The current incarnation of our gaming group kicked off in January of 2012. Since then, we’ve played some RPG or other nearly every Friday night. The constitution of the group has shifted over time, but it’s been typical for us to have 6-10 players on any given Friday night.

We have a shared Google spreadsheet where we track games and schedule upcoming sessions. This page summarizes our gaming from January 2012 to present. For the first eight years or so, this data is almost exclusively for Friday night gaming. The group was pretty unified and we played every week. The pandemic changed that, fragmenting the group (or accelerating fragmentation that had already begun). The data gets weirder (and more diverse!) from that point on.

We still track our games, though, and since we all get together in some combination nearly every Friday plus at various other times, there’s a pretty good story here to be found in the data.

Each of our campaigns has a name. Here’s a quick look at the campaigns and how many sessions were part of each one.

Campaigns

The top entry here isn’t actually a campaign – it’s a grab bag bucket of one shots (and “few shots”) using various systems and set in the Rainy City setting. If we broke out some of the “few shots” and gave them campaign labels, this number would go down, but I expect that even if it only consisted of standalone one shots it would still hold a pretty big spot on the chart.

The diversification of our gaming really shows up here, with 4 of the top 10 campaigns being side games that not everyone was in – games that didn’t make the Friday night session.

I should probably add some filters so I can display Friday night sessions vs other games. But I’m not going to do that today.

One interesting note is that one of the campaigns that was most memorable for me as GM, and that I remember most fondly – the Rainy City Parliament – wasn’t all that long, at 17 sessions, so it no longer even makes the top 10. In contrast, the Ruin Sea Campaign, a D&D 5e hexcrawl, was my single longest campaign in terms of sessions, but it didn’t involve the same investment on my part as GM as my favorite campaigns ( the Rainy City Parliament, War in the North, City College, and Hissatsuwaza).

Here is a plot of how the campaigns stack up over time, with color to indicate the game system.

Now how about game systems? Let’s take a closer look at what systems have we played since 2012.

Game Systems

D&D dominates the list, making up about a quarter of our games. It’s a common ground, a touchstone, a game we always return to. It was also the system for the Long Stair, Goblin Kingdoms, Nezara, and The Ruin Sea Campaign. I’m (pleasantly) surprised to see that Dauerregen, my homebrew system for recent Rainy City games, has managed to move up into second place. A lot of this is thanks to Andrew and I running one-shots of it alongside the two-year long City College Campaign. It’s been succeeded by newer “editions” of it, and I suspect that if I grouped all “Skeleton” system games together, its second place position would be especially safe.

Some of my very favorite RPGs do really well on this list, with both Street Fighter and The Fantasy Trip in the top 5.

RuneQuest (RuneQuest 6, now Mythras) has a respectable position as well. There was a stretch there during which it was basically the only system we played, and that adds up. That’s also how Traveller 2022 got its position, falling in not too far behind RuneQuest 6 and next in the overall rankings.

Four of the most played game systems are in non-fantasy settings, which I think is a good sign of variety. If I blocked this off into 5 year increments, I suspect we’d see a marked difference between the first 5 years and the last 5 years. One more thing for my “to do” list, perhaps.

Here’s a look of the game systems we’ve played over time, and who ran each system.

Ok, new topic.

Who GMs the most?

GMs

No real surprises here. This matches my intuitions. Andrew and I both run pretty regularly, and we had a lead over everyone else because at the start it was just the two of us in the rotation.

Now let’s look at which game systems have been run the largest number of times by anyone who has run twenty or more sessions.

Andrew’s Systems

Andrew has run a lot of Dungeons & Dragons. His top three spots (40% of his games) are versions of D&D. This is down from 50% earlier, and I think this would be a good case for a “first five years” versus “last five years” comparison, where D&D is less prominent in his more recent GM-ing overall.

