Happy Jacks RPG Podcast

Here are some of the results from our latest listener survey. We had 70 responses, which is two or three times our previous responses.

Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edtition						19.73%
Dungeons and Dragons 3rd, 3.5 or Pathfinder						12.93%
Star Wars						10.2%
Savage Worlds						8.16%
GURPS						7.48%
Homebrew						7.48%
White Wolf						7.48%
Traveller						6.8%
Chaosium/BRP (includes Call of Cthulhu)						5.44%
Shadow Run						4.08%
Other D20 OGL System						3.4%
Fantasy Flight Games Titles (Rogue Trader, Dark Heresy, Grimm, etc)						2.72%
Indie System						2.04%
Hero System						1.36%
Fate/FUDGE-based Systems						0.68%
Burning Wheel/Mouseguard						0%

Again, I’m surprised that the various DnD flavors combined only hit 39%. The other notable response is that no one said they played Burning Wheel or Mouseguard. This reinforces my theory that only bloggers play these games.

Regarding how often you GM/DM:

I primarily GM/DM the games my group plays.						34%
I tend to GM/DM more often than other players in my group.						29%
I GM/DM occasionally.						18%
I rarely GM/DM — I am primarily a player.						15%
I’m a player and have no interest in GM/DMing.						3%

Again, not surprising. I figure most of the audience of podcasts and blogs are GMs or DMs. Though players are better represented that I expected, so we’re going to continue to work toward adding more content for players.

We also asked about listener email, as it’s the backbone of our content:

Like it! There’s just enough listener email and voicemail.						54%
Love it! I want more listener email and voicemail.						33%
It’s okay. Sometimes, there’s too much listern email and voicemail.						13%

Regarding the CONTENT of these emails what do you like/don’t like:

	I want more	Just right	Too much	I want less
Listeners’ gaming stories.	29.23%	64.62%	3.08%	3.08%
Homebrewed rules changes.	21.54%	61.54%	7.69%	9.23%
Questions about RPG topics.	54.55%	45.45%	0%	0%
Answers to questions posed in previous episodes.	34.85%	62.12%	1.52%	1.52%
Beer recommendations.	27.69%	35.38%	15.38%	21.54%

This may be of interest to those of you who write us emails, and when we get to the point where we have to limit the number of emails we read, we’ll definitely keep this in mind. So in the future, if your email includes QUESTIONS about RPGs, they’ll go to the front of the line, because more than half of our listeners want to hear more of your questions (and our answers, apparently).

And finally we asked about the rest of our content:

	More please	Just right	I want less	Make it go away
Recaps of our current games.	44.78%	49.25%	5.97%	0%
Commentary about the gaming industry.	26.87%	64.18%	8.96%	0%
Gaming stories from “the old days.”	40.3%	55.22%	4.48%	0%
Reviews/critiques of various RPG systems.	60.61%	36.36%	3.03%	0%
Tangents	23.88%	67.16%	8.96%	0%

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Season 03 Episode 11

Your hosts: Stu, CADave, Gammonstark, Stork, Tyler and Kimi.

Listener email, and keeping the challenge in your games.

Featured song: “That Bastard John Barleycorn” by the Merry Wives of Windsor.

We love listener feedback.

Email us at happyjacksrpg at gmail dot com.

Call our voicemail line at (626) 629-8RPG

Follow us on twitter at: www.twitter.com/happyjacksrpg.

Click the link below to take our survey.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Final Gencon 2010 update from Veremond and Useless Triviaman.

Baxil over at his blog has posted modified DnD4E initiative cards. He’s done a generic one that can work with any system and one for his current Fireborn game. He’s also created cards for Enemies, Allies, and other special cases.

Taking his lead (and since my DnD4E games is on hiatus), I made an initiative tracking card specifically for GURPS. I’ve included all of the perception rolls, basic speed/move and a spot to note important disadvantages, and the GM may need to keep in mind.

gurps-init-cards (pdf 45kb)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Season 03 Episode 10

Your hosts: Stu, Kimi, Tappy, Casey and Bruce.

We read listener email and discuss GMs roles in Player Characters, both generation and in-play.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Update from Listener Veremond from Gencon 2010.

