I just finished listening to the first major campaign/arc of The Adventure Zone, a podcast where three brothers and their dad play Dungeons and Dragons, broken up inter a series of stories. It’s very good! Each story definitely felt pretty different, especially the last stories (especially especially The Stolen Century) seemed to have a lot of exposition by the DM and little action by the players. So I set out to see if there were any trends for how much players spoke each stories/episode.

Spoiler alert: Results were in the header image. It shows the fraction that each player spoke in each episode, as defined by numbers of words spoken. The darker shades represend the human players speaking, while the lighter shades represent their characters (or the NPCs for Griffin, the DM).

There doesn’t seem to be a trend across the whole campaign, though I was surprised by how much it varied. The Stolen Century story, which I expected to be very Griffin-heavy, was a pretty average 50% of Griffin + 10% as NPCs. The finale was definitely mostly DM, with Griffin making up 78.7% of words in the penultimate episode.

I was also surprised by how much the fraction of in- and out-of-character changed by episode, even within a story. For example, Petals to the Metal had episode 21 with one of the highest fraction of in-character words (59.3%), then just two episodes later had some of the lowest (4.3%, 5.6%, 9.1%). These correspond with episodes of low-action – episode 21 was basically where the PCs talk to the quest-givers about what’s going on – and the action-heavy battle wagon race.

There’s a lot to look at in the data. Take a look for yourself at the link below.

The data!

Which hugely relies on the incredible effots of the TAZscripts team. (thank you!!)

TAZ Transcribed

And how the script for pulling the data.

github