls - which were fun. All of this on the inside of the dust-cover for the magazine so quite small text but still functional.

The first session, the party got there, poked around, ran into some random-encounter generated monsters and met some with negotiation, some with swords drawn. They managed to stumble their way past a bunch of things directly to the wizards bedroom and got in a big fight with the mimic-door there, then spent a block of time dealing with the sketchy magic mirror before leaving with some rescuees.

The second time around a slightly different team went in and went room by room trying to figure out what the problem was. They eventually made their way downstairs, took out the artifact that was malfunctioning to spawn all the monsters and installed the wizards apprentice as the new master of the place before leaving with armfuls of loot.

This is the most complex of the dungeons because there are lots of moving parts - more punchy random monsters, large uncertainty over if/where the wizard is found - and the fact that many of the monsters are sentient and randomly summoned from all sorts of places means they may not be hostile or from this world. I had fun having a dwarf be a warhammer old world dwarf, a white ape be a Barsoomian, etc.

From the inside and outside of a dust cover, let's say two and a half pages of A4, I got two solid sessions, great gaming.

I got great use out of those dungeons - while one could make arguments about room for improvements in any of them which other reviews have done, I think the combination of having a bunch of them in a compact format was very useful indeed when running that open format hexcrawl. The players could roam where they willed and I had kick-ass dungeons at my finger-tips whenever I needed them.

In full transparency I must admit this was not the *most* weight efficient way possible to carry those around since Knock #1 is a chunky book but given the minimal effort involved in pulling it off the shelf and slinging it in my go-bag, I could commit the calories to lug it around.