A few months ago, David Pinilla set up a survey for RPG Podcast listeners. If you’re interested in reading the RPG Podcast Listener Survey Results, you can find them here.

There are a couple of things I noticed that I find interesting.

The Games People Play.

The first thing I noticed is what games are popular with listeners. Some of it isn’t surprising, but some is:

• DnD/D20 (except Star Wars) is played by 36.8% of respondents.
• Savage Worlds: 10%.
• FATE/FUDGE: 8.3%.

It’s no surprise that DnD/D20 has the highest share of players. Frankly, I thought it would be about twice that, and in reality it might be.

I suspect the sample of RPG Podcast Listeners as a subset of all RPG players is a small fraction. Many people play RPGs, but aren’t “in to the hobby” enough to spend time listening to podcast (or reading blogs). They play their game on Saturday night, and that’s it (until the next session). They aren’t interested in it beyond what’s happening at their table. I suspect there may be a lot of DnD/D20 players who fit into this category, so we’re only getting a portion of them in the sample used by the survey.

The other thing that surprised me is that Savage Worlds and FATE/FUDGE scored so high. I find this even more remarkable because White Wolf titles only came in at 6.3%. At my local gaming story, by looking at what’s stocked, I would have assumed that White Wolf games would have come in second behind DnD/D20. Maybe that’s the case regionally.

I wonder if the popularity of Savage Worlds and FATE/FUDGE is a result of the low barrier-to-entry. The Savage Worlds Explorer’s Edtion is 10 bucks, and you can find FATE/FUDGE material free on the web, and even the stuff that isn’t free is reasonably priced. Spirit of the Century is about 15 bucks for a PDF.

Contrast this with GURPS (which is almost $100 for hard-copies of the core books), which came in at 2.8%, and HERO (also with expensive books) at 1.9%, and you start to see a correlation between price-to-play and popularity.

This is further reinforced by Burning Wheel/Mouseguard (6.7%), which (at least in the case of Burning Wheel) is a very complicated system, but reasonably priced.

The Top 10

How did the individual podcasts rate with regards to listenership? Here’s the top 10:

1. Fear the Boot (44.0%)
2. The Podge Cast (36.4%)
3. All Games Considered (28.4%)
4. Role Playing Public Radio (26.2%)
5. Bear Swarm! (26%)
6. Brilliant Gameologists (24..1%)
7. Atomic Array (19.5%)
8. Happy Jacks RPG Podcast (19.5%)
9. The Voice of the Revolution (19.3%)
10. 2D Feet in a Random Direction (18.9%)

I am stunned that we came in so high, and rightfully so. This survey took place in may, when all of us (the Happy Jack’s hosts) were working the Renaissance Pleasure Faire, and many listeners were under the impression that they were listening to pre-recorded episodes that were months old. Because many listeners thought they weren’t listening to “timely” shows, our site traffic and unique downloads plummeted. So, for our show in particular, this was not a good month to survey podcast listeners. But somehow we still hit #8.

The most recent episode of Brilliant Gameologists discusses the survey, and one of the hosts (Scott) predicted that either Happy Jacks or RPPR will be in the Number 1 position next year. He backed this prediction up with the comments, as both RPPR and Happy Jacks had an enormous number of “rabid” comments in the survey. This surprised me as well (not with regards to RPPR), but with regards to Happy Jacks. I was under the impression that no one knows who we are. Certainly, I don’t think we’ve pinged the radar of most other podcasts or blogs, as we don’t get many mentions on other podcasts or blogs. But apparently, word-of-mouth promotion from existing listeners goes a long way, maybe farther than getting blog/podcast mentions).

What I’d Like to See in the Next Survey

There are a couple questions that I would like to have asked in the next survey:

• Did recommendations and reviews in podcasts get you to try/buy new games.
• How many listeners are GMs and how many are players.

The first question is just for curiosity’s sake. The second question would affect our content. Do we have a lot of listeners who are primarily players? If so, we need to step up our player-targeted content.

To Conclude

Thank you to those of you who took the survey. It’s provided a lot of insight, and you may very well see some subtle changes to our content as a result (but we’re not getting rid of the burps!)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

GENCON UPDATE from Listener Veremond and Useless Trivia Man.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Reminder about Gencon promos.

Go to THIS FORUM TOPIC for information.