What are the most played roleplaying systems anymore?

[Mallus]

My group play 3e and 4e, with a little M&M2e on the down-low.

 

[RFisher]

Yes, you´re mistaken. What you need is a sample that is representative of the whole gamer population. A minority is indeed enough to generalize from when that minority is comparable to the majority in diversity and composition.

So, if you poll ENworld, you can generalize stuff about hard-core D&D DMs and players that post on the internet. Not the D&D gamer population as a whole.

Hmm. That seems essentially what I wrote, though better said.

 

[Hella_Tellah]

My group play 3e and 4e, with a little M&M2e on the down-low.

Five people are sitting around a table at their Friendly Local Gaming Shop, each with a sheet of paper in front of them and a 20-sided die in hand. One of them is describing a cackling maniac in a lab coat, riding a giant robotic dinosaur climbing up the Empire State Building. Suddenly, Greg, the regular D&D DM, comes in the door.

"Cheetos?" exclaims Greg. "Mountain Dew? Dice?! What is going on here?"
"It's--ah--not what it looks like!" Dave cries out. "We're just practicing for your game!"
"Yeah," Cheryl chimes in, "We weren't playing with the dice. We were just washing them!"
"And this book--it has people with capes on it." Greg continues, "Not cloaks, but capes! And underpants on the outside of their regular pants!"
"Greg," says Kevin, "I'm sorry. We were playing Mutants and Masterminds. On the down-low."

 

[dmccoy1693]

ICv2 is reporting the top 5 games of the fall of 08 "reflects sales in August, September, and October." They are:
1 Dungeons and Dragons - Wizards of the Coast
2 Warhammer 40K: Dark Heresy - Fantasy Flight Games
3 World of Darkness - White Wolf
4 Shadowrun - Catalyst Lab Games
5 Pathfinder - Paizo Publishing

link

I would not imagine that ICv2 would count Exalted as a WoD game, since it isn't.

 

[Otterscrubber]

I'd have to say the top 3 roleplaying systems are:

1) Christianity
2) Islam
3) Bhuddism

Some of those guys are hardcore!!!! I'd tried playing a few for awhile but while the rulebooks were free they were way too detailed for my tastes.....

 

[eyebeams]

WoD actually has a much larger reader-base than player-base. This is subjective, of course, but from personal experience I see WoD books fly off the shelves and almost never being played.

This would be a function of you not being in the homes of people you don't know.

 

[The Little Raven]

WoD actually has a much larger reader-base than player-base.

I think this perception persists because people tend not to play public games of WoD like they do D&D. I've been in at least a dozen different groups that played White Wolf games since 1995, and we never played a single game in a public place (like game stores).

 

[eyebeams]

I know, working on the line now, that discussion about the WoD is much more focused on situations in play than it used to be: questions about how to rule on a certain spell, for example, or discussions about how to work collectively in a specific chronicle.

I do think The WoD could do to have a resurgence on organized play outside of LARP. A lot of players started in LARP but don't do it anymore (they moved after finishing university, for example).