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[Rex Invictus]

I take it you haven't been to our FG&RP or Play With Your Buddies boards... well, ever. We've got I think two 5e campaigns, two 4e campaigns, around 15-20 3.5e campaigns (plus a dozen more at any given time that don't get off the ground), with most of the latter being houseruled, and precisely zero PF campaigns.

My uni isn't exactly a roleplaying Mecca, but of the group adverts I've seen, one was looking for players for CoC d20, one for 5e, and two for 3.5e.

Given how hard you're pushing PF you're probably heavily invested in the idea of it being the very best that ever was, and if that's the case you're probably only playing with likeminded people in communities of such. Though you haven't even bothered to provide anecdotal evidence of your claims, just meaningless sales.

E: aaaand, when you come right down to it, I said it already: PF is 3.5e with a set of houserules some people liked enough to pay for.

Meaningless sales. xD

Conflating all the different editions of D&D is a massive mistake, too, considering the differences between all of them.

Given how hard you're pushing PF you're probably heavily invested in the idea of it being the very best that ever was

Et tu, Brute?

If you want more meaningless facts, instead of anecdotal evidence, how about the industry report from Roll20?

[Tawa]

The player percentage is higher for D&D 3.5, if you'd bothered to look at your own chart.

[My Name is Immaterial]

By only 1.5%, Taw. That's essentially meaningless.
I think that the fact that 5e beat out 4e is way more interesting, and funny anyway.

[Kassire]

So it means we could say by Roll.20 standards people play Pathfinder and DnD 3.5 at around an equal rate, but it seems people are playing with smaller group sizes in Pathfinder. I mean, who wouldn't want to play a game where there's 10 players all playing paladins?

[Rex Invictus]

The player percentage is higher for D&D 3.5, if you'd bothered to look at your own chart.

Players can (and do) tag as many systems as they feel like on their profile. I mean, christ, I have 3.5 on mine. The Game % is the number of games actually being played.

By only 1.5%, Taw. That's essentially meaningless.
I think that the fact that 5e beat out 4e is way more interesting, and funny anyway.

Says a lot about the fact it's all about D&D and not about the system.

[Sergarr]

By only 1.5%, Taw. That's essentially meaningless.
I think that the fact that 5e beat out 4e is way more interesting, and funny anyway.

4e sucks and everyone knew that except for the die-hard fans of 4e.

[Bohandas]

The player percentage is higher for D&D 3.5, if you'd bothered to look at your own chart.

Plus, we're simply talking about "D&D" which means we have to add several of those entries together to get the numbers for D&D

[Criptfeind]

By only 1.5%, Taw. That's essentially meaningless.
I think that the fact that 5e beat out 4e is way more interesting, and funny anyway.

4e sucks and everyone knew that except for the die-hard fans of 4e.

Except apparently me. Who likes 3.5 more, but also likes 4.

There's a lot of hate in this thread with very little reasoning (except for Tawarochir at one point I guess. But his complaints seemed mostly personal preference.) To give a "pro tip" to haters. If the thing you don't like you don't like for subjective reasons, that doesn't mean it's bad, just that it's not what you like.

[Orange Wizard]

The percentage of D&D games adds to 41.26%, a.k.a. almost double that of Pathfinder.

E: Actually, I missed out AD&D and Original D&D, which brings us up to 44.60%.

[Flying Dice]

Et tu, Brute?

Not particularly. I play 3.5e, but that's mostly because it's a) common and b) decent once it's been fixed up; it's still got a boatload of problems, which is part of why I'm cautiously optimistic about 5e.

If you want more meaningless facts, instead of anecdotal evidence, how about the industry report from Roll20?

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The reason Tack's numbers were meaningless has already been mentioned, and you ignored that post. I'll quote it here to see if you ignore it again.

Also @ Sales figures, 3.5e stopped being published in 2008, so keep that in mind. Basically, those numbers are saying that Pathfinder did beter than 4e.

Arguing that PF sales in those quarters make PF more played and more popular than 3.5e is like arguing that Kick Ass 2 is more popular than Star Wars: A New Hope because the former sold more tickets at the box office in 2013.

Likewise, as mentioned above, 3.5e was more popular with players even in the data you cherrypicked from a single source.

Furthermore, that source is questionable. Their sample size is a scant 2,500 people from a self-selected group (people from the roll20 community who opted into the survey, taken over a couple months from a single year). That's from an estimated playerbase of 20 million people over the course of its history, with an estimated six million players as of 2007.

Additionally, compiled google search data indicates that it took nearly six years after the release of Pathfinder for it to pass 3.5e in general search volume, and that it didn't even start gaining until 3.5e went out of print and 4e was released, indicating that a good chunk of the playerbase for it were 3.5e players who were disappointed by 4e and unwilling to stick with a game which was no longer in print.

Likewise, the data also shows that the popularity of 3.5e has been holding steady since 2009, despite being out of print and in competition with both PF and 4e. Even more telling, however, is the fact that specific searches per month for character sheets, character generators, and PDFs for D&D vs. PF are overwhelmingly in favor of D&D; even if you strip half the numbers from D&D to account for non-3.5e searches (more than fair, given that 3.5e is still by far the most popular edition at the time of this study), 3.5e still beats out PF in each of those categories, which I would argue are more relevant as they are directly associated with actively playing the game rather than looking for any sort of information related to it.

[Bohandas]

go here.
There's others, but this is the biggest, free-est one.

