Smaller slices of a bigger pie - older D&D editions on Roll20

With another year past we can update the trend in editions of D&D as played on Roll20.

What we are looking at here is the share of D&D players for the various editions only from among Roll20 (so ~ 60-75% of the total players on Roll20 depending on the year). I have taken the % of campaigns for each edition for the last available report in each year and made that stack 100% in each year so we can see what % of D&D players are playing which edition.

Answering a question from Axian Spice on twitter, the following are my very dirty estimates for absolute numbers of users - with the caveat of noting the pre/post 2019 reporting method changed hence the 'step' in the last 3 years. It is not large so I think our general trend is not bad but still, exercise appropriate caution. Particularly with the 2021 number which is based on an extrapolation ofthe growth in Roll20 users.

This comes from taking the quarters where Roll20 declared they passed X million users and using those dates to plot a user growth trend. Zooming in to see the older editions more clearly we can see they are broadly stable in absolute number of users over time.

This suggests that it is not that non-5e communities have been losing players, more that 5e is capturing the new comers who are joining the hobby. Those older edition communities appear to be mostly stable in absolute users with only 4e declining. Pathfinder even appears to be growing at a rate that would be impressive (doubled in 5 years) were it not for the comparison to 5e (which quadrupled). This makes sense intuitively, coming to D&D and ending up playing an older edition is a more complex path than getting scooped up by the edition on the shelves today. So D&D 5e and Pathfinder 2e are the two current editions, both of which look to be growing.

As a check on whether we can believe these edition splits let us compare surveys from given years to the Roll20 splits of D&D players between editions we can see that broadly the story looks correct. These were previously smushed into a single chart, now I split them by time grouping for clarity.

Back in the mid 2010s, prior to 5e dropping, there was a splintered scene with multiple editions in active use. 4e, 3.5e, Pathfinder and the nascent D&D Next / 5e held broadly similar shares of players. Now, approaching 10 years later, 5e rules the roost - not because those communities have gone away but because it appears to have drawn in a lot of new people.

All this does suggest that 5e is not *killing* the old scenes - the players are there and have been consistently throughout - but that the new 5e players are additive to the hobby. I choose to be cautiously optimistic about this.

% Campaigns on Roll20	2014	2015	2016	2017	2018	2019	2020	2021
D&D 5e	12.08	31.39	46.40	57.66	60.88	51.21	52.90	53.19
Pathfinder	26.83	19.78	15.63	11.54	9.87	6.33	3.69	3.24
Pf2e	0.00	0.00	0.00	0.00	0.00	0.57	1.58	1.44
3.5e	17.87	10.64	7.00	4.74	3.89	1.30	1.02	0.81
4e	11.31	4.01	2.26	1.39	1.13	0.30	0.20	0.17
AD&D	2.65	1.76	1.40	1.06	0.89	0.23	0.23	0.19
Old Editions, OSR variants	3.61	2.35	1.80	1.45	1.32	0.54	0.10	0.09

Sources:
What Games People Are Talking About on Enworld 2013
r/DND 2014
Twitter D&D demographics survey 2020
D&D Research Wizards 2020

Orr Reports for Roll20 - other reports linked on the wiki.

For more, see the Big List of TTRPG surveys post