# Roll20's Latest Usage Report: D&D Steady, Cthulhu Down!



## DarkCrisis (Nov 12, 2021)

Kind if surprised Star Trek isn’t higher


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## Morrus (Nov 12, 2021)

DarkCrisis said:


> Mind if surprised Star Trek isn’t higher



I’ve always found it surprising how big licensed properties don’t dominate these lists. Maybe the bug Avatar game will make a good showing?


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## Samurai (Nov 12, 2021)

Original Pathfinder is still beating the heck out of the 2nd edition (3.2% vs 1.4%)!


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## Morrus (Nov 12, 2021)

Samurai said:


> Original Pathfinder is still beating the heck out of the 2nd edition (3.2% vs 1.4%)!



They’re on Foundry, apparently.


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## J.Quondam (Nov 12, 2021)

My favorite comparison on the list:

D&D 5E (campaigns): 53.19%​Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition (campaigns): 0.05%​​


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## JThursby (Nov 12, 2021)

Morrus said:


> [The PF2e players are] on Foundry, apparently.



Can confirm.  It's very nice, in case anyone hasn't heard.

Anyone have a clue as to why VTM suddenly rose?  Was it just seasonal with Halloween, or has there been something going on to make the system more approachable?  The first printing 5th ed book I have is so god damn unreable because of it's bad layout and organization that I don't have any clue if the system is good or not.  If there was a readable revised version I would consider getting it and just chucking this travisty of print into the dumpster.


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## darjr (Nov 12, 2021)

I do wish we could see this broken out by region


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## Retreater (Nov 12, 2021)

darjr said:


> I do wish we could see this broken out by region



I suspect that 100% of Roll20 users are somewhere on earth.


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## MGibster (Nov 12, 2021)

Morrus said:


> I’ve always found it surprising how big licensed properties don’t dominate these lists. Maybe the bug Avatar game will make a good showing?



In particular, I've always been surprised that Star Trek hasn't had a bigger splash in the RPG market than it has.  I remember the first Trek RPG published by FASA in the 80s, because I'm old, Last Unicorn Games, Decipher, and now Modiphius.  (I think FASA lost the license in the late 80s or very early 90s.)  It's quite possible I'm experiencing some confirmation bias.  I was a huge Star Trek fan when I started playing RPGs and all my friends were fans as well.  I'm probably projecting that onto other gamers.  On the flip side, I think Star Trek is a somewhat difficult thing to emulate when you're used to playing D&D like I was in the 80s and 90s.  Killing stuff and taking their things isn't something Roddenberry would approve of.

And Avatar?  For a movie that made so much money it doesn't seem to have left a significant cultural imprint.


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## Lanefan (Nov 12, 2021)

Until that 19.8%* "uncategorized" gets categorized, every system's placing on the list - other than 5e - has to be taken with a very large grain of salt.

* - on the pie chart.  It's 14.65% on the actual list; and this is the second quarter in a row their numbers - on the same page! - don't agree with themselves.


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## darjr (Nov 12, 2021)

Retreater said:


> I suspect that 100% of Roll20 users are somewhere on earth.



Near, but I would not say all with such certainty in this day and age.


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## MGibster (Nov 12, 2021)

Lanefan said:


> Until that 19.8%* "uncategorized" gets categorized, every system's placing on the list - other than 5e - has to be taken with a very large grain of salt.



I bet at least .8% of that is Cyborg Commando.  In my mechanical heart of hearts I know this to be true.


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## Bolongo (Nov 12, 2021)

MGibster said:


> In particular, I've always been surprised that Star Trek hasn't had a bigger splash in the RPG market than it has.



If ST is played correctly, you're not allowed to murder hobo.
So I don't find it surprising at all.


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## Manbearcat (Nov 12, 2021)

JThursby said:


> Anyone have a clue as to why VTM suddenly rose?




In honor of the 191 year anniversary of the first railroad being built.


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## LuisCarlos17f (Nov 12, 2021)

I am surprised because Starfinder has got more players than the famous Star Wars. Paizo's game could become a serious rival in a future.


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## Samurai (Nov 12, 2021)

J.Quondam said:


> My favorite comparison on the list:
> 
> D&D 5E (campaigns): 53.19%​Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition (campaigns): 0.05%​​



Fate also is divided (no idea why they did it to those 2 games).

FATE (Core, Accelerated, Dresden Files...): .30%
Fate: .08%


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## Samurai (Nov 12, 2021)

On the ratings for Star Wars and Star Trek, I can't help but feel that the settings' latest movies and TV shows (with only a few exceptions, like Mandalorian) have pretty much killed interest in younger players who didn't experience those universes in their heydays...


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## Tormyr (Nov 12, 2021)

J.Quondam said:


> My favorite comparison on the list:
> 
> D&D 5E (campaigns): 53.19%​Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition (campaigns): 0.05%​​



I wonder if the second entry is composed of the campaigns using the community Shaped sheet instead of the Roll20-provided character sheet.


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## dbm (Nov 12, 2021)

This shows the problem with collecting what is presumably free-form data. Savage Worlds appears on the list twice, too, with no visible difference in the label (presumably one has a trailing space or something similar).


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## Morrus (Nov 12, 2021)

LuisCarlos17f said:


> I am surprised because Starfinder has got more players than the famous Star Wars. Paizo's game could become a serious rival in a future.



Pretty sure they're not allowed to make digital versions of the game (thus no PDFs). That would include Roll20 implementation.


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## DarkCrisis (Nov 12, 2021)

MGibster said:


> In particular, I've always been surprised that Star Trek hasn't had a bigger splash in the RPG market than it has.  I remember the first Trek RPG published by FASA in the 80s, because I'm old, Last Unicorn Games, Decipher, and now Modiphius.  (I think FASA lost the license in the late 80s or very early 90s.)  It's quite possible I'm experiencing some confirmation bias.  I was a huge Star Trek fan when I started playing RPGs and all my friends were fans as well.  I'm probably projecting that onto other gamers.  On the flip side, I think Star Trek is a somewhat difficult thing to emulate when you're used to playing D&D like I was in the 80s and 90s.  Killing stuff and taking their things isn't something Roddenberry would approve of.
> 
> And Avatar?  For a movie that made so much money it doesn't seem to have left a significant cultural imprint.



That’s Avatar the Last Airbender.  They just had a kickstarter for a RPG and it made a whole lot of money.  Like 1st or 2nd most of any RPG product on kickstarter ever.  It was all pretty shocking


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## Jacob Lewis (Nov 12, 2021)

The thing to remember about these usage reports is that they only reflect the usage on that particular platform. Part of the appeal of VTTs is the level of automation and ease that comes with support from publishers and community. So even popular systems, like Star Wars and Pathfinder 2, might not ever do well on platforms with poor support or lacking in content.

In the case of PF2, it's become apparent to a lot of fans that Foundry offers much better content and support without having to buy any subscriptions or materials beyond the base program. And this may be the case in several more different systems. Unfortunately, Foundry cannot provide accurate info because the software can be run on private networks.


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## Espadadelaaurora (Nov 12, 2021)

A bit disappointed of seeing Cyberpunk and Alien in a low position.


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## Blue Orange (Nov 12, 2021)

darjr said:


> Near, but I would not say all with such certainty in this day and age.




Astronauts are often sci-fi fans, as you might expect. But I don't know if the ISS gets internet. RPGs might be an effective way to pass long voyages as in space travel though...


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## Marc Radle (Nov 12, 2021)

MGibster said:


> In particular, I've always been surprised that Star Trek hasn't had a bigger splash in the RPG market than it has.  I remember the first Trek RPG published by FASA in the 80s, because I'm old, Last Unicorn Games, Decipher, and now Modiphius.  (I think FASA lost the license in the late 80s or very early 90s.)  It's quite possible I'm experiencing some confirmation bias.  I was a huge Star Trek fan when I started playing RPGs and all my friends were fans as well.  I'm probably projecting that onto other gamers.  On the flip side, I think Star Trek is a somewhat difficult thing to emulate when you're used to playing D&D like I was in the 80s and 90s.  Killing stuff and taking their things isn't something Roddenberry would approve of.
> 
> And Avatar?  For a movie that made so much money it doesn't seem to have left a significant cultural imprint.



Ah … two things that bring back memories for me …

I was a huge Star Trek fan back then and LOVED the FASA Star Trek game! We played the heck out of it! I even still have my original boxed set 

I haven’t heard Last Unicorn Games in a while! I worked with them for a number of years … mainly on the Aria: Canticle of the Monomyth RPG and Heresy card game. In fact, I stopped working with them when they got the Star Trek license, but had to move to California as part of the deal, so they were closer to Paramount.

Good times!!


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## Umbran (Nov 12, 2021)

MGibster said:


> And Avatar?  For a movie that made so much money it doesn't seem to have left a significant cultural imprint.




The movie?  Of course, not, because it was drek.  The movie made money because folks hoped it would be like the animated series before it, which has certainly had impact - if you need proof of that, see the performance of the game's kickstarter.


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## Morrus (Nov 12, 2021)

Umbran said:


> The movie?  Of course, not, because it was drek.  The movie made money because folks hoped it would be like the animated series before it, which has certainly had impact - if you need proof of that, see the performance of the game's kickstarter.



Not _that_ Avatar.


