The Most Popular D&D Character Name Is "Bob"

What's the name of your D&D character? The folks at D&D Beyond have released some more stats, and this time they're sharing the top 15 D&D player character names.

What's the name of your D&D character? The folks at D&D Beyond have released some more stats, and this time they're sharing the top 15 D&D player character names.


dndnames.png



What these stats appear to tell us is that many people call their character "Bob", and even more seems to just use their class name, such as "Cleric" or "Bard". Lots of people seems to name their characters after Game of Thrones' Varys, but spell it differently, and lots like "dark" names like Ash, Raven, Ember, and Shadow.

More realistically, it may be that many of these are simply experimental builds, with placeholder names. The folks at D&D Beyond (watch the stream here) say that these are the most popular names "for characters on D&D Beyond", although the other data elements shown on that stream were specific to material used from Xanathar's Guide to Everything.

Numbers-wise, they're not saying those are all the characters on D&D Beyond - there will be thousands of names used which are used less than 755 times each, and possibly even thousands which are used just once. The table above only shows the top 15, and how often they were used.
 

log in or register to remove this ad

5ekyu

Hero
I think for this one, they included test characters: but usually, they have ways to sift out test characters. And in my personal experience, most people don't use feats, so it seems plausible.
To me this is more a case of the difficulties of parsing searches for frequency on open text field vs that of checkboxes.

How did they handle multi-word names?

How did they handle names like "Soren, Cleric of Pelor"?

How did they handle "Walter (Tristan)" where the () is the player name and the first part the charscter name?

There are huge differences in ata output whether they search and count for "exact match whole entry" and "includes". Frankly, this feels like the result of an "includes" search myself.
 

log in or register to remove this ad


Blue

Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal
I think for this one, they included test characters: but usually, they have ways to sift out test characters. And in my personal experience, most people don't use feats, so it seems plausible.

Since that's been an ongoing question, can you provide anything backing up the claim that they usually are filtering characters? I'm haven't seen anything about it after an earlier search and that would be useful information to know so we can help verify the quality of the other data dumps.
 

I'm reminded of the old Dragon magazine article "Whaddaya Mean, Jack the Samurai?!"

I feel bad if anyone out there has a character named Ember Ravenshadow.
 

aco175

Legend
I recall several 2e Dragon articles, or maybe the DMG, where it talks about naming PCs and talks about Bob, the fighter who dies and the next fighter with the same stats being Bob 2. The articles talks about putting a bit more thought into it than this though.

Not sure if this old article carries through time and people put Bob into the creator until something better comes up.
 

What these stats appear to tell us is that nearly 10% of people call their character "Bob",
Uh really? I mean that would indicate that their are only something like 12,810 characters built on DDB. Is that in agreement with data on things like feats etc?

12k seems exceptionally low given all the talk of how big/used/important DDB is.
 


Parmandur

Book-Friend
Since that's been an ongoing question, can you provide anything backing up the claim that they usually are filtering characters? I'm haven't seen anything about it after an earlier search and that would be useful information to know so we can help verify the quality of the other data dumps.

They talk about it every time they go over the data in these videos. There are able to filter based on activity on a sheet that indicates actual play. Their numbers they provide also match up with what WotC has said for years based on their in-depth surveys, such as with Feats, so the data matches what is known from other sources, lending it credibility..
 

Parmandur

Book-Friend
Uh really? I mean that would indicate that their are only something like 12,810 characters built on DDB. Is that in agreement with data on things like feats etc?

12k seems exceptionally low given all the talk of how big/used/important DDB is.

Yeah, I don't think this list is all-inclusive: most likely, most PCs have relatively unique names.
 


Remove ads

Remove ads

Top