There is also maptools. Which is both bigger, and more free. I'd say map tools is much much better, but it is harder to use (basically, you need to know how to port forward, but that's something worth knowing how to do anyway...)

How do I use this. I've downloaded the .zip but can't figure out which file starts the program

go here.
There's others, but this is the biggest, free-est one.

Does this make your email address public if you sign up? I don't want anyone who doesn't know me personally to be able to connect my real name to my primary email address. Because I'm paranoid.

[My Name is Immaterial]

Does this make your email address public if you sign up? I don't want anyone who doesn't know me personally to be able to connect my real name to my primary email address. Because I'm paranoid.

No. Also, you should make an email just for your online life. I highly recommend it.

[Criptfeind]

How do I use this. I've downloaded the .zip but can't figure out which file starts the program

Huh. For some reason the launcher isn't so obvious in the new version. Weird.

Anyway, the executable files launch it. Called 'maptool-1.3.b91' or 'launcher-130829.01'. The first one just opens it up right away, the second one lets you set some settings first.

Spoiler: Bit of starting advice for maptools that totally got away from me when I was writing it. (click to show/hide)

One of the downsides to maptools as compared to roll20 is that initially it has a lower number of tokens (roll20 has it's own depository that you can search though and such, maptools comes with almost nothing)

So if you wanta start using maptools the first step is to get some tokens probably. There are some packs available for download in the client. If you go to File>Add Resource To Library it will open up a little window, on the left side there are three tabs, if you click the bottom one it opens up a list of resources you can download. If you wanta mess around with or use maptools, I recommend Devin Night's Tokens. (Assuming they still offer it, I did download it like five years ago, but presumably it's still there.) There's also a pack of resources I use called "Mapping objects"* which is a couple of gigbytes of backgrounds and such you can use to create your world (in maptools you can select a resource tile and draw with it. Very useful for quickly throwing together good looking anything.) Of course, both of these are GM things mostly. As just a player you don't need ether, since your gm will handle them and all you need most likely is a player token. Which you could use one of these, but it's normally best to make one yourself using the tokentool, which is another program made by the same people who made maptools and can get gotten from the same site. It's even useful for roll20.

*Mapping objects is not on the list of downloadables. It's a torrent that's probably available online somewhere, if not I can put it up probably.

[Flying Dice]

Yeah, if you go with maptool make sure to spend a hour or two getting tokens ready for any characters you might use and familiarizing yourself with how it parses chat commands, how to navigate maps, &c. It sucks to learn/relearn it ten minutes before a session.

[Rex Invictus]

The percentage of D&D games adds to 41.26%, a.k.a. almost double that of Pathfinder.

E: Actually, I missed out AD&D and Original D&D, which brings us up to 44.60%.

Combining 3.5, 4e and 5e is like lumping together a type of apples, an MMOs and a book.

Not particularly. I play 3.5e, but that's mostly because it's a) common and b) decent once it's been fixed up; it's still got a boatload of problems, which is part of why I'm cautiously optimistic about 5e.

Seriously, if you want a cleaner and fixed up version of 3.5, play Pathfinder. That is what Pathfinder is.

Additionally, compiled google search data indicates that it took nearly six years after the release of Pathfinder for it to pass 3.5e in general search volume, and that it didn't even start gaining until 3.5e went out of print and 4e was released, indicating that a good chunk of the playerbase for it were 3.5e players who were disappointed by 4e and unwilling to stick with a game which was no longer in print.

Likewise, the data also shows that the popularity of 3.5e has been holding steady since 2009, despite being out of print and in competition with both PF and 4e. Even more telling, however, is the fact that specific searches per month for character sheets, character generators, and PDFs for D&D vs. PF are overwhelmingly in favor of D&D; even if you strip half the numbers from D&D to account for non-3.5e searches (more than fair, given that 3.5e is still by far the most popular edition at the time of this study), 3.5e still beats out PF in each of those categories, which I would argue are more relevant as they are directly associated with actively playing the game rather than looking for any sort of information related to it.

That was from 2012.

Now it is a very different story.

Likewise, as mentioned above, 3.5e was more popular with players even in the data you cherrypicked from a single source.

Which has nothing to do with the number of games being played. You can add as much as you like to your profile with no punishment.

Furthermore, that source is questionable. Their sample size is a scant 2,500 people from a self-selected group (people from the roll20 community who opted into the survey, taken over a couple months from a single year). That's from an estimated playerbase of 20 million people over the course of its history, with an estimated six million players as of 2007.

Saying it's a scant 2,500 people is a devastating misunderstanding of how many people make an acceptable study. We have clinical trials that don't involve that many people (average is 1000-3000), and those are things that can ruin people's lives if they mess up. 2,500 from a cross section like that is HUGE.

Also, if you read the post, you'd understand that it wasn't 2,500 people.

It was 15,000 players and 25,000 games. That's HUGE.

It’s from those two places that we made The Orr Group Industry Report. Self-reported use of the Roll20 system. In the report we state we worked from a sample size of 25,000 games and 15,000 players— each one of those campaigns and players were active during Quarter 3, thus being included. That said, many, many users don’t select what games they are playing— in the last 24 hours, for example, over 6,000 games accessed and the vast majority of those have not selected what is being played. Additionally, a Game Master is more likely to indicate what campaign they’re starting than a player is likely to alter their profile as it has no effect on the player simply being able to join the Game Master’s session.