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## zedturtle (Nov 12, 2021)

Umbran said:


> The movie?  Of course, not, because it was drek.  The movie made money because folks hoped it would be like the animated series before it, which has certainly had impact - if you need proof of that, see the performance of the game's kickstarter.



I think the "movie" is a reference to the 3D James Cameron one with the blue people. Avatar the Last Airbender might have had a movie but we should not darken the skies with words about it.


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## Umbran (Nov 12, 2021)

Morrus said:


> Not _that_ Avatar.






zedturtle said:


> I think the "movie" is a reference to the 3D James Cameron one with the blue people.




Well, they were both pretty crummy movies.  How was I supposed to tell?!?


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## ReshiIRE (Nov 12, 2021)

Espadadelaaurora said:


> A bit disappointed of seeing Cyberpunk and Alien in a low position.



I suspect there's quite a number of Cyberpunk Red useres using Foundry; I know when I was planning to run it (still want to but I'm in a creative funk and I was going to be ambitious with that one), Foundry seemed like a no brainer due to the good support it had in Foundry, and the fact a big Cyberpunk community Discord I'm in pretty heavily recommends it.

Though I know it's not possible with Foundry (or some otehr VTTs), having a comprehensive number of games run in X system would be very fascinating. Especially since my understanding is that 5e is more than 50% of revenue or market share that Roll 20 is showing.


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## jhilahd (Nov 12, 2021)

JThursby said:


> Can confirm.  It's very nice, in case anyone hasn't heard.
> 
> Anyone have a clue as to why VTM suddenly rose?  Was it just seasonal with Halloween, or has there been something going on to make the system more approachable?  The first printing 5th ed book I have is so god damn unreable because of it's bad layout and organization that I don't have any clue if the system is good or not.  If there was a readable revised version I would consider getting it and just chucking this travisty of print into the dumpster.



I think your Halloween suggestion is probably a strong reason. L.A. by Night helped also.

I'm sorry you had issues with it. 
I just ran my first ever World of Darkness game and used v5. Other than some odd digging of rules here and there, I loved the system. 
I ran a 6 game mini-chronicle (with one of those being our session zero) to my group who had never played it before. They're primarily d20 and Savage World gamers(system snobs) and this was the first long short term game with a system that wasn't one of those. And now they're asking for a full blown Chronicle. Oof.
I found the Worldofdarkness.com website and their discord channel helped me alot with questions about rules and things that I might have had issues with. I kept things as simplified as possible.


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## bassplayer (Nov 12, 2021)

Nice to see Tormenta doing a good job up there. As long as I'm concerned, there isn't even an informal version of it's rules in english, which means Brazilian's  TTRPG scenario is growing a lot. And I am pretty sure that 5e is way more popular than Tormenta here in Brazil.


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## Mallus (Nov 12, 2021)

Of course Cthulhu's numbers are down. By this point everyone's character is either insane or dead.


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## Paragon Lost (Nov 12, 2021)

It would be really interesting to see truly accurate numbers and breakdowns on a each game system and edition and from all the various online gaming platforms. Roll20s are just done so crazy that getting a real number about anything is just pure speculation.


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## JThursby (Nov 12, 2021)

Paragon Lost said:


> I would be really interesting to see truly accurate numbers and breakdowns on a each game system and edition and from all the various online gaming platforms. Roll20s are just done so crazy that getting a real number about anything is just pure speculation.



I would like that as well, but that would require a rather herculean effort of tracking and polling to get a clear picture of.  The Orr groups quarterly reports are the "best" estimate we have, though all it really tells us is that Wotc, Chaosium and Paizo are the RPG triad and no one else has a comparable market share.  We should just play what we want to anyways, a game doesn't get better because it's more or less popular.


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## Paragon Lost (Nov 12, 2021)

JThursby said:


> I would like that as well, but that would require a rather herculean effort of tracking and polling to get a clear picture of.  The Orr groups quarterly reports are the "best" estimate we have, though all it really tells us is that Wotc, Chaosium and Paizo are the RPG triad and no one else has a comparable market share.  We should just play what we want to anyways, a game doesn't get better because it's more or less popular.



 I think the bigger issue is getting them all to share. I'm sure most of the platforms have some clear ideas as to what's being played and how many.


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## JThursby (Nov 12, 2021)

Paragon Lost said:


> I think the bigger issue is getting them all to share. I'm sure most of the platforms have some clear ideas as to what's being played and how many.



As a customer of various VTT services, I would prefer they just not report on my activity to a third party.  I value my privacy over assembling a report on RPG trends.


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## Gammadoodler (Nov 12, 2021)

Blue Orange said:


> Astronauts are often sci-fi fans, as you might expect. But I don't know if the ISS gets internet. RPGs might be an effective way to pass long voyages as in space travel though...



One benefit of VTTs in space. Dice rolling is waaaay easier. Also, generally speaking, the tables used in tabletop gaming are dramatically less effective without gravity.


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## Paragon Lost (Nov 12, 2021)

JThursby said:


> As a customer of various VTT services, I would prefer they just not report on my activity to a third party.  I value my privacy over assembling a report on RPG trends.



 As long as they aren't listing me or you for that matter as the individual I don't have a problem with them gathering the information for a general breakdown of what game systems are being played and the percentages.


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## Barantor (Nov 12, 2021)

These lists always make me wonder if other VTTs like Foundry skew different as more of a community uses it over roll20 for certain rpgs.


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## J.Quondam (Nov 12, 2021)

JThursby said:


> As a customer of various VTT services, I would prefer they just not report on my activity to a third party.  I value my privacy over assembling a report on RPG trends.



I strongly doubt there's any personal info attached to the stats. But the "snooping" _is_ off-putting, or at least as off-putting as snooping is on any other online platform. But that's the business model to keep things free-ish, so I can't really complain, I guess.

That said, I do have a (sadly neglected!) Roll20 account, with several campaigns setup & tagged for a number of different systems. So I wonder how exactly my account figures into the report, if at all.


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## teitan (Nov 12, 2021)

Samurai said:


> Original Pathfinder is still beating the heck out of the 2nd edition (3.2% vs 1.4%)!



As stated it has to do with the platform more than the game itself.


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## Weirdok (Nov 12, 2021)

Marc Radle said:


> Ah … two things that bring back memories for me …
> 
> I was a huge Star Trek fan back then and LOVED the FASA Star Trek game! We played the heck out of it! I even still have my original boxed set
> 
> ...



The Star Wars game was great back in the 80's. My friends were hooked on TSR stuff, so, I couldn't get anyone to play ☹


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## Retreater (Nov 12, 2021)

teitan said:


> As stated it has to do with the platform more than the game itself.



Even if Roll20 isn't the preferred system for PF2, it is the biggest VTT. PF2 should have a greater proportion of players.
My very personal bias: I don't think significant numbers of people are playing it.


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## Erdric Dragin (Nov 12, 2021)

Samurai said:


> Original Pathfinder is still beating the heck out of the 2nd edition (3.2% vs 1.4%)!



As it should. Still dunno what the heck was the point of cutting 1e and creating the undesired 2e.


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## Gammadoodler (Nov 12, 2021)

Retreater said:


> Even if Roll20 isn't the preferred system for PF2, it is the biggest VTT. PF2 should have a greater proportion of players.
> My very personal bias: I don't think significant numbers of people are playing it.



I don't know your experience in either VTT, but I can say that my experience with 2e on foundry was vastly to superior to roll20. Frankly I suspect the only reason that 1.2% exists on roll20 is that they haven't tried foundry, or they're too invested in the roll20 ecosystem to switch.


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## Retreater (Nov 13, 2021)

Gammadoodler said:


> I don't know your experience in either VTT, but I can say that my experience with 2e on foundry was vastly to superior to roll20. Frankly I suspect the only reason that 1.2% exists on roll20 is that they haven't tried foundry, or they're too invested in the roll20 ecosystem to switch.



I've tried Foundry, and I'm firmly staying in the Roll20 ecosystem. 
If we're ok with a little thread detour, I can explain myself.
1) Roll20 is browser based. I can access my campaign from any computer. I can update the campaign on my break at work. I don't need to create servers. In short, it just works.
2) Foundry is unstable. You add the wrong module, it collapses. Something gets pulled from the service, it collapses. You create a campaign and Foundry updates to a new version, it collapses.
3) It's not actually intuitive. I learned Roll20 in a week. Can't get Foundry working in months.
4) You can't really buy stuff already done on Foundry. You have to do a lot of it yourself.
5) Importing tokens, maps, art, etc on Foundry is a chore. It's drag and drop and instantly works on Roll20.
6) More people use Roll20, so in the event you don't want to play PF2 (or want to try anything else) you have assets, friends, UI knowledge ready to try any other RPG in existence.
7) You don't have to have a great computer and internet speed to run a game on Roll20.
8) Too much automation can be bad. It can get in the way of the game if you make an error.


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## TheSword (Nov 13, 2021)

Retreater said:


> I've tried Foundry, and I'm firmly staying in the Roll20 ecosystem.
> If we're ok with a little thread detour, I can explain myself.
> 1) Roll20 is browser based. I can access my campaign from any computer. I can update the campaign on my break at work. I don't need to create servers. In short, it just works.
> 2) Foundry is unstable. You add the wrong module, it collapses. Something gets pulled from the service, it collapses. You create a campaign and Foundry updates to a new version, it collapses.
> ...