Rich’s Systems

About a fifth of my games are D&D games, mostly 5th edition. That checks out given that the Goblin Kingdoms, Ruin Sea, and Long Stair games all used it. Street Fighter is currently in the lead, with the Fantasy Trip bumping up against the top as well.

Together, Skeleton system games also make a good showing. If you combine Dauerregen (39), Dauergewitter (20), Skeleton (17), Dauerunwetter (3), Dungeon? Fuck Yeah. (2), and Dauerregen v2 (1), you get a respectable 82 sessions, making it easily the game system I’ve run most frequently. That’s pretty heartwarming

Jacque’s Systems

Jacque brings it.

Ben’s Systems

Cool list – all modern, supers, and sci fi.

Bill’s Systems

One cool thing about Bill’s games is that he’s not afraid to roll his own system when it is called for. His first two campaigns used homebrewed game systems. I probably wouldn’t have made Dauerregen (now Skeleton) for the City College campaign if I hadn’t been emboldened to do so following his example – chances are, it would’ve been a RuneQuest 6 / Mythras campaign.

Everyone Else’s Systems

Just for fun.

More D&D, but also the added variety of a couple homebrew gigs.

Shared Campaign Settings

The Broken Lands is a shared campaign setting. If we take the original Broken Lands campaign and the more recent Ruin Sea and Saviors of Adastariis campaigns as the three campaigns we’ve had in the setting, who has run it most?

Broken Lands Adventures

Pretty even split – more even than I realized. I tend to think of the Broken Lands as being more Andrew’s playground than mine because he ran most of the sessions in the original Broken Lands campaign – but in turn, I’ve run more sessions in the Ruin Sea. What if we also include the precursor campaigns – Goblin Kingdoms and Nezara to the totals?

Broken Worlds Adventures

Still an even split.

Our other major shared setting is the Hrimgate. I’ve put a lot of time into setting design for it, and I almost think of it as having been created in its current form to be a home for the War in the North. (That’s what it is in my head.) How does that shake out?

Hrimgate Adventures

Andrew has run well over twice as many games in the world of Hrimgate as I have. This makes sense, when you consider that Ruins of Vanor, Magisterium, War in the South, and yes, First Cities, are all Hrimgate games. (His count without First Cities (i.e., only including games in the world of Hrimgate now, not its earliest days), would be 44; this is closer, but still significantly higher.)

I think of myself as a major co-creator of the setting, and certainly I’ve made my mark – but in terms of GMing, I haven’t run it nearly as much.

Here’s another thing. Hrimgate, in my head, is properly a RuneQuest setting. But is it?

That’s a pretty clear result.

Rainy City Adventures

We’ve also had campaigns and one-shot sessions in The Rainy City, a shared campaign setting that first started as a concept for a BESM 2nd edition game (which never happened) and ultimately became the setting for a Rules Cyclopedia D&D game sometime around 2009-2010. Here are the Rainy City campaigns and sessions on record.

Rainy City one-shot sessions are more common than campaign sessions. I kind of like that, and I wonder if to some extent it is why the city itself feels like it has quite a lot of texture. We’ve had opportunity to look in, if only for a short while, on various people of the city and their neighborhoods and their doings. These numbers both under- and over-represent non-campaign sessions, however – in many of the “Rainy City Adventures” sessions, characters from City College have featured. On the other hand, about half of the Parliament sessions were games that featured 1-3 vignettes: short adventures with mostly pregen characters.

What game systems have we used for Rainy City Sessions?

As I noted above, this doesn’t take into account the D&D Rules Cyclopedia campaign from before the spreadsheet was kept, for which I have records of ten sessions. Skeleton system variations (from Dauerregen on) have become the home game system for this campaign setting.

Who’s GMing in the Rainy City?

Mostly me, which isn’t too surprising. But it’s cool to see that Andrew has run a good number of sessions as well I’d love to see more of these run by other players from our group. Certainly people know the city well enough and the texture added by other GMs would be fun to see. I’d also be curious to see what game systems they’d use to bring their vision of the city to life!