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.

 

[BadEye]

But when 20% of your character population don't have subclasses and when all clerics, warlocks, sorcerers by definition have subclasses it kind of significantly skews the results right?

I'm not going to have time to deep dive an explanation on this, but you're not thinking of the data sets how they should be considered.

Taking an incredibly simple example, let's go with the entire population is 100 and it is composed of only Fighters and Clerics.

There are 70 fighters and 30 clerics. The 70 fighters choose (let's say) among 10 subclasses and (let's say) equally for the example. That means that for those 10 fighters subclasses, they each only compose 7% of the total percentage of individual subclasses.

For the 30 clerics, let's say that 20 of those are Life Domain, and the rest are Knowledge Domain (10). This gives us a final breakdown of:

20% Life Domain, 10% Knowledge Domain, and 10 other subclasses at 7%. Even though there are only 30 total clerics compared to the 70 total fighters, Life Domain still comprises the highest individual percentage.

Of course mileage is going to vary on any of this. The intent is to demonstrate which subclass choices are popular comparatively. If someone chooses cleric, there's a pretty high percentage they're choosing Life, same as with Draconic sorcerer. Fighter is the most popular class overall, but they have a higher number of better-represented subclasses, therefore bringing their individual percentages lower.

It might be more helpful to consider the rankings by class I shared back in April. (This is not updated for current, but we will provide that in the near future. I couldn't figure out how to inline this, so I tried to attach.)

 

[FrogReaver]

You're doing calculations without all of the data. If we were presented with the whole picture, these snapshots would likely make more sense, but alas! We only have a couple of pie charts.

I'm doing calculations on the data they gave us to help fill in their huge gaps. I shouldn't have to do that. But I figure it's worth combating now before I hear on every thread for the next year how D&D Beyond says XYZ is more popular. Instead I'd rather nip that in the bud and have everyone know basing anything on these couple of D&D charts is bogus.

 

[FrogReaver]

I'm not going to have time to deep dive an explanation on this, but you're not thinking of the data sets how they should be considered.

Taking an incredibly simple example, let's go with the entire population is 100 and it is composed of only Fighters and Clerics.

There are 70 fighters and 30 clerics. The 70 fighters choose (let's say) among 10 subclasses and (let's say) equally for the example. That means that for those 10 fighters subclasses, they each only compose 7% of the total percentage of individual subclasses.

For the 30 clerics, let's say that 20 of those are Life Domain, and the rest are Knowledge Domain (10). This gives us a final breakdown of:

20% Life Domain, 10% Knowledge Domain, and 10 other subclasses at 7%. Even though there are only 30 total clerics compared to the 70 total fighters, Life Domain still comprises the highest individual percentage.

Of course mileage is going to vary on any of this. The intent is to demonstrate which subclass choices are popular comparatively. If someone chooses cleric, there's a pretty high percentage they're choosing Life, same as with Draconic sorcerer. Fighter is the most popular class overall, but they have a higher number of better-represented subclasses, therefore bringing their individual percentages lower.

It might be more helpful to consider the rankings by class I shared back in April. (This is not updated for current, but we will provide that in the near future. I couldn't figure out how to inline this, so I tried to attach.)

Wrong, that's absolutely not what the subclass chart is showing.

 

[Morrus]

I'm doing calculations on the data they gave us to help fill in their huge gaps. I shouldn't have to do that.

You don't have to do that.

 

[Ash Mantle]

I must admit this information supports my belief that the Swashbuckler subclass was awful. I don’t know how they ever settled on that version but it really missed the mark.

I really like the swashbuckler

 

[FrogReaver]

You don't have to do that.

I really don't have much choice in the matter. It's what I do when something doesn't make sense. They provided data that doesn't make sense so I figure it out. If they provided all their data it most likely would make sense.

 

[FrogReaver]

I really like the swashbuckler

I think it's great too.

 

[Morrus]

I really don't have much choice in the matter.

In fact, you are the *only* person who chooses what you do.

 

[BadEye]

Wrong, that's absolutely not what the subclass chart is showing.

Yes...it is?

I guess this will be my last attempt to explain, this time with a question - do you see any single other cleric domain in the list on that chart?

No being the answer, the reason is such a high percentage of clerics choose Life Domain that the total of that subset is higher than all the other individual subclasses for all the other classes. I can confirm that over 60% of clerics on DDB are Life Domain, and clerics have the most subclasses of any class. Only sorcerers exhibit more single-subclass dominance with Draconic comprising 65% of all sorcerers (sorcerers just have a good bit fewer total number of characters).

Perhaps one other part you're missing is that the population for the subclasses chart already removes all characters without subclasses. Since it is looking only at relative subclass distribution, it only includes characters with subclasses. In other words, the subclasses chart does not use the same population as the classes chart.

I tried here. I can assure you that we have an actual statistician that is doing this stuff (not me) and that it's what we see. You are making some pretty dogmatic assertions about datasets you haven't seen in detail.

At the end of the day, you're right with some of your other comments - this information does not demonstrate any class or subclass is "better," more balanced, or anything else than another, no more than it used to mean when they shared World of Warcraft class or race distributions. Sometimes inferences can be made, but nothing is completely solid since we can't guarantee a character is being played versus just created (even though we attempt to do what we can there).

I hope you have a great rest of the weekend!

 

[FrogReaver]

Yes...it is?

I guess this will be my last attempt to explain, this time with a question - do you see any single other cleric domain in the list on that chart?

No being the answer, the reason is such a high percentage of clerics choose Life Domain that the total of that subset is higher than all the other individual subclasses for all the other classes. I can confirm that over 60% of clerics on DDB are Life Domain, and clerics have the most subclasses of any class. Only sorcerers exhibit more single-subclass dominance with Draconic comprising 65% of all sorcerers (sorcerers just have a good bit fewer total number of characters).

Perhaps one other part you're missing is that the population for the subclasses chart already removes all characters without subclasses. Since it is looking only at relative subclass distribution, it only includes characters with subclasses. In other words, the subclasses chart does not use the same population as the classes chart.

I tried here. I can assure you that we have an actual statistician that is doing this stuff (not me) and that it's what we see. You are making some pretty dogmatic assertions about datasets you haven't seen in detail.

At the end of the day, you're right with some of your other comments - this information does not demonstrate any class or subclass is "better," more balanced, or anything else than another, no more than it used to mean when they shared World of Warcraft class or race distributions. Sometimes inferences can be made, but nothing is completely solid since we can't guarantee a character is being played versus just created (even though we attempt to do what we can there).

I hope you have a great rest of the weekend!

I can prove you are incorrect.

Look at the Barbarian subclasses. His highest is 5.1%. Even if you took all his subclasses you would get nowhere near 100% of barbarians accounted for which is what would need to be able to happen if you were correct. Thus you are incorrect.