Couldn’t agree more. I’ll add that after paying £50 I expect a bit more technical support than is available.

I had issues opening my computer as a server and the links on the website suggested downloading freeware. I was extremely uncomfortable asking players to download freeware I didn’t trust onto their computers… particularly when it involved bypassing firewalls. I ended up paying extra to use The Forge through a browser which added a whole extra step to uploading after what was already an annoying process.

Even then there was always at least one other player who struggled to connect - leading to 15 mins at the start of every session tinkering.

It felt like I needed to be an expert in programming just to get to a place where Foundry would start.


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## FrogReaver (Nov 13, 2021)

Pathfinder - 3.2%
Pathfinder 2 - 1.4%

Those results are interesting.  Will PF2 ever outdo PF1?


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## kayman (Nov 13, 2021)

If you play PF2 you MUST use Foundry . I ran  AoA on Roll 20 and A.V. and SoT (current) on foundry . IMHO , there is no choice to be made . Use Foundry  .


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## Retreater (Nov 13, 2021)

FrogReaver said:


> Pathfinder - 3.2%
> Pathfinder 2 - 1.4%
> 
> Those results are interesting.  Will PF2 ever outdo PF1?



I doubt it. PF1 hit at the perfect time. D&D would have to again lose market dominance to see a rival system get that popular. And I don't see that happening during the lifespan of PF2. 
If you're asking if it will outdo the 3.2% on Roll20, that's a maybe. More likely PF1 will continue to drop on Roll20 and PF2 will increase a little bit.
But I do expect a later day resurgence for PF2, like how 4e  (and even TSR era D&D) is being reconsidered these days.


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## Higgs (Nov 13, 2021)

Morrus said:


> They’re on Foundry, apparently



We sure are!


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## Higgs (Nov 13, 2021)

Retreater said:


> I doubt it. PF1 hit at the perfect time. D&D would have to again lose market dominance to see a rival system get that popular. And I don't see that happening during the lifespan of PF2.
> If you're asking if it will outdo the 3.2% on Roll20, that's a maybe. More likely PF1 will continue to drop on Roll20 and PF2 will increase a little bit.
> But I do expect a later day resurgence for PF2, like how 4e  (and even TSR era D&D) is being reconsidered these days.



Roll20 is not an accurate measure of PF2 vs PF1 overall.  I'm not even a little surprised that PF1 is still more popular on roll20


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## Retreater (Nov 13, 2021)

Higgs said:


> Roll20 is not an accurate measure of PF2 vs PF1 overall.  I'm not even a little surprised that PF1 is still more popular on roll20



Roll20 has the lion's share of VTT users. Proportionately, PF2 should be higher there if it's being widely adopted - even if a good chunk of the players are on Foundry. 
But the PF2 fans will cite any exception to make it look like the system is widely in use.
No one's playing on Roll20? Well, that's because everyone is playing on Foundry.
Books languishing on store shelves? Well, that's because everyone is buying online, using Archives of Nethys, etc. 
Numbers are low on Amazon? Well, that's because everyone is buying directly from Paizo.
Can't find local PFS events? Well, that's because of the pandemic, everyone's playing on Foundry, etc.

It's okay to like a system that isn't popular. I'm running a PbtA game and a WFRP game at the moment on Roll20. I'm not under the illusion that either system rivals 5e in popularity.


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## FrogReaver (Nov 13, 2021)

Higgs said:


> Roll20 is not an accurate measure of PF2 vs PF1 overall.  I'm not even a little surprised that PF1 is still more popular on roll20



Why?


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## FrogReaver (Nov 13, 2021)

Retreater said:


> Roll20 has the lion's share of VTT users. Proportionately, PF2 should be higher there if it's being widely adopted - even if a good chunk of the players are on Foundry.
> But the PF2 fans will cite any exception to make it look like the system is widely in use.
> No one's playing on Roll20? Well, that's because everyone is playing on Foundry.
> Books languishing on store shelves? Well, that's because everyone is buying online, using Archives of Nethys, etc.
> ...



There could be good reasons PF2 players haven't adopted roll20 while PF1 players did.  

Say PF2 had poor support on roll20 while another VTT had much better support.  Say PF1 was heavily supported on roll20 and not very supported anywhere else.

I don't know enough about the community to say.


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## FrogReaver (Nov 13, 2021)

kayman said:


> If you play PF2 you MUST use Foundry . I ran  AoA on Roll 20 and A.V. and SoT (current) on foundry . IMHO , there is no choice to be made . Use Foundry  .



Out of curiosity should a D&D 5e group use roll20 or foundry?  Is doing so of the same level of importance as it is for the pathfinder 2 group?


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## Retreater (Nov 13, 2021)

FrogReaver said:


> Out of curiosity should a D&D 5e group use roll20 or foundry?  Is doing so of the same level of importance as it is for the pathfinder 2 group?



Are you using official content on 5e? Running adventures? Using supplements? All that is available to purchase on Roll20. Foundry has the ability (sometimes) to link to what you purchase on D&D Beyond (as does Roll20), but no official marketplace.
I say "sometimes" because the add-ons to link to D&D Beyond are unofficial, get taken down, perhaps illegal. If you don't use that, you're programming everything into Foundry yourself. Every class, spell, monster, etc, that isn't in the SRD.


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## FrogReaver (Nov 13, 2021)

Retreater said:


> Are you using official content on 5e? Running adventures? Using supplements? All that is available to purchase on Roll20. Foundry has the ability (sometimes) to link to what you purchase on D&D Beyond (as does Roll20), but no official marketplace.
> I say "sometimes" because the add-ons to link to D&D Beyond are unofficial, get taken down, perhaps illegal. If you don't use that, you're programming everything into Foundry yourself. Every class, spell, monster, etc, that isn't in the SRD.



Then I'm not understanding what makes that better for PF2 than roll20?


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## Morrus (Nov 13, 2021)

Retreater said:


> Roll20 has the lion's share of VTT users. Proportionately, PF2 should be higher there if it's being widely adopted - even if a good chunk of the players are on Foundry.
> But the PF2 fans will cite any exception to make it look like the system is widely in use.
> No one's playing on Roll20? Well, that's because everyone is playing on Foundry.
> Books languishing on store shelves? Well, that's because everyone is buying online, using Archives of Nethys, etc.
> ...



You seem invested in “proving” PF2 isn’t popular. I mean, they _are_ playing on Foundry.

PF2 isn’t as popular as 5E, of course. Nobody is claiming that.


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## Retreater (Nov 13, 2021)

FrogReaver said:


> Then I'm not understanding what makes that better for PF2 than roll20?



The explanation was for 5e, not PF2.
PF2 on Foundry has the blessing of Paizo. They can access the entire PF2 SRD (which is basically every rule, supplement, character option, monster, etc). 
There's a great PDF importer tool you can link to your purchased adventures and load them into Foundry


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## Retreater (Nov 13, 2021)

Morrus said:


> You seem invested in “proving” PF2 isn’t popular. I mean, they _are_ playing on Foundry.
> 
> PF2 isn’t as popular as 5E, of course. Nobody is claiming that.



Third party publishers aren't producing PF2 stuff in large amounts, as I'm sure you're aware as a third party publisher.
So these theoretical PF2 players aren't buying books through traditional channels, aren't playing on the biggest VTT (the only one that gives stats), aren't purchasing 3rd party products, aren't playing in local game events. Even if only some of these metrics applied to only some of the players, we'd see a proportional increase if there were a widescale adoption.
The only thing we can go on is the personal testimony of a few very loud fans online. It fails in every other quantifiable metric we have access to.


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## Myrdin Potter (Nov 13, 2021)

The Foundry “excuse” of private networks should apply to Fantasy Grounds, but they can report the number of sessions. Only FG publishes actual numbers that can be tracked over time. Roll20 uses percentages and total number of accounts and changes how the percentages are calculated. Foundry does not give out any stats at all.


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## Myrdin Potter (Nov 13, 2021)

Paragon Lost said:


> It would be really interesting to see truly accurate numbers and breakdowns on a each game system and edition and from all the various online gaming platforms. Roll20s are just done so crazy that getting a real number about anything is just pure speculation.



Fantasy Grounds also publishes a similar report but they give actual numbers out.


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## Morrus (Nov 13, 2021)

Retreater said:


> Third party publishers aren't producing PF2 stuff in large amounts, as I'm sure you're aware as a third party publisher.
> So these theoretical PF2 players aren't buying books through traditional channels, aren't playing on the biggest VTT (the only one that gives stats), aren't purchasing 3rd party products, aren't playing in local game events. Even if only some of these metrics applied to only some of the players, we'd see a proportional increase if there were a widescale adoption.
> The only thing we can go on is the personal testimony of a few very loud fans online. It fails in every other quantifiable metric we have access to.



The fact that folks are playing PF2 on Foundry rather than Roll20 has nothing to do with books or 3PP stuff or the general popularity or lack thereof of PF2. It just means that the folks who are playing PF2 on VTTs are doing so on Foundry.


----------



## Morrus (Nov 13, 2021)

Paragon Lost said:


> It would be really interesting to see truly accurate numbers and breakdowns on a each game system and edition and from all the various online gaming platforms. Roll20s are just done so crazy that getting a real number about anything is just pure speculation.



