Who uses RW?
 

Apparently no DM's on Reddit that play D&D 5e and who took a recent survey there.... It's interesting in that RW is completely absent in the top 30 out of 4164 respondents.

http://slyflourish.com/2016_dm_surve...lts.html#tools

Looks like we need to start a poll on the LWD forums for how many RW users actually frequent Reddit. :P

It would have been more useful if they'd limited that survey question to software/online tools. Mixing everything from paper to the core rulebooks to digital tools makes it hard to take much away from it. I'd certainly consider pencil, paper, dice, and the rulebooks more useful to my RPG experiences than Realm Works.

LWD might consider the lack of Hero Lab unfortunate, though I'm not surprised given that they don't have a license for most of D&D 5e. A Pathfinder source would be more likely to give LWD's products a decent showing.

Added: Re: Reddit, I don't go on there much. The first page of a Google search shows a few different D&D and/or D&D 5e boards, so I doubt they're even drawing from a pool that includes "most of the folks who run 5e and go on Reddit".

You'll notice that Hero Lab is also absent. Yet there are many thousands of users who have specifically purchased the D&D 5E material for Hero Lab.

While we don't have game-specific numbers for Realm Works, I know of many users that are using RW for their D&D 5E games.

Another question is whether they actually SCANNED for either Hero Lab or Realm Works, which is entirely unclear from the article. And, if they did, we have users regularly call Hero Lab and Realm Works by various permutations of the name, plus the common abbreviations of HL and RW, which may very well have been dropped based on the approach being used. Or they could have 25 HL, 24 Hero Lab, 21 Hero Labs, etc. - all of which weren't correctly merged together without recognition of equivalence and extra effort.

All of the above calls the entire "survey" into question. I'm not saying it's wrong, but it's certainly NOT definitive in any way whatsoever. And it's probably not even indicative in any meaningful way with respect to Hero Lab and Realm Works. Especially in light of the concrete data we have for Hero Lab that clearly establishes that product being very widely used for D&D 5E (pushing 10,000 users).

LWD has not had a strong presence in the 5e world so this isn't surprising.

Further reddit, uggh.

Looking at the raw data posted by the survey author, I counted 25 Hero Lab responses and 18 for Realm Works. So they weren't unknown, just not as popular as some of the other digital tools listed.

Touche' :) Of note, paper ranked highly.... I'm personally sold on RW and decided to post this not because the findings are correct, accurate, right or wrong, but merely as an interesting finding and a potential market.

And note that the call for survey takers was posted in /r/dndnext (39,000 subscribers), and not in /r/rpg (110,000) or /r/dnd (200,000).

That probably limited their potential viewers a lot. Even though it was for 5e DMs, from the numbers, I'd think that many 5e DMs look at the other two and not /r/dndnext.

FWIW, the call for survey respondents was also posted in D&D 5th discussion areas on ENWorld, Facebook, Google+, and the creator's Twitter and blog. (This list may not be exhaustive, but it's what's included in the results post.)

Not sure why you wouldn't hit more of the places on Reddit (maybe he did; I didn't search), but at least it wasn't just one forum.

More people use an online fight management app to run D&D5E than use the PHB, DMG and MM?

I suspect serious methodological problems with this survey. Pay it no regard.