Humans, Fighters, and Life Domain Most Popular On D&D Beyond

Yet more stats published by D&D Beyond, the official licensed Dungeons & Dragons electronic tool. Recently they revealed the most commonly viewed adventures, and the most common classes by tier on their platform. This time they're looking at how often people create characters of each race, class and subclass!

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Humans are by far the most common choice, with a total of 22% of the character made on the platform. They're followd up by Half-Elves, Tieflings, and Dragonborn. Deep Gnomes are the least popular listed, with under 1%, although the developer confirms that a lot of other races hover around 0.8%, just below it.

This is followed up by a look at classes. Fighters come first, and druids last. The "traditional" core four - fighter, rogue, cleric, wizard - make up the top four. The developer mentions that warlocks got very popular just after Xanathar's Guide, but it has returned to normal now.

Next it's the turn of the subclasses. The lead of the cleric's Life Domain, sorcerer's Draconic Bloodline and The Fiend (despite being a less popular class) are fairly strong. They note that the Hexblade was the most popular last time they looked, but it's down to 2.8% now.

Of course, these are characters created on the platform, not necessarily played. Lots of people create multiple character builds for fun. According to the developer, that's 8.8 million characters in total.

 

[Mistwell]

Weird that forest gnomes come in behind the other subraces. I think those are clearly the best for gnome illusionists. (Bias: I've played a gnome illusionist for more than a decade.)

Their "Speak with Small Beasts" also makes them good Druids. Conjure Woodland Creatures becomes a better out of combat spell with that ability. Of course, as you point out a free Minor Illusion cantrip and bonus to Dex makes them excellent illusionists.

 

[Ash Mantle]

But you're right, it's tough to see a clear logic---I think they got lucky with 5E in many ways, which makes figuring out how this happened tough.

I'm totally moved! Someone shares my opinion about this! Please believe me, I swear no irony here, I would never expect that. thanks, really.

I feel this extremely belittles the amount and length of the ongoing playtesting and feedback process, of both mechanics and adventures, that Wizards has its content undergo.

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

I feel this extremely belittles the amount and length of the ongoing playtesting and feedback process, of both mechanics and adventures, that Wizards has its content undergo.

I was very much referring to how successful things were overall. What I meant about "they got lucky" was that I don't think anyone in 2014 would have anticipated the really substantial success that's happened and their released for a while afterwards felt a bit uncertain because it wasn't too clear where things would go.

And I will say this, which you can take as being belittling if you want: WotC may playtest like heck, but their math skills haven't really impressed me in a lot of areas and it really never has. 3E had chained rounding errors in the saving throws which led to some really strange stuff and there are a number of areas in 5E as well. I don't recall ones in 4E but I'm sure they were there, too.

Doing a good job with an established game like D&D is hard and in general they did a good job, although there are some poorly functioning aspects of 5E, still. I'd like a 5.5E that fixed up some areas, e.g., saves and skills especially at high levels, and made a few classes less prone to build traps or being monotonous.

 

[Satyrn]

Their "Speak with Small Beasts" also makes them good Druids. Conjure Woodland Creatures becomes a better out of combat spell with that ability. Of course, as you point out a free Minor Illusion cantrip and bonus to Dex makes them excellent illusionists.

They also make for an awesome dual-wielding, owl-loving, dog-riding battlemaster! (That picture Oofta likes to post was mostly inspired by my gnome.)

I think my favorite moment with that character was, when camping alone, I used speak with beasts (and a handful of nuts) to ask a flock of squirrels to stand watch for me.

 

[KarinsDad]

Not so. Out of users that have unlocked the entire PHB, we still see the non-variant human selected more or less as frequently as variant.

I posit this could mean a smaller percentage of the playerbase is concerned with mechanical "optimization" than those of us that comment on internet threads are.

It depends on what you mean by mechanical optimization.

I've often picked standard human because it gives the most boosts to ability scores. That's mechanical optimization.

Other players could pick variant human because it gives a feat. That too is mechanical optimization.

It depends on what you are optimizing for.

 

[Ash Mantle]

I was very much referring to how successful things were overall. What I meant about "they got lucky" was that I don't think anyone in 2014 would have anticipated the really substantial success that's happened and their released for a while afterwards felt a bit uncertain because it wasn't too clear where things would go.

And I will say this, which you can take as being belittling if you want: WotC may playtest like heck, but their math skills haven't really impressed me in a lot of areas and it really never has. 3E had chained rounding errors in the saving throws which led to some really strange stuff and there are a number of areas in 5E as well. I don't recall ones in 4E but I'm sure they were there, too.

Doing a good job with an established game like D&D is hard and in general they did a good job, although there are some poorly functioning aspects of 5E, still. I'd like a 5.5E that fixed up some areas, e.g., saves and skills especially at high levels, and made a few classes less prone to build traps or being monotonous.

My point was that by your writing and only claiming that figuring how Wizards got successful is tough because they got lucky with 5E in many ways, in other words only attributing their success with luck, severely undermines the amount of quality content they produce and still belittles the playtesting and feedback process. I'm also not sure claiming they're directionless is reasonable, we're just not privy to their internal production cycles. We can see that their intent with UA is to publish these outcomes in books, only the classes and races are made generic so as to not tip their hand as to what is next in line.
I know there's being a few errors in the maths with the beasts in the MM, but apparently these are 'intended'? But in terms of classes and subclasses, is the quality of their maths skills still a major concern?

What are your concerns with the saves and skills of classes?
I feel that even trap classes in 5e are still playable and fun. I can't speak for the objective monotony of classes as this is subjective.