They used to. They stopped recently.


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## Retreater (Nov 13, 2021)

Morrus said:


> The fact that folks are playing PF2 on Foundry rather than Roll20 has nothing to do with books or 3PP stuff or the general popularity or lack thereof of PF2. It just means that the folks who are playing PF2 on VTTs are doing so on Foundry.



Not upset at all. I'm happy anyone is playing any system they want, in person or on any VTT they want.
Even though PF2 didn't work for me, I have lots of systems I do like. Hopefully Level Up will be a good fit when we get around to trying it.


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## ChaosOS (Nov 13, 2021)

Related, the Savage Worlds community pretty strongly prefers Fantasy Grounds and Foundry - PEGinc has clearly been pushing Foundry support with all their official content for the platform, including the Savage Pathfinder adaptation.


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## ReshiIRE (Nov 14, 2021)

Myrdin Potter said:


> The Foundry “excuse” of private networks should apply to Fantasy Grounds, but they can report the number of sessions. Only FG publishes actual numbers that can be tracked over time. Roll20 uses percentages and total number of accounts and changes how the percentages are calculated. Foundry does not give out any stats at all.



Fantasy Grounds, if I understand correctly, has an inbuilt Cloud service that they directly report. I'm not sure if they use any telemitry with their LAN versions, but this makes it much easier for them to report stats.

Foundry, in contrast, is significantly more decentralised. While there are hosting services such as Forge, none of them are 'official' official; I suspect there's a good amount of Foundry users who host locally or host via free AWS accounts. This makes it more difficult for Foundry to gather accurate stats. The most accurate you would get is from Forge.

However, another thing to point out is that, if I understand Roll 20's business model correctly, for a large amount of games you can effectively play for free and just use it as a VTT (without necessarily having inbuilt system support, but if I understand correctly 5e's SRD is freely available there). Foundry requires an explicit license that the GM has to buy, and Fantasy Grounds has a mixed model (there is a 'free seats' model for Fantasy Grounds that means a GM can buy a more expensive license and nobody else has to pay; but they do then have to pay for the system in most cases, in my understanding).

This _probably _biases the data in some way. I am making a big assumption, but I think it may be a fair one; since 5e is so dominate and so popular, I can imagine a large amount of people use Roll 20 because it's also relatively free and inexpensive - and in some ways, not as ''hardcore' or 'dedicated' in their purchasing decisions. 

I imagine, then, for other VTTs, if we were to get data from them, would be biased by those users being more 'dedicated' or 'hardcore' in some ways, and this may change what games are being played.


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## Myrdin Potter (Nov 14, 2021)

ReshiIRE said:


> Fantasy Grounds, if I understand correctly, has an inbuilt Cloud service that they directly report. I'm not sure if they use any telemitry with their LAN versions, but this makes it much easier for them to report stats.
> 
> Foundry, in contrast, is significantly more decentralised. While there are hosting services such as Forge, none of them are 'official' official; I suspect there's a good amount of Foundry users who host locally or host via free AWS accounts. This makes it more difficult for Foundry to gather accurate stats. The most accurate you would get is from Forge.
> 
> ...



FG grabs the game system when the license check handshake is made.


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## Higgs (Nov 14, 2021)

Retreater said:


> Roll20 has the lion's share of VTT users. Proportionately, PF2 should be higher there if it's being widely adopted - even if a good chunk of the players are on Foundry.
> But the PF2 fans will cite any exception to make it look like the system is widely in use.
> No one's playing on Roll20? Well, that's because everyone is playing on Foundry.
> Books languishing on store shelves? Well, that's because everyone is buying online, using Archives of Nethys, etc.
> ...



My dude, no one (and I mean no one) is under this illusion that PF2 (or, you know....any other fantasy rpg I can think of) is "rivaling 5e in popularity."  You are putting a LOT of thoughts and feelings into other people's head with this post, and making some pretty sketchy assumptions all the way around.


----------



## Higgs (Nov 14, 2021)

FrogReaver said:


> There could be good reasons PF2 players haven't adopted roll20 while PF1 players did.
> 
> Say PF2 had poor support on roll20 while another VTT had much better support.  Say PF1 was heavily supported on roll20 and not very supported anywhere else.
> 
> I don't know enough about the community to say.



You pretty much nailed it.  Roll20 isn't exactly HOSTILE to PF2, but playing in Foundry is a night and day difference.  
Also, and I'll only speak for myself on this one, but as very progressive individual I feel much better about playing on Foundry than anything on roll20.  In stating this, I'm now prepared for people to whinge about social justice virtue signalling.


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## Retreater (Nov 14, 2021)

Higgs said:


> My dude, no one (and I mean no one) is under this illusion that PF2 (or, you know....any other fantasy rpg I can think of) is "rivaling 5e in popularity."  You are putting a LOT of thoughts and feelings into other people's head with this post, and making some pretty sketchy assumptions all the way around.



The original post I was elaborating on was in regards to people saying "1.5% (or whatever the amount of PF2 games on Roll20 is) isn't a fair metric of the popularity of the game because people aren't playing PF2 on Roll20 and are instead elsewhere." So my argument is that if PF2 is widely adopted, even if Roll20 isn't the best VTT for PF2, the numbers aught to reflect more than 1.5% by virtue of the popularity of the platform.


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## Guest 7025638 (Nov 14, 2021)

It’s really nice that Foundry is so much better than Roll20 for PF2 and many more systems (I tried it once as a player, it was really good, I’m not denying that), just don't forget the fact it's also much more expensive (really expensive for us, for example) so it's basically out of the question, no matter how good it is, actually.


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## jsaving (Nov 15, 2021)

Foundry is a great resource for PF2e but is there any actual evidence that more PF2e players use Foundry than Roll20?  It's just very strange that when people ask for that, the rebuttal is "people are playing on Foundry," which some no doubt are but which doesn't in any way answer the question.


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## Justice and Rule (Nov 15, 2021)

ibenny said:


> It’s really nice that Foundry is so much better than Roll20 for PF2 and many more systems (I tried it once as a player, it was really good, I’m not denying that), just don't forget the fact it's also much more expensive (really expensive for us, for example) so it's basically out of the question, no matter how good it is, actually.




It really depends on your internet connection. If the group helps a GM buy Foundry, the cost for the program itself isn't bad: $10-$12 per person.

Now if you don't have a great connection to host... well, _that's_ where it gets expensive. As someone who has _surprisingly_ good rural internet, this hasn't been a problem for me. But if you don't have the speed to host, you'll have to probably pay a monthly fee for a server. And if you want to use the integrated video, you'll also likely have to do that. Really hoping someone finds a way to integrate Discord's video feature into it, as it'd allow me to remove one side window from my games.



jsaving said:


> An unverified and unverifiable claim, though possible.




I mean, it's unverifiable through numbers, but if you spend time with the PF2 community it's pretty obvious that it is at least _something_. Foundry is the first, second, and third recommendation from the Paizo Boards to Reddit and just about anywhere else PF2 gets talked about. I've not seen this sort of push from any other game, though I'll admit there are plenty of game communities that I'm not a part of.


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## teitan (Nov 15, 2021)

Yeah just spend some time in the P2 groups on Facebook, YouTube or on Paizo. Paizo supports Foundry, foundry actively develops P2 materials. Roll20 does not. They have the core rulebooks and some of the early Adventure Paths for P2 and then it is hit or miss. In April Paizo even announced an official partnership with Foundry.





__





						paizo.com - Community / Paizo Blog
					





					paizo.com
				




You can be a naysayer but the fact remains, until we can consolidate all the VTT statistics then they aren't really a good judge on any of this beyond... people play D&D and everything else is kind of... there.


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## BigZebra (Nov 15, 2021)

It’s simply not true that Roll20 doesn’t actively develop PF2 content. One month ago they released AP 3 and 4 of Strength of Thousand Suns as well as Guns & Gear and Lost Bazar. 
They are actually trying to stay current on the Paizo releases and also just released a Starfinder adventure.


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## Justice and Rule (Nov 15, 2021)

BigZebra said:


> It’s simply not true that Roll20 doesn’t actively develop PF2 content. One month ago they released AP 3 and 4 of Strength of Thousand Suns as well as Guns & Gear and Lost Bazar.
> They are actually trying to stay current on the Paizo releases and also just released a Starfinder adventure.




Eh, there were problems in the past (ironically their slow scheduling had been a reason for people to say that things weren't going well), but the bigger thing is that Foundry as a platform has just been better for PF2 players.


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## teitan (Nov 15, 2021)

BigZebra said:


> It’s simply not true that Roll20 doesn’t actively develop PF2 content. One month ago they released AP 3 and 4 of Strength of Thousand Suns as well as Guns & Gear and Lost Bazar.
> They are actually trying to stay current on the Paizo releases and also just released a Starfinder adventure.



Yes sure, but historically that isn't true. When I was looking at Roll20 last winter it was very spotty and last I looked two months ago it was still spotty.


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## aramis erak (Nov 15, 2021)

MGibster said:


> In particular, I've always been surprised that Star Trek hasn't had a bigger splash in the RPG market than it has.  I remember the first Trek RPG published by FASA in the 80s, because I'm old, Last Unicorn Games, Decipher, and now Modiphius.  (I think FASA lost the license in the late 80s or very early 90s.)



