The State of Play in 2021

[Polydamas]

Tabletop gaming has changed a bit over the past 20 years, from D&D + World of Darkness + Call of Cthulhu to the proliferation of small games companies and variants of D&D. The biggest mystery is what games are actually being played on Friday and Saturday nights. Does anyone have data?

There is some data on sales, but I take the position that sales have little to do with what people actually play. Most roleplaying books are never used, while the ones which are used most often are often used 2-4 times a month for ten years. The gamers with the most money to throw at kickstarter often have less free time than teenagers and university students.

Small companies often issue games with short rules, because that is what the market will bear, but how does that relate to play?

Conventions are also not so good a guide, not just because of the pandemic but because the Internet has given gamers so many different ways to be social. Streaming might be better, although I suspect its biased towards popular systems.

[Polydamas]

Roll20 has statistics on campaigns played on them in 2020. Because of the pandemic, that is not a bad proxy.

53% D&D 5e
10% Call of Cthulhu
5% Pathfinder
1% Warhammer
1% World of Darkness
1% D&D 3.5E
1% Star Wars
1% Starfinder
12% Other (Savage Worlds, Shadowrun, das Schwartze Auge, etc.)
15% Other/Uncategorized

GURPS is at 0.24%. So versions of D&D make up about 70% of campaigns played on roll 20 whose system is specified. It looks like Pathfinder is shrinking (but only moved from second to third place because hockey stick distribution) and D&D 4e and WoD are collapsing.

[William]

Of course, the very name Roll20 suggests a preference for d20 based games, so I don't think this necessarily reflects GURPS' position in the game market.

[Polydamas]

Originally Posted by William

Of course, the very name Roll20 suggests a preference for d20 based games, so I don't think this necessarily reflects GURPS' position in the game market.

I suspect that the name is just an arbitrary marketing choice at the beginning, possibly shaped by what URLs they could buy as much as anything else.

The 15% uncategorized is worrisome, and probably a high percentage of those games are smaller systems, but its better than just one person saying something gloomy, another saying that does not match my experience or my conversations with other people in the industry, and the first person not having anything public they can point to. I've never met a CoC player or seen a book in stores, but it seems like it is big in the Midwest like Das schwartze Auge is in Germany or LARPing is in Sweden.

I have seen estimates that for a few years around 2012, Pathfinder sales were similar to D&D 4e sales. It looks like that might not be the case any more.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Polydamas

I've never met a CoC player or seen a book in stores,

Hi! My name's Fred and I've played CoC. Not enthusiastically but I've done it multiple times.

If it would help you I would say that you can explain CoC's survival by a dedicated fan base that buys new editions and especially _Special_ new editions (deluxe binding and so forth) almost reflexively. It might be something like Traveller that way.

Other people get roped into playing CoC (over and over) because there's a relatively large and elaborate amount of adventures for it and almost any sort of player group can run through them (until everyone dies or goes mad).

[Polydamas]

H-C Vortisch too, I was thinking more about people I know in person. Delta Green shows up on the Roll20 list too, although I don't think we should take any of the numbers under 1% too seriously given how many games are uncategorized.

I think the One Shot Adventures project is one of the most useful for GURPS right now, because games spread when people play them with someone new.

[dbm]

This gets discussed fairly regularly on ENWorld. Here’s a thread on Roll20 and another on Fantasy Grounds.

The platforms definitely skew towards supporting certain types of games. As a user of Fantasy Grounds we picked this as it supported both D&D 5e and Savage Worlds really well and these are the campaigns we were running when lockdown started.

When people talk about running games there seems to be a preference for Roll20 due to its ‘free’ tier and a whole bunch of people using a ‘home brew’ solution which may just be Zoom or some other video conferencing software, perhaps with something like Google Docs to share maps. Basically, if your game needs maps and your game uses a rule system that is well supported there is a tangible benefit from using the platforms like Roll20 or Fantasy Grounds. If you aren’t using a system like that or stick with ‘theatre of the mind’ it is less beneficial.

So, it’s a self-selecting audience not a true reflection of the industry as a whole. But it is one of the few tangible data points we have available as these are numbers of games being run, not numbers of books being bought that potentially never see use.

[seaweedbrain]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Other people get roped into playing CoC (over and over) because there's a relatively large and elaborate amount of adventures for it and almost any sort of player group can run through them (until everyone dies or goes mad).

my group has been turning to pre made adventures more and more. I think we're getting to the point in our gaming lives that we feel we'd rather focus more on playing than worrying about set up outside of character creation. I'm currently the only in the group that as far as I know has notes regarding my own campaign setting A mix of Infinite Worlds and Indiana Jones.

[Polydamas]

That is a good point that in some systems you can just use any old videochat app. I think 5e D&D played down battle maps didn't it? That is an old debate in D&D, 2e had Combat and Tactics and 3.5e encouraged battle maps too.

When someone in my last group ten years ago left for school, they continued to play over Skype.

Originally Posted by seaweedbrain

my group has been turning to pre made adventures more and more. I think we're getting to the point in our gaming lives that we feel we'd rather focus more on playing than worrying about set up outside of character creation. I'm currently the only in the group that as far as I know has notes regarding my own campaign setting A mix of Infinite Worlds and Indiana Jones.

systems with good adventures can be hard to find! A lot of 3e adventures were less fun than teenaged-me could come up with. CoC has famous adventures like Mask of Nyarlathotep, but also some which are "investigation/exposition, fight scene, investigation/exposition, fight scene ..." Finding those good adventures can be hard too.

[Apollonian]

Originally Posted by Polydamas

systems with good adventures can be hard to find! A lot of 3e adventures were less fun than teenaged-me could come up with. CoC has famous adventures like Mask of Nyarlathotep, but also some which are "investigation/exposition, fight scene, investigation/exposition, fight scene ..." Finding those good adventures can be hard too.

Yeah, I'm starting to be in the same situation. Lack of adventures is one of GURPS' weak points, even though there are very good reasons for it. Luckily, it's not too hard to adapt adventures for other games to GURPS...