Data queried August 29, 2026. The data grows weekly; we'll rerun everything around 500 sessions.
Most numbers about how people play D&D come from surveys. Surveys measure what people remember, or what they'd like to be true. Threadfall records sessions live at the table, which happens to produce something surveys can't: how long sessions actually run, and when tables actually sit down to play.
We measured 88 live-recorded sessions across 20 campaigns, through August 2026. 35 of those have reliable durations, 33 measured directly plus 2 recovered from timestamped transcript chunks (a method validated against the measured sessions first: it agreed within a minute on 15 of 16). The other 53 predate both the duration field and the chunk retention window, so their lengths are honestly unknowable. The timed 35 add up to just over 101 hours. These are tables that opted into a live recording tool, so they're not a random sample of the hobby, just one thin slice of it: groups organized enough to schedule a game and committed enough to record it. Nothing below says anything about D&D players in general.
The median session runs 3.05 hours, average 2.9. Ninety percent wrap inside 4 hours, and the longest we recorded is 4.05. I'd assumed the marathon session, the one that runs until 2am, was more common than this. Maybe it happens at tables that don't record. Among the 35 sessions we can time, three hours is close to the whole story. Recording has no built-in length limit, a table can run as long as it wants. The four hour ceiling is behavioral, not a limit of the tool.
The median timed session produces 25,314 words of transcript, and that's everything: the roleplay, the rules arguments, somebody ordering the pizza. It works out to roughly 8,100 words an hour of continuous table talk (median of per-session rates). The Hobbit runs about 95,000 words, so a weekly table talks its way through a Hobbit's worth roughly every four sessions, though spoken words and edited prose aren't the same kind of words.
The median transcript runs about 25,000 words; the chapter written from it runs about 1,100. Measured per session, the median compression is 22.8 to 1. Most of what gets said at a table isn't story. It's mechanics, cross-talk, and people deciding what to do next. The story inside three hours of play comes out to about four printed pages.
Scheduling looks the way you'd expect if you've ever tried to organize a game night. Friday is the most common in the data, 25 of 88 sessions, and that one holds up to a closer look: those 25 come from 7 different campaigns, with the largest contributing 6. Sunday is second at 21, though 11 of those are a single group's standing slot, so half of Sunday's count is one table's habit. Friday through Sunday together is two-thirds of everything recorded. And Wednesday produced exactly one session out of 88. With 20 campaigns behind these counts, that's more likely a fact about organized recording groups than a rule about the hobby.
Our system flags lines it thinks a table will repeat later, the jokes and declarations that outlive the session, and it flags about 21 per timed session, roughly one every 8 minutes. That number measures what one AI extractor considers quotable, which says as much about the extractor's calibration as about table wit. I'm including it because the rate stays steady across very different sessions, so it's tracking something consistent, though I can't tell you exactly what.
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Live-recorded sessions | 88, across 20 campaigns |
| Sessions with usable durations | 35 (33 measured, 2 derived from chunk timestamps), 101.4 hours |
| Session length (n=35) | median 3.05 h · mean 2.90 · p90 3.96 · max 4.05 |
| Transcript words per session (n=33 timed) | median 25,314 · mean 23,845 · range 8,456 to 36,459 |
| Words per hour (median of per-session rates) | 8,125 |
| Recap compression (median of per-session ratios, n=31) | 22.8 to 1 |
| Day-of-week, all 88 (Sun to Sat) | 21 · 10 · 6 · 1 · 12 · 25 · 13 |
| Friday concentration | 25 sessions from 7 campaigns; largest single-campaign share 6 |
| Sunday concentration | 21 sessions from 6 campaigns; largest single-campaign share 11 |
| AI-flagged quotes per timed session | 21.4, about one per 8 minutes |
| Recording length cap | none; the 4-hour ceiling is behavioral |
Sessions recorded live through a browser, an in-person mic, or a Discord voice bot. Durations are wall-clock recording time for 33 sessions plus 2 recovered from transcript-chunk timestamps (validated method, above). Day-of-week comes from session timestamps across all 88. Word counts are whitespace-delimited transcript tokens with out-of-character talk included, from the 33 timed sessions; median word counts agree across the timed and untimed groups (25,314 vs 24,751), so the sample isn't skewing them. Test and demo campaigns are excluded. Known confounds: the tables are self-selected users of one recording tool, 20 campaigns stand behind all the counts, and the quote metric is defined by our own extractor. If you want a cut we didn't run, ask: hello@thread-fall.com and we'll run it.
Among the 35 live-recorded sessions we can time precisely, the median is 3.05 hours and 90 percent wrap inside 4 hours. The four hour session people plan around turns out to sit near the top of the range rather than the middle. This is measured wall-clock data from tables that record their games, so treat it as a snapshot of that group rather than a survey of every table.
In this data set, Friday (25 of 88 sessions, spread across 7 campaigns), then Sunday, then Saturday. Friday through Sunday covers two-thirds of all recorded play, and Wednesday produced exactly one session out of 88.
About 25,000 in a median three-hour session, roughly 8,100 an hour, counted from live transcripts with out-of-character talk included. The written recap distills that about 23 to 1, down to roughly 1,100 words of story.
Threadfall transcribes D&D and Daggerheart sessions live at the table, which produces exact wall-clock and timestamp data as a side effect. The numbers here come from 88 real live-recorded sessions across 20 campaigns on the platform, test campaigns excluded, queried August 2026. Methodology and confounds are on this page; if you want a cut we didn't run, ask: hello@thread-fall.com.
Threadfall is the tool that produced this data: it records your session live and turns it into a written chapter. What is Threadfall? · what makes a good session recap · read a campaign it documented