Fasa lost it about 1992 or so... over Next Gen being a separate IP from TOS. They were licensed for Star Trek, and they did books covering TNG without realizing that their license didn't cover it. It did, however, cover the movies...

The offending products were First Year Sourcebook and the TNG Officers' Manual. Given where I was living, I think that was 1992-ish.

It also was cotemporous with Paramount vs Task Force Games and Amarillo Design Bureau...  Note that TFG/ADB won, and FASA lost... Article on it in TFG's house organ, Nexus, issue 18...


Morrus said:


> Pretty sure they're not allowed to make digital versions of the game (thus no PDFs). That would include Roll20 implementation.



Yeah, Disney considers PDF to be Software; software has a different license than tabletop games. This was actually explicitly stated on the FFG forums, but the Asmmodee move recently resulted in no forums.

Anyway, that also means no VTT support. They had to get special permission for the offline dice roller... from disney and the computer games license holder...


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## babi_gog (Nov 15, 2021)

> Maybe the bug Avatar game will make a good showing?




I do wonder if the Avatar Legends game is part of the bump seen in PbtA group currently


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## Guest 7025638 (Nov 15, 2021)

Justice and Rule said:


> It really depends on your internet connection. If the group helps a GM buy Foundry, the cost for the program itself isn't bad: $10-$12 per person.
> 
> Now if you don't have a great connection to host... well, _that's_ where it gets expensive. As someone who has _surprisingly_ good rural internet, this hasn't been a problem for me. But if you don't have the speed to host, you'll have to probably pay a monthly fee for a server. And if you want to use the integrated video, you'll also likely have to do that. Really hoping someone finds a way to integrate Discord's video feature into it, as it'd allow me to remove one side window from my games.
> 
> ...



We're all using the free account of Roll20, we don't buy anything from Roll20 (not even the GM) so compared to that, Foundry is really expensive for us (we live in a poor country).


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## Gammadoodler (Nov 15, 2021)

ibenny said:


> We're all using the free account of Roll20, we don't buy anything from Roll20 (not even the GM) so compared to that, Foundry is really expensive for us (we live in a poor country).



That is certainly fair. Bur if you are comparing something completely free, to something with a cost, and money is your primary limitation, then the free version wins it every time. 

I can't testify to the difficulty of gming or administrating foundry (we play using the forge browser). I can say, from a player side, having set up and played characters on both VTTs, that Foundry was much better set up to handle the complexities of PF2e, as I wasn't having to manually build and maintain the dice rolling formulae for every unique circumstance that arises. For me the biggest savings was Time, the ability to drag and drop feats, equipment etc. and then turn things on and off with easy to use buttons is huge with the level of complexity of 2e. 

It takes some of the more arduous elements of 2e and makes them easy. You can tell very quickly that the VTT is designed for maximum usability with minimal energy expenditure, and it continues to receive improvements. When you compare it to the Roll20 environment, where it's clear that support has been cobbled together with the bare minimum of developer time required and where improvements might take years (seriously,  has the 5e environment, their bread and butter, received meaningful improvements in the last 5 years?), the difference is night and day.


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## Justice and Rule (Nov 15, 2021)

ibenny said:


> We're all using the free account of Roll20, we don't buy anything from Roll20 (not even the GM) so compared to that, Foundry is really expensive for us (we live in a poor country).




We all have our own financial situations, so I understand that. For me, when I started doing stuff on Roll20 I eventually had to get a subscription for all the stuff I was putting on there.



Gammadoodler said:


> That is certainly fair. Bur if you are comparing something completely free, to something with a cost, and money is your primary limitation, then the free version wins it every time.
> 
> I can't testify to the difficulty of gming or administrating foundry (we play using the forge browser). I can say, from a player side, having set up and played characters on both VTTs, that Foundry was much better set up to handle the complexities of PF2e, as I wasn't having to manually build and maintain the dice rolling formulae for every unique circumstance that arises. For me the biggest savings was Time, the ability to drag and drop feats, equipment etc. and then turn things on and off with easy to use buttons is huge with the level of complexity of 2e.
> 
> It takes some of the more arduous elements of 2e and makes them easy. You can tell very quickly that the VTT is designed for maximum usability with minimal energy expenditure, and it continues to receive improvements. When you compare it to the Roll20 environment, where it's clear that support has been cobbled together with the bare minimum of developer time required and where improvements might take years (seriously,  has the 5e environment, their bread and butter, received meaningful improvements in the last 5 years?), the difference is night and day.




Yeah, Foundry's interface is just so much better for just about everything. Roll20's tools are just... not great, and the whole interface feels very out of date.


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## Retreater (Nov 15, 2021)

Justice and Rule said:


> Yeah, Foundry's interface is just so much better for just about everything. Roll20's tools are just... not great, and the whole interface feels very out of date.



As someone who doesn't know a lot about computers, I find Roll20's fewer options to be much more streamlined than Foundry. 
All I have to do is download a map, token, or art and drag it onto the screen of Roll20. Foundry means you're making subfolders for your campaign, saving it in the correct path, etc.
Even navigating from one map to the next is more complex for me in Foundry.


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## Stefano Rinaldelli (Nov 15, 2021)

ibenny said:


> It’s really nice that Foundry is so much better than Roll20 for PF2 and many more systems (I tried it once as a player, it was really good, I’m not denying that), just don't forget the fact it's also much more expensive (really expensive for us, for example) so it's basically out of the question, no matter how good it is, actually.



Plainly false. Have a search...


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## Guest 7025638 (Nov 15, 2021)

Stefano Rinaldelli said:


> Plainly false. Have a search...



Meaning? You think I can't decide if something is too expensive for me?  Elaborate, please..


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## Gammadoodler (Nov 15, 2021)

Retreater said:


> As someone who doesn't know a lot about computers, I find Roll20's fewer options to be much more streamlined than Foundry.
> All I have to do is download a map, token, or art and drag it onto the screen of Roll20. Foundry means you're making subfolders for your campaign, saving it in the correct path, etc.
> Even navigating from one map to the next is more complex for me in Foundry.



Then it may be a matter of not having to experience the gm side of the interface (in my case anyway. From a 2e player side, I can say that it probably took me half the time to get a level one character set up in foundry, maybe less, and at that point the foundry character sheet had fewer errors and was able to do more stuff through button clicks rather than dice roll coding.


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## J.Quondam (Nov 15, 2021)

I wonder if the majority of gaming groups now use a VTT (either remotely or for in-person, and how many of each); or if most are still mainly pen & paper games?
It would be interesting to know, but I suppose there's no way to answer that.


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## Stefano Rinaldelli (Nov 15, 2021)

ibenny said:


> Meaning? You think I can't decide if something is too expensive for me?  Elaborate, please..



You say it is *much more* expensive...


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## Stefano Rinaldelli (Nov 15, 2021)

J.Quondam said:


> I wonder if the majority of gaming groups now use a VTT (either remotely or for in-person, and how many of each); or if most are still mainly pen & paper games?
> It would be interesting to know, but I suppose there's no way to answer that.



For me the best option is to run an in person game with maps on a player's screen controlled by DM. I switch to Foundry and never come back to miniatures and pencils


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## Guest 7025638 (Nov 15, 2021)

Stefano Rinaldelli said:


> You say it is *much more* expensive...



Compared to using the free accounts of Roll20 and not buying assets or anything from there (essentially, not paying for it any way) Foundry *is* much more expensive. Fooundry is way above our options here.


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## GrahamWills (Nov 15, 2021)

One thing to note is that the headline seems to be assuming Roll20 is the measurably which games should be evaluated as to popularity. But it makes just as much sense to reverse that outlook and rewrite it as:

-------------
Roll20's Latest Usage Report: Cthulhu players leaving, D&D remains steady​Roll20 has released it's latest quarterly report -- and has a new format which features less numbers but prettier graphics! Everything is percentages now, rather than absolute numbers.

Only D&D players continue to frequent Roll20 steadily. _Call of Cthulhu_ player now only comprise  11.9% (down 4.4%) then_ Pathfinder _at 3.2% (down 0.2%) (_Pathfinder_ users apparently use Foundry these days). That's a big drop for Roll20 which seen a steady rise in_ Cthulhu players_ for the last year or two.


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## Justice and Rule (Nov 15, 2021)

Retreater said:


> As someone who doesn't know a lot about computers, I find Roll20's fewer options to be much more streamlined than Foundry.
> All I have to do is download a map, token, or art and drag it onto the screen of Roll20. Foundry means you're making subfolders for your campaign, saving it in the correct path, etc.
> Even navigating from one map to the next is more complex for me in Foundry.




Roll20 is anything *but *streamlined. Organizing characters, maps, and anything else is just an absolute nightmare, not to mention trying to manage storage space. With Foundry, it's nice to have your own folders to search from, but within the actual interface itself it's just that much easier to organize; you could drop everything into a single file folder and it wouldn't matter because it's so damn easy to organize things when you put them into the VTT itself.

Plus the actual act of putting these things together is just so much easier in Foundry. I can wall up a map lightning quick compared to Roll20, and stuff like lighting is just way, way simpler. Every interface and feature is just so much more intuitive compared to Roll20, largely because Roll20 looks like a product over a decade old while Foundry looks like one that is constantly updating.


