2020 has seen widespread growth for nearly every game system on Roll20. Let’s look at how that growth plays out!

Campaign Percentage: How many Roll20 campaigns use this game system.* 

Account Percentage: How many Roll20 users play this game system.* 

*Only games with at least one hour of playtime are counted in these results.

When we compare this quarter’s Top 10 to the ones from Q4 2019, we find that there’s been very little movement in the overall rank. D&D 5E continues to be the top game by both Campaign and Account Percentage.

That’s because most systems have grown in proportion to the overall growth of games on Roll20. As a whole, Roll20 has seen nearly double (181%) more active campaigns in Q1 2020 compared to Q4 2019. To keep using D&D 5E as an example, that system also nearly doubled (192%) the number of active campaigns in Q1.

This holds true for most systems across Roll20, with games like Pathfinder Second Edition (199%) or FATE (217%) also doubling. That growth is substantial for both systems - I know I’d like to have twice as many friends to game with - even though it doesn’t change the overall ranking.

But there are some major exceptions. Let’s look at those.

*Growth Percentage: Percent Change in number of active Roll20 campaigns between Q4 2019 and Q1 2020. Only systems that had more than 200 Active Games in Quarter 2** have been counted. **Correction: An earlier version of this post stated that systems had to have more than 200 Active Games in both Q1 and Q2.

We’re popping champagne corks for all the games in this list because tripling, quadrupling, and even quintupling your playerbase is an achievement worth celebrating. Even so, we had to ask ourselves: what on EARTH is happening with HeroQuest?

No, it’s not a typo. HeroQuest, a game from 1989, really grew by 4,066% in the first quarter of 2020. Looking at the system that had the second highest growth (Old School Essentials, 962%) gave us a clue about why.

Old School Essentials only launched last year, but it’s a system designed to emulate the feel (and the mechanics) of classic tabletop RPGs from the 1980s. We looked at other roleplaying games that have either been around for decades (Rolemaster, 1980) or built in the style of them (Zweihänder, 2017 and Labyrinth Lord, 2007) and found that they consistently outpaced the overall rate of growth on Roll20.

What do you say, old school tabletop gamers? Have you moved your games online to comply with social distancing protocols? If so, welcome and we hope we’ve been able to provide a good home for you and your group.

To everyone who’s been joining us on Roll20 to play online during these unique times: we’re grateful to all of you doing your best to keep your communities safe. We’ll keep the servers up, you keep the dice rolling, and let’s all keep telling stories together.

View the full report: 

Compare with the previous report!

About The Orr Group Industry Report

The Orr Group Industry Report explores trends within the tabletop gaming industry with a focus on the online tabletop community. Created in 2014, the Orr Report has always aimed to go beyond the topic of “what games have sold recently” and really centralize the focus on what games people are continuing to play and enjoy on an ongoing basis. Everyone from players to publishers can get a bird’s eye view for the usage and popularity of different systems on Roll20 and identify trends for tabletop as a whole.

More Resources from Roll20:

Roll20 Crash Course: Learn how to set up a basic game on Roll20.

Stay at Home, Play at Home: Get free adventures, art, and resources for your game.

It’s a brand new year, and we’ve got brand new numbers to wrap up the Q4 2019 Orr Group Industry Report!

Campaign Percentage: How many Roll20 campaigns use this game system.* 

Account Percentage: How many Roll20 users play this game system.* 

*Only games with at least one hour of playtime are counted in these results.

In the last Orr Report, we saw Call of Cthulhu surge to second place and wondered if we’d see it go even higher in the spooky season. To our surprise, its hardcore horror advocates have been locked in a second place tug-of-war with the free spirits who play with custom games/sheets in the Uncategorized section. Meanwhile, D&D 5E floats serenely above the fray.

We did predict correctly that Pathfinder Second Edition would continue its steady climb and crack the Top 10, where it now comes in at #8 by both metrics. It’s been a season of quiet but steady growth for the newcomer, and so we thought, wouldn’t it be interesting to look at what games had the greatest rate of growth between Q3 and Q4? Sure enough, Pathfinder Second Edition is right there:

Growth Percentage: Percent Change in number of active Roll20 campaigns between Q3 and Q4 2019.

And holy heck, Ironsworn, talk about positive momentum! Its overall player base hasn’t gotten large enough to show up in the Top 10, but since we retooled this report we’ve been able to unlock special insights like this. The sharp spike in Ironsworn games happened in the middle of November, right about the same time that Roll20 GM-in-Residence Adam Koebel streamed Ironsworn on his channel. If you played because of that, did you like that the game was free, fun, and supports GM-less play… or were you trying to emulate Adam in hopes that a little of his coolness would rub off on you? Be honest. This is a judgment-free zone.

Do you have your own speculations about why some of these games saw growth in the last quarter? (Don’t think we don’t see you there, Rise of the Star Wars SAGA.) How about the rest of the games on Roll20? View the full report and share your thoughts in the comments!

Q3 at Roll20 runs from July to September, so it’s not the spooky season yet, but you wouldn’t know it from checking on the newest Orr Group Industry Report! Can you spot the horror games in our top 10?

Campaign Percentage: How many Roll20 campaigns use this game system.* 

Account Percentage: How many Roll20 users play this game system.*

*Only games with at least one hour of playtime are counted in these results.

Call of Cthulhu continues to grow by leaps and bounds, taking firm control of the second slot no matter how you calculate the numbers. Are you among the 13% of Roll20 users currently playing this system? If not, Roll20 recently added a free adventure and announced official system support coming in Q4, so we’ll be keeping a close eye on this system at the start of 2020 to see what effect that has on its growth. Not too close an eye, though: we’d like to keep our sanity in check.

