Dungeons in Dungeons & Dragons

There's an interesting poll; still doesn't have tons of respondents yet, but the early numbers are interesting. Basically, the question is; how much do you use dungeons in Dungeons & Dragons? The answers include:

• Never
• Almost Never
• Rarely
• Sometimes but not regularly.

Those are the answers that I consider variations of "I don't focus the game on dungeoncrawling."

• Regularly, but not exclusively.

I consider this one to be the probable default mode, where people don't really think about it too much, but by default they use a lot of dungeon-crawls. Probably because most of them run packaged modules, which tend to have a lot of dungeon-crawls in them.

• Most of the time
• Always

There's also an "I'm a special snowflake" response for people who can't decide. Back in ye olde days, these were more overtly jokey, like "I'm Brannich Blacksmoke" or "Lemoncurry." I don't remember why those two became the default, but whatever. There is a vote or two on that one, but I'm going to ignore it.

In the first batch, we have almost a third, so a bigger plurality than I expected. My own answer was actually "Almost Never" rather than "Never" because I do occasionally do a little bit of one here and there. Maybe that's not entirely fair, as there's a pretty big difference between "Never" and "Sometimes, but not regularly". But conceptually, they're all gradients of the same idea; not really being a big enough fan of dungeon-crawling to make it the focus of the game. Maybe the most extreme, "Never" is different than teh rest, but the percentage of responses that selected never is very low, about 3%. The cumulative percentage of all of those groups together is almost 30%.

The middle one, the "default" as I called it, is just a hair under half of the respondents.

The fans of dungeon-crawling, i.e., most of the time and always, are about 22-23%, so less than a quarter. This is interesting to me. I had thought that my avoidance of dungeon-crawling made me kind of an iconoclast in the D&D-o-sphere, and I do mostly play D&D or D&D-adjacent fantasy games. Apparently that's not necessarily true. If nearly a third of people use dungeons, at most, "sometimes but not regularly" then that's a pretty significant secondary plurality. 

I suspect that the bottom and top part will start to converge. I've been watching the last few hours as more responses came in, and the "not that interested in dungeons" group gradually has gone down from just over 30 to a bit under it. I wouldn't be surprised if it settles somewhere near a quarter, i.e. 25%. Meanwhile, the "I use dungeons a lot" group has done the opposite; gone from under 20% to a little over. I think both will "settle" close to a quarter the responses.

Anyway, interesting data, I think.