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## Retreater (Nov 15, 2021)

Justice and Rule said:


> Roll20 is anything *but *streamlined. Organizing characters, maps, and anything else is just an absolute nightmare, not to mention trying to manage storage space.



The only thing you have to do on Roll20 is to drag the entry and put it on the folder or subfolder - dragging and dropping with a mouse. 
Putting in dynamic lighting is not difficult to do on Roll20, though it can be a little time-consuming (but no more so than Foundry).


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## Gammadoodler (Nov 15, 2021)

ibenny said:


> Compared to using the free accounts of Roll20 and not buying assets or anything from there (essentially, not paying for it any way) Foundry *is* much more expensive. Fooundry is way above our options here.



Yes, but you are dividing by zero here. Any cost will be "much more expensive" by that standard.

In this case, it's saying less about the cost of Foundry than it is about your tolerance for additional cost.

There's nothing wrong with choosing a lower cost/free option if that's what you can afford. It is misleading, though to those who don't have such inflexible budgets. It'd be less misleading to say "and there is no option to use it for free" since that is the real barrier to entry you care about.


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## darjr (Nov 15, 2021)

Stefano Rinaldelli said:


> You say it is *much more* expensive...



If this isn’t some privileged talk!
Just FYI the D&D game day from WotC adjusted pricing for certain regions because the tickets for players there were outrageous. Just because a price is affordable to you doesn’t mean it isn’t out of the question for someone else.

These software platforms play in a world market.


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## Justice and Rule (Nov 16, 2021)

Retreater said:


> The only thing you have to do on Roll20 is to drag the entry and put it on the folder or subfolder - dragging and dropping with a mouse.




When I was doing it, I was mass-loading and I just found the organizational system of Roll20 to be a mess. Never organized things as I wanted it. I can way more cleanly organizes things in Foundry.



Retreater said:


> Putting in dynamic lighting is not difficult to do on Roll20, though it can be a little time-consuming (but no more so than Foundry).




Having made absolutely massive maps on both, I have to disagree. I go to the lighting layer, I instantly see all the light sources and can modify them as I need or even turn them off with a single click. With Roll20, when I was using it, I was placing down objects with a lighting trait and shrinking them down to hide. Walls are similar, with the different options being incredibly useful (the terrain wall option is so damn useful for small alleys to give a sense of place, since you can show off the buildings around you rather than it just looking like a skinny hallway).

For me, the biggest benefit of Roll20 is the integrated video chat. Everything else is feels like it is dated.


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## teitan (Nov 16, 2021)

I got a crash course in Roll20 for my Theros campaign from one of my players. I was able to do what was needed for the time being but overall found it frustrating and counter intuitive. Laying down the grid was one of the most frustrating experiences of my life in trying to get it to line up with the maps pre-drawn grids and sometimes even importing my own, ungridded, maps was a nightmare to get it to work. I spent more time working on that than I did in session prep writing the adventures.


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## Retreater (Nov 16, 2021)

teitan said:


> I got a crash course in Roll20 for my Theros campaign from one of my players. I was able to do what was needed for the time being but overall found it frustrating and counter intuitive. Laying down the grid was one of the most frustrating experiences of my life in trying to get it to line up with the maps pre-drawn grids and sometimes even importing my own, ungridded, maps was a nightmare to get it to work. I spent more time working on that than I did in session prep writing the adventures.



The grids took a while to learn, but I got it down to where I can do better than the pro stuff released by WotC in a matter of a few minutes.


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## Stefano Rinaldelli (Nov 16, 2021)

darjr said:


> If this isn’t some privileged talk!
> Just FYI the D&D game day from WotC adjusted pricing for certain regions because the tickets for players there were outrageous. Just because a price is affordable to you doesn’t mean it isn’t out of the question for someone else.
> 
> These software platforms play in a world market.



Maybe i misunderstand. I believe it was a comparison btw foundry and other platforms.
If not, you are obviously right


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## teitan (Nov 16, 2021)

Retreater said:


> The grids took a while to learn, but I got it down to where I can do better than the pro stuff released by WotC in a matter of a few minutes.



Hey that's awesome. We got back to in person once everyone was vaxxed so it was maybe three months of Roll20. 4 of the five of us had Covid at one point or another. \I had it for five weeks, with Pneumonia, almost didn't make it as there weren't enough beds and my Oxygen levels didn't get low enough but I pulled through with long covid. So we have an extra barrier beyond those vaccines thankfully.


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## Stefano Rinaldelli (Nov 16, 2021)

ibenny said:


> Compared to using the free accounts of Roll20 and not buying assets or anything from there (essentially, not paying for it any way) Foundry *is* much more expensive. Fooundry is way above our options here.



I don't argue with your concept of affordable, because is subjective. But invite you to consider that aside for initial license, foundry quickly become cheaper in usage, both for time saved that for contents available for free. It is a sort of investiment.


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## Bolares (Nov 16, 2021)

Vampire 5th just came out in Brazil. And the older editions of the game were REALLY popular around here, so maybe that's one reason for it's rise...


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## gss000 (Nov 17, 2021)

A few things based on my own experience dealing with incomplete data sets and trying to draw conclusions from them.



Paragon Lost said:


> It would be really interesting to see truly accurate numbers and breakdowns on a each game system and edition and from all the various online gaming platforms. Roll20s are just done so crazy that getting a real number about anything is just pure speculation.



Yes, it would be nice, but you can still use the data available. If the absolute numbers aren't there, you can look at the trends in the data for a story about how a product is performing. If Roll20 was the only game in town, the story would be really bad for Pathfinder 2e. However, it's not and it's not the only VTT releasing numbers. Fantasy Grounds is releasing reports, too, so we can compare the systems. Its Q4 2020 report - the latest I can find - has PF2 at 6% of games and PF1 at 7% of games played. That's significantly higher than Roll20. However, like Roll20, more people are playing PF1 than PF2. If Foundry is like these other two - an assumption - then there will be more PF1 than PF2 players there.

But how many people are playing on Foundry? Is there a more people there than any other VTT? That question leads us to...



Morrus said:


> PF2 isn’t as popular as 5E, of course. Nobody is claiming that. That would be absurd. But it _is_ disproportionately more popular on Foundry than on Roll20 due to the quality of the support on that platform.



We know people are playing PF2 on Foundry. We don't know how many or in what proportion. All I've seen so far is people on message boards claiming this is the case. However, people who post on message boards aren't a good source of survey data because they are self-selecting enthusiasts. There may be a lot of silent people who enjoy PF2 or PF1 on Roll20 over Foundry. We can try to calculate that.

I recently found this Reddit thread from May 2020 that has some of the companies reporting numbers. It has an interesting comment from a Foundry official. "The Foundry website recently surpassed 5,400 user registrations - user registration began in April shortly before pre-purchasing. I won't speak to license sales numbers because everyone has a different mental rubric for what it would mean for a project like FVTT to be financially successful, but numbers have exceeded my expectations by this point considering the _official_ release is not until later this month (May 22)." We now know they were starting with a couple thousand registrations.

How much growth could their be? It's qualitative, but let's look at other places with numbers of subscribers and make some assumptions. There are currently is less than 2000 people supporting their patreon, Foundry's Twitter account has 12,000 followers, their Redditt has 28,000 members, and their Discord has 43,000 members. If every person their bought a license, and there is no overlap in subscribers on any of those sites, that's 80,000 people. For fun, let's say all those people play PF2 and no one plays 5E. How does that compare to Roll20? Roll20 just released that 1.5% of the accounts are playing PF2. If they still have 8 million users, that's 120,000 accounts playing PF2, more than my "for fun" estimate.

Another way to look at it is to calculate how many Foundry users there has to be to have more than 120,000 accounts playing PF2. If a quarter of Foundry license holders are playing PF2, then you would need 480,000 Foundry total licenses. If it's double what is playing on Fantasy Grounds, then it's more like a million accounts. I find it unlikely that it has that many subscribers after 1.5 years of operation.

All this to say, while people rightly say PF2 players are using Foundry, I find it difficult to believe that more people are using Foundry than Roll20 until I see some data. License sales would be a great start. Likely, the proportion of Foundry PF2 players is higher than Roll20's. If it follows Fantasy Grounds' trends, then there are likely even more PF1 players than PF2.

Final note: this all doesn't matter as long as you're having fun playing the game you like.


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## Gammadoodler (Nov 17, 2021)

gss000 said:


> A few things based on my own experience dealing with incomplete data sets and trying to draw conclusions from them.
> 
> 
> Yes, it would be nice, but you can still use the data available. If the absolute numbers aren't there, you can look at the trends in the data for a story about how a product is performing. If Roll20 was the only game in town, the story would be really bad for Pathfinder 2e. However, it's not and it's not the only VTT releasing numbers. Fantasy Grounds is releasing reports, too, so we can compare the systems. Its Q4 2020 report - the latest I can find - has PF2 at 6% of games and PF1 at 7% of games played. That's significantly higher than Roll20. However, like Roll20, more people are playing PF1 than PF2. If Foundry is like these other two - an assumption - then there will be more PF1 than PF2 players there.
> ...



Interesting way of looking at it. One thing I would note is that you only need one license to run the VTT not one license per game or per player.

