A while back we looked at the latest (end 2020) Fantasy Grounds vs Roll20 data and saw a difference in the big non-D&D systems - namely that Pathfinder (1e and 2e) has a much bigger following propotionally on Fantasy Grounds. Friends at the Adventuring Party podcast who are Pathfinder players inform me that Fantasy Grounds has great Pathfinder integration and that this makes sense. The next most popular systems outside D&D/Pathfinder were Savage Worlds, Starfinder, Call of Cthulu, MoreCore, Traveller, Rolemaster, WoD, GURPS and Star Wars.
Now comparing this to Obsidian Portal - between 20-40% of new campaigns are not D&D in a year. The below excludes the many editions of D&D and Pathfinder to zoom in on everything else. Here 5e and Pathfinder (1e and 2e) being the significant contributors to the 'D&D' segment.
This highlights the share of top-15 non-D&D campaigns added each year on Obsidian Portal. This aggregates the different editions of those games together - Star Wars includes Edge of Empire, Saga Edition, Age of Rebellion, Force and Destiny, d20 and d6 editions for example. The first point of interest to me is the collective high-tide of non-D&D games in 2014, immediately before 5e came out. This peak of non-D&D gaming in 2014 was not a single game having a great year, it was a general trend over 2009-2014 with FATE, Star Wars and Numenera having good years but not wildly off trend years.
Since 2015, and the release of 5e, it appears all other systems have been losing share of new campaigns. Note, Obsidian Portals new campaigns year on year has been growing a little but they are broadly similar, this is not like the explosive growth on Roll20 where a smaller share of a much larger pie is still a larger number of players. Here the reduced share of campaigns suggests that more of the general TTRPG community is playing 5e.
Comparing this to the fewer years of data we can pull from Roll20 and we see a similar overall story with different elements highlighted.
Most interestingly for Roll20 - Call of Cthulu has a big slice and we have seen some systems like WoD and 40k fade off in the past few years.
Going back to Obsidian Portal, as our longest dataset, and recognising that it is a tool for managing campaign information so may be more suited to some genres than others, let us look at the trends of top-15 non-D&D or Pathfinder systems
The element that jumps out at me are the survivors - like Legend of the Five Rings, Call of Cthulu, and Mutants and Masterminds; these have their 1% share and grind along at that level while other systems rise and fall around them. The swings, up and down, seen in Savage Worlds, Fate, Shadowrun and Star Wars seems to point to the boost that can be achieved by new editions or catching the zeitgeist. The fact that almost everything is trending down says that there is not one gang of experimentalists out there playing all the non-D&D stuff. The slow drain of everything suggests to me that people are being sucked up by the event horizon of 5e - which also suggests that there are lots of players who could pop back out to play other stuff under the right circumstances.
Another possiblity is that certain communities are transitioning to entirely different playstyles that do not need Obsidian Portal style campaign management; where did the Exalted players go, for instance. Did they really all stop playing in 2016? Did something else capture them?
Comparing this to what the ICV2 reports say about what was popular with retailers at the same times, games that held a place in the top-3 for a few quarters seem to be the ones that show up in the Obsidian Portal numbers - Star Wars was second on the list for multiple ICV2 reports 2012-2014 and we see a sliver appear in 2013 then a big pop 2014 onwards on Obsidian Portal that persists while it sits in 3rd place on ICV2 through to 2019. Other systems appear on the ICV2 reports (e.g. the Warhammer 40k games) but barely register on Obsidian Portal. Still others barely appear on ICV2 (Numenera) and do show significan presence on Obsidian Portal. All this points to Obsidian Portal giving a particular lens on what people are playing, one that should be treated with a grain of salt as we move away from its core function as a D&D campaign management tool. Some games just do not need that type of campaign organisation tool and so they are not present in the data.
The relative behaviour year-on-year of games that do turn up is something we can say is really happening and may tell us something about what is going on in the gaming sphere and I hope we can add many more years to this fascinating data set.
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