Basic Fantasy RPG Forums

Just a quick heads up that roll20 release their quarterly report on the games being ran on their site and Basic Fantasy is ranked 18 out of 65 listed. There are a few listings that are more of a grouping than actual system listing such as "Others" and "Board games".

For those that are active on roll20, congrats on making the system active enough to get listed.

That's really cool to see BFRPG so high up on the list! Goodness 5E is a juggernaut

I'm happy to see BFPRG and a few other cool OSR games in there !

Except for the D&D name, which attracts a lot of people, I don't really get why everybody plays 5e. Not a band game, but definitely not a great one.

I've played 5e and it's good at getting you going really quickly. Characters start out with quite a bit of strengths behind them and a lot of the rules makes it easy to play fast. Some things like advantage/disadvantage make it easy to modify the situation, either as rules suggest or DM wishes. Character creation also gives you a TON of options, so you can create your desired character pretty easily; the development is done for you. (Whether that's something you want or not is a different question, but it does speed things along.)

That all being said I'd rather have a nice quick character creation (which BFRPG makes really easy and simple), straightforward rules for combat (so I don't have to figure out if a bonus action needs to happen before or after some attack), etc. I'd also like to be able to just join a game quickly instead of spending a whole session JUST figuring out the process and the details.

I'd think BFRPG is popular on Roll20 beacuse it's easy to get a game going for a one-shot or single-adventure campaign. What's easier, reading an 11-page PDF (free on internet) which, assuming you know some basic table-top RPG ideas, is very quick to digest, or reading a 200 page book you'd have to order online. (Yes, I know there's a quickstart guide for 5e, but I had to read that for an hour to understand it.)

I play in a 5E game DM'ed by a friend. It's definitely a cool system, but it can definitely get bogged down sometimes. When characters have too many special skills (we're level 4), and you also have actions, and bonus actions, and movement, and etc., well... It kills a bit of the quickness of the system in my opinion.

My problem with 5e is that I feel they tried to put every option of every edition available in some way or other. It makes a lot of customization options for characters, but it makes the system lack any personnality.

http://blog.roll20.net/post/15995261941 ... rt-q1-2017
http://blog.roll20.net/post/16319031261 ... rt-q2-2017

BFRPG moved up to 17 in Q1/2017 overtaking Stars Without Number but in Q2/2017 it fell to 19 while Stars without Number moved to 18 and Apocalypse World System jumped from 19 to 16. Still in top 20 of games played every quarter so thats a good sign.

I have to say that's pretty impressive. What is also interesting is the number of systems that are D&D versions or variants. I have to say I'm also quite happy to see Cthulu up there ... that would be quite freaky playing online, all the lights off ...

Anyways I think BFRPG is doing really well. As it stands I'm looking at running it weekly with 3 friends as a minimum. I have other games in other systems that I also love but I like the simplicity of BFRPG. We can get to the root of having fun with minimum fuss.

I haven't tried Roll20 yet but if I do BFRPG will be the perfect system. Actually I have a friend who may be interested ... and I thought I didn't have enough hours in the day already!