You're being pretty generous in your assumptions, so I don't have any issue with your conclusions per se. That said, it'd likely make sense to apply some kind of players per license multiplier to get closer to "total usage". "Reddit * 4" or "Discord * 3" would both put it in competitive territory with Roll20 based on the numbers you've reported.


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## darjr (Nov 17, 2021)

Those sales estimates are welcome. So it might it be entirely wrong that Roll20 numbers, despite it’s lack of favor for many PF 1 and 2 players may still be a decent handle on the larger trend? Maybe?


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## gss000 (Nov 17, 2021)

Gammadoodler said:


> Interesting way of looking at it. One thing I would note is that you only need one license to run the VTT not one license per game or per player.



That's a very good point! I stand corrected.



Gammadoodler said:


> You're being pretty generous in your assumptions, so I don't have any issue with your conclusions per se. That said, it'd likely make sense to apply some kind of players per license multiplier to get closer to "total usage". "Reddit * 4" or "Discord * 3" would both put it in competitive territory with Roll20 based on the numbers you've reported.



Yes. Another way to handle that is to divide the Roll20 numbers by an average number of players. Say a game on average is four players and a DM. The 120,000 accounts playing PF2 is then 24,000 games. With my generous estimates, if a quarter of Foundry licenses are playing PF2, and each license represents one table, they are just about the same number of games on each site. If double Fantasy Grounds' percentage, then there would only be 9,600 games, or 40% of what Roll20 has. If we ever have license download numbers, we could start making better estimates.

And one flaw of my method is you have to be generous with the assumptions without any additional information, although I'm sure what I did there is too generous. There is likely a good deal of overlap between the subscription/follower services.


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## ReshiIRE (Nov 17, 2021)

I stand corrected.

Still, Foundry is doing pretty well considering. I hope it blows up more in the future, especially for new games.


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## gss000 (Nov 17, 2021)

darjr said:


> Those sales estimates are welcome. So it might it be entirely wrong that Roll20 numbers, despite it’s lack of favor for many PF 1 and 2 players may still be a decent handle on the larger trend? Maybe?



Maybe is the best I would say. All I would confidently say is it's not obvious that more people are playing on Foundry. I think if one is a doubter, you'll likely say it's not true more people play on Foundry (I fall in this camp based on what I've seen so far). However, if you are a booster, then this isn't at all ironclad evidence. More information is definitely needed.

And to be clear, this does not indicate whether a) PF2 is a success compared to other games; b) PF2 is doing as well for Paizo as it should at this stage in its life; or c) PF2 is growing, staying the same, or declining in popularity. All those have different answers and this may not even be relevant to that.


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## darjr (Nov 17, 2021)

@gss000 Thanks.

As far as

A) I think there is no doubt that PF2 is a huge success. Especially compared to everything else besides 5e but nothing else can be compared to 5e. Even PF1 success levels compared to 4e was a hurdle of sorts. Even if the play numbers are now lower than PF1.

B) is trickier, but news is that Paizo has hired more staff. So I think it’s at least doing well enough for that.

C) I have no idea. But I think a gander at Pathfinder Infinite might help with that, but only tangentially. And not concretely.


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## Gammadoodler (Nov 18, 2021)

gss000 said:


> That's a very good point! I stand corrected.
> 
> 
> Yes. Another way to handle that is to divide the Roll20 numbers by an average number of players. Say a game on average is four players and a DM. The 120,000 accounts playing PF2 is then 24,000 games. With my generous estimates, if a quarter of Foundry licenses are playing PF2, and each license represents one table, they are just about the same number of games on each site. If double Fantasy Grounds' percentage, then there would only be 9,600 games, or 40% of what Roll20 has. If we ever have license download numbers, we could start making better estimates.
> ...



I did find another interesting data point. The Forge (one of Foundry's common hosting solutions) includes some data on "Systems" installs on their site, specifically, % of games with the system installed.

So grains of salt as it relates to data sourcing, completeness etc. and it says nothing at all about the overall size of the player base. With that in mind... the number one installed game system is 5e at 77%. The number 2 is PF2e at 17% followed by Warhammer FRP, PF1, Savage Worlds, and Call of Cthulhu with a little over 5% each.

Since it seems to be possible to install multiple systems in a single game (or they're employing sorcerers that allow the total percentages to get past 100), it doesn't make sense to look at this as parts of a whole. But, it looks like there might be a story tell in how these systems relate to each other.

5e is installed 5x as often as Pf2e which is installed 3x as often as PF1.

Ir might not be possible to make the case that "all the 2e players are using Foundry", but there is some evidence 2e enjoys a stronger following there.


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## Justice and Rule (Nov 18, 2021)

We also have some statistics from Fantasy Grounds, which shows PF2 largely rising alongside PF1 games and being way closer compared to Roll20.






Obviously this is a bit behind, but at the least we have a way better idea of the actual numbers behind things. If you want to include D&D 5E in there, throws off the chart a bit but it's still instructive.






I do wonder what their 2021 statistics will look like


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## AtomicPope (Nov 18, 2021)

Blue Orange said:


> Astronauts are often sci-fi fans, as you might expect. But I don't know if the ISS gets internet. RPGs might be an effective way to pass long voyages as in space travel though...



I suspect they have a great satellite connection.


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## AtomicPope (Nov 18, 2021)

I really like Cthulhu games but they're like board games in that they're designed to kick players out and end.  So a Cthulhu campaign isn't like other RPG campaigns.  There are times when the campaign is over, the PCs are insane or dead, and everyone is thinking about the next character or game.


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## gss000 (Nov 19, 2021)

Gammadoodler said:


> I did find another interesting data point. The Forge (one of Foundry's common hosting solutions) includes some data on "Systems" installs on their site, specifically, % of games with the system installed.
> 
> So grains of salt as it relates to data sourcing, completeness etc. and it says nothing at all about the overall size of the player base. With that in mind... the number one installed game system is 5e at 77%. The number 2 is PF2e at 17% followed by Warhammer FRP, PF1, Savage Worlds, and Call of Cthulhu with a little over 5% each.



That's really interesting! Thanks for finding that. Do you have a link? Do they send out updates regularly?



Gammadoodler said:


> Since it seems to be possible to install multiple systems in a single game (or they're employing sorcerers that allow the total percentages to get past 100), it doesn't make sense to look at this as parts of a whole. But, it looks like there might be a story tell in how these systems relate to each other.
> 
> 5e is installed 5x as often as Pf2e which is installed 3x as often as PF1.
> 
> Ir might not be possible to make the case that "all the 2e players are using Foundry", but there is some evidence 2e enjoys a stronger following there.



Yes, this is actually a game changer for a lot of reason. First, until this, the only VTTs that I knew published table numbers (Roll20, Fantasy Grounds) had PF2 lagging PF1 use. One could argue that there was evidence that PF1 players were still not moving to PF2. There's now a case to say that's wrong. One instance isn't definitive, but it's not something to ignore. Second, as you said, there could be a stronger showing over at Foundry. With a VTT showing 17% of tables playing PF2, it's not a stretch to think if Foundry is as popular as people are saying, there could be 20 -25% of tables playing it. That is less a generous estimate to a potentially reasonable one.


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## gss000 (Nov 19, 2021)

Justice and Rule said:


> We also have some statistics from Fantasy Grounds, which shows PF2 largely rising alongside PF1 games and being way closer compared to Roll20.
> 
> Obviously this is a bit behind, but at the least we have a way better idea of the actual numbers behind things. If you want to include D&D 5E in there, throws off the chart a bit but it's still instructive.
> 
> I do wonder what their 2021 statistics will look like



Yes! It was why I was more pessimistic in my PF2 outlook - it confirmed certain cases from the Roll20 numbers like more people are still playing PF1 than PF2. 

If they release 2021 numbers, I'll be watching to see whether PF2 will ever overtake PF1 consistently.


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## Gammadoodler (Nov 19, 2021)

gss000 said:


> That's really interesting! Thanks for finding that. Do you have a link? Do they send out updates regularly?
> 
> 
> Yes, this is actually a game changer for a lot of reason. First, until this, the only VTTs that I knew published table numbers (Roll20, Fantasy Grounds) had PF2 lagging PF1 use. One could argue that there was evidence that PF1 players were still not moving to PF2. There's now a case to say that's wrong. One instance isn't definitive, but it's not something to ignore. Second, as you said, there could be a stronger showing over at Foundry. With a VTT showing 17% of tables playing PF2, it's not a stretch to think if Foundry is as popular as people are saying, there could be 20 -25% of tables playing it. That is less a generous estimate to a potentially reasonable one.



Forge "Systems" page

The percentages are included in the statistics when you click on the system. No idea regarding how that updates.


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## Justice and Rule (Nov 19, 2021)

gss000 said:


> Yes, this is actually a game changer for a lot of reason. First, until this, the only VTTs that I knew published table numbers (Roll20, Fantasy Grounds) had PF2 lagging PF1 use. One could argue that there was evidence that PF1 players were still not moving to PF2. There's now a case to say that's wrong. One instance isn't definitive, but it's not something to ignore. Second, as you said, there could be a stronger showing over at Foundry. With a VTT showing 17% of tables playing PF2, it's not a stretch to think if Foundry is as popular as people are saying, there could be 20 -25% of tables playing it. That is less a generous estimate to a potentially reasonable one.




