Top Games Played On FG In 2018: D&D, Pathfinder, Savage Worlds

Fantasy Grounds has sent me over some graphs showing the top games played on its virtual tabletop platform throughout the whole of 2018. Unsurprisingly, the top three are D&D 5th Edition (67%), Pathfinder (12%), and Savage Worlds (5%). These are followed by Starfinder, D&D 3.5, Call of Cthulhu, D&D 4E, Star Wars, then Pathfinder 2. The figures are much the same as we've seen previously, with an increase by Starfinder and the appearance of Pathfinder 2 from July.

Previous stats: 2016 | 2017​

 

[Rodney Musgraves]

Because cake is a lie!

why pie charts - whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy

Thats easy, because cake is a lie!

 

[vpuigdoller]

I think that by D&D and Pathfinder having bigger and constant yearly Adventure Paths makes it easier for the busier ppl to run and play games since the prep time is vastly reduced and without the need to create the story yourself. More DMs (GMs) equals more people playing.

 

[vpuigdoller]

Some of this is driven by the quality of the ruleset automation. Savage Worlds has a very good ruleset. There is an excellent community AD&D ruleset as well. So that encourages more players of those systems to use FG.

Of course, the 5e ruleset is very good. FG was the first to win the WoTC license and they have all of the official WoTC 5e material available.

I agree 100% Ruleset automation in Fantasy grounds and Roll20 has helped a lot and makes it way easier to run and join games.

 

[Reynard]

I think that by D&D and Pathfinder having bigger and constant yearly Adventure Paths makes it easier for the busier ppl to run and play games since the prep time is vastly reduced and without the need to create the story yourself. More DMs (GMs) equals more people playing.

YMMV of course, but I have never found running APs in either PF or D&D to be time savers. In fact, for me it takes more time to pour through the adventure, extract the vital information, modify it to fit my particular group of players and their characters, and make it interesting and fun to run. Dragonheist is a perfect example: it is an okay adventure and an absolutely terrible heist, with a huge amount of obfuscated material buried in the prose and scattered around the book.

That said, I prefer FG for running things like the Yawning Portal adventures. It has worked great so far for Sunless Citadel and Forge of Fury. But those discrete modules have far less scattered info than, say, Storm King's Thunder.

 

[Mistwell]

The Pathfinder Playtest finished in December so now you would be just playing for the fun of it.

There is another type of playing?

 

[Morrus]

There is another type of playing?

I'm sure hate-playing is a thing; the gaming corollary to hate-watching.

 

[LordEntrails]

So we now have our first evidence of the impact of NolanT getting caught behaving badly. More than 10,000 additional games per month were run on FG following the late September incident. Not all of them stuck around, and some of that increase is no doubt due to the release of WDDH and DoMM, but compared to the June increase, it seems most of that was due to the NolanT incident.

So, 10k games, if each "group" plays 3 times a month and has 5 people, 10k/3*5 = 16,667 people moved from Roll20 to FG. Now that's a totally rough estimate based upon limited data that has many factors and assumptions. But it does give a reasonable scale to the impact of the incident.

And, as mentioned below, since those are only games that are recorded using the Alias feature, the number is certainly higher.

Wow! 5e added over 19,000 users in a year - that is more than the total users of the next 9 highest games (in Dec. 18). It also increased its share by 3%

I like 5e, but it seems to me the marketing team is doing a pretty darn good job!

Not USERS, those are games played.

FG reports the number of games played using their "Alias" feature. Not total number of games played, or number of licenses or number of players, but rather just those games that run for at least an hour and use the Alias function to allow players to connect to the GM without using a direct IP address.

 

[Shasarak]

There is another type of playing?

Well yeah, it is explained right in the name.

 

[Mistwell]

Well yeah, it is explained right in the name.

I don't know about you, but I only play playtest stuff if it's fun or because someone is paying me to do it. Do people playtest a lot of stuff they don't find to be fun and which doesn't involve being a paid playtester?

 

[Shasarak]

I don't know about you, but I only play playtest stuff if it's fun or because someone is paying me to do it. Do people playtest a lot of stuff they don't find to be fun and which doesn't involve being a paid playtester?

I must admit that now I am curious about how often you get paid to playtest something and how I too can get on to that lucrative playtesting bandwagon?