Human Fighters Most Common Race/Class Combo In D&D

Cognomen's Cassowary · Oct 12, 2017

An article by Gus Wezerek on FiveThirtyEight looks at race and class combination in D&D, using data from D&D Beyond. Wezerek suggests a reason for the popularity of human fighters: "It lets you focus on creating a good story rather than spending time flipping through rulebooks to look up spells."

Image from Curse via FiveThirtyEight

rczarnec · Oct 12, 2017

Multiclass characters count for both classes, so I wonder how many of the fighters are actually fighter dips.

I assume that this might also prop up warlock numbers.

lowkey13 · Oct 12, 2017

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TwoSix · Oct 12, 2017

lowkey13 said:
Counterpoint- despite the grognard dislike of the new races, Dragonborn, Tieflings, and Genasi are all more popular than halflings and half-orcs.

Reminds me of WoW race selection tendencies, people just avoid the races that are ugly and/or short. Even in a tabletop game where you can't see them.

OB1 · Oct 12, 2017

lowkey13 said:
There are many threads here about class design. That the Ranger and Fighter are bad designs. That the Paladin, Bard, and Monk are good designs (for what they are trying to accomplish). I think that what I'm seeing is that many people care less than we do about whether or not a class is all it can be (or "properly designed") and just want to play a class because it is what it is.

Great observations all around, and I quoted the above for truth.

One other observation I had is that when it comes to class, the more straighforward the class is the more popular it is. Bards, Sorcerers and Druids require a fair degree of work from the player, where fighters and rogues are pretty simple to run and are chosen nearly 25% of the time. The core 4 are chosen 40% of the time as a whole.

Additionally, I wonder how much the fact that certain choices are free to use and others require a purchase comes into play in the numbers.

I've listed the results as a percentage of the total below for easy of comparison.

HUMAN 23.1%
ELF 15.1%
HALF-ELF 9.6%
DWARF 8.7%
DRAGONBORN 7.5%
TIEFLING 7.0%
GENASI 5.5%
HALFLING 5.4%
HALF-ORC 4.6%
GNOME 4.2%
GOLIATH 4.1%
AARAKOCRA 3.5%
AASIMAR 1.6%

FIGHTER 12.7%
ROGUE 10.4%
WIZARD 9.0%
BARBARIAN 8.3%
CLERIC 8.3%
RANGER 8.1%
PALADIN 8.1%
WARLOCK 8.0%
MONK 7.2%
BARD 7.1%
SORCERER 6.9%
DRUID 5.8%

Tony Vargas · Oct 12, 2017

Cognomen's Cassowary said:
Wezerek suggests a slightly silly reason for the popularity of human fighters: human because they get +1 to everything, and fighters because they let you focus on storytelling over mechanics. He doesn't even broach the subject of the variant human and its potentially game-breaking fighter synergy in combat.

Heh. "Focus on storytelling over mechanics?" Wow.

Fighter - well, two PH sub-classes of fighter - is about the only class option to represent the lion's share of heroes from the broader fantasy genre, be it fiction, myth or legend, book, film or TV.
Of course a lot of people play it.

lowkey13 said:
And, of course, the boring, bland Fighter is by far the most popular. Because of course it is. Which just goes to show that the internet is not always representative of actual play.

It is precisely because the fighter covers so many common, familiar, popular, and relatable fantasy archetypes that it's mechanical shortcomings are such a big issue - and why they remain un-solved for so long ("it can't be that bad, people keep playing it!").

Likewise, human is, necessarily, the most familiar, relatable race. All players being reasonably human - no matter what mundanes may say about us nerds being from other planets.

lowkey13 · Oct 12, 2017

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flametitan · Oct 12, 2017

That said, We don't know how many of these characters are actually characters intended to be played or just for messing around with in D&D Beyond.

Blue · Oct 12, 2017

They don't differentiate between "characters getting played" and "character builds I'm playing around with". I'll often build out sample characters at a few levels to see if they work mechanically - something successful, sometimes not, sometimes too successful for my normal table. But that's a big difference between what I'm playing because I find it interesting.

This is likely not inherent in the data in any way, but if they track XP over time they can probably see it. Any that the XP/level never changes, or ones where the XP is only at a few set points, often jumping more than one level, are most likely theoretical builds.