I'll be honest: I don't think all that many PF1 players are switching to PF2 at this point. Definitely a bunch at the beginning, but we have to remember that Pathfinder was created on a movement to keep old rules. At this point there are people who have been playing 3.X for over 20 years from the original through PF. I suspect a lot of PF people still left playing are the sort of players who have found their system in 3.X and aren't likely to move.

Rather, I'm guessing the majority of PF2 players are like me: 5E players who are looking for a crunchier and better-balanced d20 system.



gss000 said:


> Yes! It was why I was more pessimistic in my PF2 outlook - it confirmed certain cases from the Roll20 numbers like more people are still playing PF1 than PF2.
> 
> If they release 2021 numbers, I'll be watching to see whether PF2 will ever overtake PF1 consistently.




I think it's interesting to see differences across platforms. FG I think has better rules integration than Roll20, which explains why PF2 is more favorably compared to PF1 on that system. Similarly, I'm guessing there are a bunch of PF1 players who started using Roll20 for their games and just have no interest in moving to a new one, which is why PF2 (given the Forge numbers above) does so much better on Foundry than PF1.


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## Gammadoodler (Nov 19, 2021)

Justice and Rule said:


> I'll be honest: I don't think all that many PF1 players are switching to PF2 at this point. Definitely a bunch at the beginning, but we have to remember that Pathfinder was created on a movement to keep old rules. At this point there are people who have been playing 3.X for over 20 years from the original through PF. I suspect a lot of PF people still left playing are the sort of players who have found their system in 3.X and aren't likely to move.
> 
> Rather, I'm guessing the majority of PF2 players are like me: 5E players who are looking for a crunchier and better-balanced d20 system.
> 
> ...



Roll20 can also be run without cost and functions better at facilitating the end to end process of getting games going simply by virtue of having a functioning LFP area.

You can go there and find PF1 or 2e games without needing to join a Discord or a Reddit/Facebook whatever. So far my only Foundry game found me because a player in a Roll20 game I was in started running it. O honestly don't know where you're supposed to look for a Foundry game if you aren't in one already.


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## Bolares (Nov 19, 2021)

How many languages has pathfinder 2 been translated to? Maybe that's a reason too?


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## Justice and Rule (Nov 19, 2021)

Gammadoodler said:


> Roll20 can also be run without cost and functions better at facilitating the end to end process of getting games going simply by virtue of having a functioning LFP area.
> 
> You can go there and find PF1 or 2e games without needing to join a Discord or a Reddit/Facebook whatever. So far my only Foundry game found me because a player in a Roll20 game I was in started running it. O honestly don't know where you're supposed to look for a Foundry game if you aren't in one already.




Oh absolutely. Roll20 is _the _casual or pick-up game spot right now. Need no investment, integrated video (which means I don't have to have someone's Discord handle) and enough mechanical support to get by with just about any system. It's the easiest place to get involved.

I do wonder if Demiplane's Pathfinder Nexus will help places like Foundry by giving people a place to find games outside of Roll20.



Bolares said:


> How many languages has pathfinder 2 been translated to? Maybe that's a reason too?




I know I've seen at least the Spanish and German, since those editions are up on DriveThruRPG.


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## MNblockhead (Dec 4, 2021)

FrogReaver said:


> Out of curiosity should a D&D 5e group use roll20 or foundry?  Is doing so of the same level of importance as it is for the pathfinder 2 group?



A bit late to the discussion, you've probably made your decision by now. But if you have good bandwidth and don't have heavy storage requirements, you probably are better off with Roll20.  I say this as a Foundry user and fan who has been running a 5e campaign in Foundry for about two years. 

Actually, I likely would have went with Fantasy Grounds, but I spend most of my time working in a country where internet access is tightly controlled, and it was simply unable to host games using Fantasy Grounds.  I was able to participate as a player in one game using Google Fi and VPN but the performance was terrible.  Also, I don't really like players having to have to install software on their machines. 

Roll20 has performed very well for me, even with subpar bandwidth, even in countries with tight controls on the Internet. Every VTT has a learning curve, but interface preferences is a matter of taste and I focus more on features and performance. Like Fantasy Grounds, you can get official D&D content on Roll20 saving a lot of prep time, especially if you run WOTC adventures. 

The main reason I didn't go with Roll20 is that I'm running a campaign with a massive number of maps and many of the maps are large. Even the top subscriber tiers at the time would make it hard to store everything.  Also, I found that large maps, with walls and lighting applies, etc. would cause the system to hang and glitch. It just didn't work for me as  DM.  But I am atypical in my storage needs. 

I host Foundry on The Forge and the The Forges hosting service is exceptional. Its designed so that assets load from servers that are closest located to the user geographically so users in different countries have the most optimal performance in terms of load times. This won't matter if you don't have players spread accross multiple countries. And it doesn't apply if you are self hosting or trying to host a game from your personal computer. 

In terms of map prep, applying walls is far easier, in my experience, in Foundry compared to Roll20, Fantasy Ground, and d20pro.  

The modules are both game changing and frustrating. Best to start with the base system and slowly add community modules after you are familiar with the base functionality. But it is crazy how cool many of the community mods are.  If you like to tinker and push the limits of your VTT, Foundry is the way to go. But it can quickly get out of hand with mods that are no longer actively developed, conflict with other mods, or just too many mods that start affecting performance leading to hours of troubleshooting. 

Out of the box, the support for 5e isn't great, compared to Fantasy Grounds or Roll20.  Even after two years of tinkering and testing, we generally use DnD Beyond for managing character sheets instead of the Foundry 5e character sheets.  Only the SRD is supported in Foundry.  There are modules that will import from DnD Beyond, but that means you need to buy content on D&D Beyond. You can't just buy non-SRD 5e content natively in Foundry.  Moreover, even with D&D Beyond Importing, we fairly frequently run into glitches that require us to go back to the character sheets in D&D Beyond. I've gotten very close to being able to run most 5e from Foundry, but not to where I can fully trust it.  And I don't think simply D&D Beyond importing will ever really get Foundry there. Until Foundry or a third-party mod developer can get licensed 5e content, and develop a proper native game system for 5e, it'll always be a kludge. 

If you want your 5e stuff to "just work" in a VTT you are better off with a VTT that licenses 5e content and actively develops and supports functionality to work with 5e. 

If, however, you don't care much about automating things and having official content available, and are more interested in really slick and useful map and token tools, I've found Foundry to be the best VTT available. Especially if you like to tinker.


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## Retreater (Dec 4, 2021)

MNblockhead said:


> I host Foundry on The Forge and the The Forges hosting service is exceptional. Its designed so that assets load from servers that are closest located to the user geographically so users in different countries have the most optimal performance in terms of load times. This won't matter if you don't have players spread accross multiple countries. And it doesn't apply if you are self hosting or trying to host a game from your personal computer.



 I'm curious about your experiences with the Forge. I've spent the past 5 hours tonight trying to get WFRP to work on Foundry (after last session on Roll20 had a technical glitch that will probably end the system on there for my group). But on Foundry, WFRP crashes every time in a matter of minutes on my computer, even after going to the Discord for advice and talking to the programmer of the official Foundry module.
It could be that my computer can't handle running Foundry. Will having the campaign hosted on the Forge use the computing power of the Forge? Might it be more stable than running the app on my computer? I haven't even gotten to the point of more than testing myself on the system, so I haven't even tried hosting it.


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## MNblockhead (Dec 4, 2021)

Retreater said:


> I'm curious about your experiences with the Forge. I've spent the past 5 hours tonight trying to get WFRP to work on Foundry (after last session on Roll20 had a technical glitch that will probably end the system on there for my group). But on Foundry, WFRP crashes every time in a matter of minutes on my computer, even after going to the Discord for advice and talking to the programmer of the official Foundry module.
> It could be that my computer can't handle running Foundry. Will having the campaign hosted on the Forge use the computing power of the Forge? Might it be more stable than running the app on my computer? I haven't even gotten to the point of more than testing myself on the system, so I haven't even tried hosting it.



Yeah, with a hosting company like The Forge, you don't have to run Foundry on your computer. Everything is done online. You just enter your Foundry license and it is set up for you. If you install modules from The Forge's Bazaar or purchase assets (tokens, map packs, etc.) from the Bazaar the storage is not counted towards your storage limit.  They have servers around the world and the data is loaded from the server nearest the user so that a players in different countries should have similar performance, assuming comparable bandwidth. 

You will still want a reasonably modern computer, but it is a lot easier for your computer to run through a browser when hosted by a good provider, than trying to run it from your computer. I've been very happy with The Forge. They have a free trial period. It is worth checking it out and comparing the performance.


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## overgeeked (Dec 7, 2021)

So D&D, in all it's official editions, knock-off editions, and closely related games, account for 59.41% of all campaigns actually run on Roll20. That's wild. What's wilder is that 5E accounts for 53.24% (5E is listed twice, once at 53.19 and again at 0.05). So 6.17% of Roll20 games are D&D-related, but not the current edition. That is more than any other single game except Call of Cthulhu. Wild.


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## darjr (Dec 7, 2021)

There is a reason laymen call the hobby D&D.


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## Bolares (Dec 7, 2021)

darjr said:


> There is a reason laymen call the hobby D&D.



Yes, because it's the best game ever! /s


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