Data queried September 29, 2026. The data grows weekly; we'll rerun everything around 500 sessions.
The longest session across 60 recorded games ran 4 hours and 3 minutes. The median finished at 3 hours and 4 minutes. So the go-to advice to budget four hours is really budgeting for the longest night anybody had. Most tables are empty an hour before that.
Most numbers about how people play D&D come from surveys, which measure what people remember or what they would like to be true. These come from sessions recorded live at the table, so they are wall-clock times rather than recollections.
The median session runs 3.06 hours and the mean 2.96. Ninety percent finish inside 3.97 hours. A table that played until 2am would find the transcript waiting in the morning, because the recorder has no length limit and no timeout. None of them played that long. Three and a half hours covers three sessions in four, and and all but two of the 60 finished inside four.
Some tables do run to 2am. None of them are in this data, and these are groups organized enough to schedule a game and press record.
The median timed session produces 23,697 words of transcript: the roleplay, the rules arguments, somebody ordering the pizza. That is roughly 8,000 words an hour. The Hobbit runs about 95,000 words, so a group that plays weekly gets through a Hobbit's worth every four sessions. That is how much talk a group is carrying between one session and the next.
The median transcript runs about 24,000 words. The chapter written from it runs about 920. The median of the per-session ratios is 23 to 1, and it holds across sessions that look nothing alike. The other 23,000 words are mechanics, cross-talk, and five people deciding what to do next. A written recap holds about four percent of what was said.
Friday takes 33 of 117 sessions, spread across 8 different campaigns with the largest contributing 8. Sunday is second at 26, but 12 of those belong to one table's weekly slot. Wednesday has hosted two sessions since March.
Friday through Sunday is 62 percent of everything recorded, so a new group hunting for a night is competing for the same three. These are groups organized enough to record, so it is a fact about them rather than about the hobby.
Our software flags the lines it expects a table to repeat later, the jokes and declarations that outlive the night, and it finds about 22 a session, one every eight minutes. The rate barely moves across sessions that differ in every other way. A three-hour session produces about two dozen lines somebody will quote back. That is a count of what one extractor considers quotable, which says as much about its calibration as about what a table finds funny.
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Live-recorded sessions | 117 |
| Sessions with usable durations | 60 measured directly (2 aborted recordings excluded), 177.4 hours |
| Session length (n=60) | median 3.06 h · mean 2.96 · p90 3.97 · max 4.05 |
| Transcript words per session (n=60 timed) | median 23,697 · mean 23,661 · range 8,630 to 38,353 |
| Words per hour (median of per-session rates) | 8,004 |
| Recap compression (median of per-session ratios, n=59) | 23.0 to 1 |
| Day-of-week, all 117 (Sun to Sat) | 26 · 14 · 13 · 2 · 15 · 33 · 14 |
| Friday concentration | 33 sessions from 8 campaigns; largest single-campaign share 8 |
| Sunday concentration | 26 sessions from 7 campaigns; largest single-campaign share 12 |
| AI-flagged quotes per timed session | 22.3, about one per 8 minutes |
| Recording length cap | none; the 4-hour ceiling is behavioral |
117 live-recorded sessions through September 2026, of which 60 carry a reliable duration. The other 55 predate the duration field, so their lengths are unknowable, and two aborted recordings under half an hour are set aside as false starts rather than sessions. The timed 60 add up to just over 177 hours. These are tables that opted into a live recording tool, groups organized enough to schedule a game and committed enough to record it, so nothing here says anything about D&D players in general. Sessions recorded live through a browser, an in-person mic, or a Discord voice bot. Durations are wall-clock recording time for the 60 sessions that carry one; recordings under half an hour are treated as aborted starts and left out. Day-of-week comes from session timestamps across all 117. Word counts are whitespace-delimited transcript tokens with out-of-character talk included, from the 60 timed sessions; median word counts agree across the timed and untimed groups (23,697 vs 24,635), 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, a modest set of campaigns stands 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. The data on this page is licensed CC BY 4.0: reuse it freely, credit Threadfall with a link.
Among the 60 live-recorded sessions we can time precisely, the median is 3.06 hours and 90 percent wrap inside 4 hours. The four hour session people plan around sits 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.
Most run close to three hours. The median across the 60 sessions we can time precisely is 3.06 hours, and 90 percent wrap inside 4.
The mean is 2.96 hours and the median is 3.06 hours, measured across 60 live-recorded sessions with precise timing.
In this data set, Friday (33 of 117 sessions, spread across 8 campaigns), then Sunday at 26. Thursday, Monday, Saturday and Tuesday sit between 13 and 15 and are a tie rather than an order. Friday through Sunday covers just under two-thirds of all recorded play, and Wednesday produced exactly two sessions out of 117.
About 24,000 in a median three-hour session, roughly 8,000 an hour, counted from live transcripts with out-of-character talk included. The written recap distills that about 23 to 1, down to roughly 920 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 117 real live-recorded sessions across the campaigns recording on the platform, test campaigns excluded, queried September 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
More measured data: how often characters die · how long campaigns last · how many quests parties juggle · what a real party looks like