D&D 5E Poll for PC's with 4 or more levels in a class.

[Satyrn]

I do think Human would plummet in the rankings if Variant Human was not available among those who know the power of Variant Human.

This reminds me of when [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] said he figured the fighter's popularity was due to its use as a dip class.

 

[Mephista]

I do think Human would plummet in the rankings if Variant Human was not available among those who know the power of Variant Human.

I'm going to disagree, I think. Humans and elves have always been extremely popular character choices, no matter what edition, even outside of D&D, even outside of fantasy TT games. MMOs, novels, science fiction...

 

[Tony Vargas]

I do think Human would plummet in the rankings if Variant Human was not available among those who know the power of Variant Human.

Human was popular long before the Variant.

 

[Hussar]

And as far as the 525 results go, they do dovetail pretty closely to WotC's own polled results. Which dovetail with these results.

I'd question their results if they were getting radically different outcomes, but, since all they do is back up other results, I'm not sure we really need to question them.

I wouldn't get too caught up on the raw percentages here in this poll. It's too small of a sample size. It's too easy for a couple of votes to swing the number and make it look bigger than it is. Whether we want to say 35% fighters or 25% fighters, at the end of the day it doesn't matter. The point is, fighters, even when controlled for dipping, remain the clearly most popular class in the game.

 

[Parmandur]

Barbarian, Bard, and Cleric are at the top of the menu, but they're kinda spread out in the rankings.

Other than that, yeah, all factors.

My feeling is that it's like one of those studies that confirms the obvious. It may or may not be a good study, but it's easy to accept the conclusion, because it's, well, obvious.

I think you're using 'good' here in the sense of effective or capable in some sense (you mention survival, for instance)? Once TWF & double-specialization became options, the fighter had an 'optimal DPR build' (long before that was a thing), so the 2e and late-1e fighters were powerhouses in that area. IMHO, the 5e fighter returns to that, it's just by a narrower margin, and shares the high-DPR laurels with several other classes, I guess it's also slower-maturing. The 3e fighter also had a couple of high-power builds that were arguably viable, or at least occasionally relevant, in spite of CoDzilla, but was, overall Tier 5, & the 4e fighter had the privilege of being a well-supported 'Defender' in a generally better-balanced iteration of the game. :shrug:

OTOH, the fighter design has gone from simplistic, to broken, to elegant, to specialized, to ...derivative, I think, is the only way to describe it succinctly. It's gone from toughness, to DPR, to customizeability, to defense-of-others, and back to DPR again. It's gone from balanced-by-items, to broken by optional rules, to optimizeable, to solidly supported in one role, to.
In Tier terms, even though they were invented specifically for 3.5, the fighter's roughly gone from Tier 5, to Tier 4, to Tier 5 (the only really valid data point in this chain), to Tier 3, to Tier 4.

It's been all over the map in a lot of ways, but it's consistently remained the most popular class. Same with human, though it's bounced around less, it's still consistently most popular.

It just dosn't seem plausible that you'd get consistent popularity from wildly varying roles, mechanics, support, balance, etc...

Thus, my conclusion is that Fighter and Human are popular because of an understandable preference for concepts that just don't fit into other classes or races. Familiar and/or relatable and/or prevalent-in-genre concepts.

I can testify that in 5E, Champion Fighter is STRONGEST THERE IS. It's actually a pretty heady feeling to turn everything into hamburger with a Dwarven axe while being practically untouchable: at least, that's how it felt in play, boring numbers saying it is only marginally better be damned. It's 5E, you have to work hard to make an unviable build

 

[ccs]

Well it's probly they started at level 1 with a multiclassing character in mind but incapable of achieving multiclassing at level 1. So most multiclassing doesn't flow from the story but from a pr defined character the player had inadequate resources to properly build without multiclassing. Also it doesn't help that 5e makes it pretty mechanically inefficient to multiclassing early (a few obvious exceptions).

Yep, you've just described a build alright.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I can testify that in 5E, Champion Fighter is STRONGEST THERE IS. It's actually a pretty heady feeling to turn everything into hamburger with a Dwarven axe while being practically untouchable: at least, that's how it felt in play, boring numbers saying it is only marginally better be damned. It's 5E, you have to work hard to make an unviable build

There's only so hard you can work the build angle with the options in print...

It was your DM that worked hard to give you a great D&D experience.

 

[Parmandur]

There's only so hard you can work the build angle with the options in print...

It was your DM that worked hard to give you a great D&D experience.

While true, the game I played the Fighter had a newb DM. My point is that there aren't "tiers" for classes: everyone can contribute to fun in the mode they want, no need to sweat too much about build details. The Fighter being a lean mean killing machine is very, very fun, and frankly what most people want out of D&D much of the time.

 

[TwoSix]

While true, the game I played the Fighter had a newb DM. My point is that there aren't "tiers" for classes: everyone can contribute to fun in the mode they want, no need to sweat too much about build details. The Fighter being a lean mean killing machine is very, very fun, and frankly what most people want out of D&D much of the time.

BMX Bandit did always look like he was having fun.

 

[Tony Vargas]

My point is that there aren't "tiers" for classes

Technically, 4e & 5e both use the term 'tier to refer to a range of levels. But the class tier concept was a 3.5 fan ranking of classes, primarily by versatility. Prepped casters able to change their focus on a daily basis were Tier 1, spontaneous casters, with a fixed list if known spells but flexibility in which ones to cast repeatedly were a hotly contested second. Fighters, able to customize their 'build' with a bonus feat every-other level, were Tier 5. 4e put most classes on AEDU, giving them rough parity in versatility, and, until Essentials all classes were compressed into what, in 3.5, would have been a single Tier.
5e returned to more traditional class designs, though with some interesting differences, significantly, all casting is now spontaneous, so prepped casters are more versatile than ever, and 'Tier 2' casters further behind them...
...Fighter's non-casting sub-classes, OTOH, well, they do produce some very competitive DPR, as you pointed out. Which -being good at one thing- puts them solidly in Tier 4.
FWIW.
Nothing about Tier rankings stops an enthusiastic player from having fun with the concept he genuinely wants to RP, and sufficient system mastery can make use if a lower tier class to create quite potent builds. I played a fighter-based, non-casting build for years under 3.x, myself, it remains a favorite character.