We’re not sure we can, though, considering the arrival of a brand new contender: Japanese RPG inSANe has cracked the top 10 for the first time. It’s a multi-genre horror RPG that tears through characters like paper, making short sessions and rotating scenarios a must. We looked into this system’s upsurge on Roll20 and learned that it’s largely driven by Korean language players, for whom the inSANe system comes second in popularity only to Call of Cthulhu. This fits with a style of play that has begun to take off in Asian markets, where one shot games are more common than long campaigns and horror games are thriving.

We’re also keeping an eye on another new arrival, and we suspect many of you are also: Pathfinder Second Edition. Even with a launch halfway through the quarter, the new system debuted at 11. With the Pathfinder Bestiary and drag n’ drop now added to Roll20’s official support of the system, and a Charactermancer on the way, this is another one we expect to see growing over the next few reports.

Notice any interesting trends of your own? Let us know in the comments!

Time to a take a gander at what’s been played on Roll20 during the last quarter. Here’s the brief overview of The Orr Group Industry Report for Quarter 1 of 2017:

Our Sample Size grew by 13% this quarter! Thanks once again to our returning users, and welcome to all the new ones.

Given the results of the last few Industry Reports, it will come as a surprise to no one that Dungeons & Dragons fifth edition continues to increase in both player and game activity – this quarter, 49% of Roll20 games were 5E games. Pathfinder continues to hold the second most popular spot, and 3.5E remains in third place.

The FATE series increased in activity this quarter, hopping over GURPS. This may very well have something to do with the new Rollplay show, Nebula Jazz, which uses the FATE Accelerated ruleset.

Here’s the full Q1 2017 report:

Das Schwarze Auge continues to see improved activity, sneaking past Dragon Age RPG this quarter. AEG’s Legend of the Five Rings also saw increased gameplay, which might have something to do with the excitement surrounding Fantasy Flight’s upcoming L5R Living Card Game. And RuneQuest jumped up a few spaces in the running, most likely due to Chaosium’s recent announcement of their new upcoming game, RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha.

The Orr Group Industry Report explores trends within the tabletop gaming industry with a focus on the online tabletop community.

Created in 2014, the Orr Report has always aimed to go beyond the topic of “what games have sold recently” and really centralize the focus on what games people are continuing to play and enjoy on an ongoing basis. Everyone from players to publishers can get a bird’s eye view for the usage and popularity of different systems and identify trends for tabletop as a whole. After a hiatus, we are now returning with a new and significantly improved report that offers richer insights.

What’s new in the Orr Report?

The Orr Report has made a shift in how we collect data. In previous years, our collection method was solely based on user selection data. We have now added a new process that also looks at character sheet usage from all 4 million+ Roll20 accounts. This provides us with data that is more broadly representative, accurate, and integrated into our systems.Whether you are familiar with the Orr Report already and have been patiently awaiting the next one or this is your first encounter, we’re confident that our improved data selection adds more value to the results than ever before.

The charts below provide a quick glance at game system frequency in Q2 2019, but as always we’ll have the full breakdown for each game system on Roll20 at the end of the report. Let’s have a look!

Campaign Percentage: How many Roll20 campaigns use this game system.

Account Percentage: How many Roll20 users play this game system.

Only games with at least one hour of playtime are counted in these results.

Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition (D&D 5E) leads across both categories with the highest percentage of both campaigns and accounts in Roll20. We’ll come back to discuss Uncategorized games in a moment, but first we want to look at the interesting twist in the results for the next unified game system! If you look at Account Percentage, Pathfinder comes in a strong second, meaning more people play Pathfinder than anything else except D&D 5E. Look over at Campaign Percentage, however, and you’ll find that Call of Cthulhu has stretched up its tendrils to seize a surprise second place for the overall number of games played in any system.

We got curious about how that happened and decided to dig further into our data for Call of Cthulhu games. We found that they have an average playtime of 11.9 hours, compared to 40 hour average game times for other systems on these charts. This might suggest that Call of Cthulhu GMs enjoy running more short games with small groups, or simply that you're all descending into madness very quickly and your GMs are leaving you to die.

Now let’s look at that big slice of Uncategorized games. This is a new grouping made possible by our updated data collection which looks at all usage on Roll20, including this group of free spirits who use custom sheets, have no listed system, or eschew character sheets entirely. The size of this group suggests that quite a healthy percentage of tabletop players want to customize their games, whether it’s taking a familiar system and morphing it to suit their needs or building a homebrew system all their own. The size of this unique segment would never be reflected in a regular sales chart, and we look forward to digging deeper with the Roll20 data to understand both this and other interesting trends in future Orr Reports.

OVERVIEW

Coming away from this Orr Report for Q2 2019, it would be easy to draw the conclusion that games in the classic fantasy genre dominate tabletop, but we think there’s much more going on here. While nearly two thirds of all Roll20 games are a version of Dungeons & Dragons or Pathfinder, the surprise surge of Call of Cthulhu calls attention to a growing segment of people who want to mix it up. Looking only at our top ten systems in these charts, at least 13% of players and 9.4% of campaigns have stepped into genres like horror, sci fi, and cyberpunk. We look forward to seeing these games continue to grow and expand on Roll20 in the future!

What other conclusions could you draw from the Q2 2019 Orr Group Industry Report? Here’s the full list: