D&D 5E Nobody Is Playing High Level Characters

According to stats from D&D Beyond, above 5th level characters start to drop off sharply, and above 10th level, the figures are very low. The exception is level 20, which looks like it's probably people creating experimental 20th-level builds.

Some of them say 0%; this isn't strictly accurate, but levels 16-19 are used by an insignificant number of players. Interestingly, there are more 3rd-5th level characters than there are 1st-2nd level.

D&D Beyond has said before that under 10% of games make it past 10th level, but these figures show the break point as being bit lower than that. DDB used over 30 million characters to compile these stats.

 

[Seramus]

That’s just begging the question. One of DDB’s main functions is characters. If you make more characters, you use the character tool. If you don’t make many characters, you use less. It’s like saying the LEGO store is more popular with those who build a lot of Lego.

More like saying people who buy LOTS of LEGO skip the store and order online. But such is the nature of speculation, because we literally don't know.

 

[Oofta]

To be fair, they've done other surveys since on more limited aspects of the game - we see a notice for one every few months on these boards, for example - but I'm not sure they've ever done another one as broad-reaching as that 1999 one was trying to be.

Thing is, a repeat now of that 1999 survey would generate results caused in no small part directly by - you guessed it - that 1999 survey!

They've absolutely solicited a lot of feedback for class and game design, just not sure how much is about level people would like to play. Which is different from levels they actually do play or have played in the past.

On a related note, I often wonder how many people never run homebrew games and rely solely on officially published mods. I never use published mods, so 20 is generally my ultimate goal. But if I wasn't comfortable doing that there aren't many options.

 

[Don Durito]

We can have a certain skepticism about the data without throwing it out completely. For example, we can probably say that the overall trends are linformative. It seems unlikely that data which indicates a pattern this strong is skewed to the extent that we should just ignore it.

At the same time, we should be careful of being too confident about what it tells us.
"Less than 15% of campaigns go beyond level 10" is probably a level of confidence that is unwarranted.

 

[Bacon Bits]

Higher level play hasn't been done very well since the BECMI days.

Eh, that's assuming you like BECMI's ideas about high level play. IIRC, it assumed that the PCs would get fiefdoms, raise armies, and basically start playing Diplomacy + Chainmail Legacy. Gary and his table were fine with the end of the game being a tabletop war game because that's how they started out.

Today, I think a lot of players don't want to stop being adventurers spelunking dungeons. They'd respond, "Hey, I started playing Diablo and now I have to switch to playing Warcraft in the middle? Why?!"

 

[Lanefan]

They've absolutely solicited a lot of feedback for class and game design, just not sure how much is about level people would like to play. Which is different from levels they actually do play or have played in the past.

On a related note, I often wonder how many people never run homebrew games and rely solely on officially published mods. I never use published mods, so 20 is generally my ultimate goal. But if I wasn't comfortable doing that there aren't many options.

Taking this a step further, there's three main aspects that can be homebrew or canned or a combination:

adventures (individual or in paths)
settings
rules

It'd be interesting to know, on a scale much more broad than we'll ever get just by polling ENWorld, what proportion of games/tables homebrew each of these; and for those that do, what the end-result ratio is between homebrew and canned.

Breaking it down by edition currently being played by that game would be even cooler! (as in, do 5e-ers homebrew more or less than 4e-ers or 3e-ers or 2e-ers, etc.)

 

[Oofta]

Taking this a step further, there's three main aspects that can be homebrew or canned or a combination:

adventures (individual or in paths)
settings
rules

It'd be interesting to know, on a scale much more broad than we'll ever get just by polling ENWorld, what proportion of games/tables homebrew each of these; and for those that do, what the end-result ratio is between homebrew and canned.

Breaking it down by edition currently being played by that game would be even cooler! (as in, do 5e-ers homebrew more or less than 4e-ers or 3e-ers or 2e-ers, etc.)

When I win the lottery and can afford to throw a $100k at market research and analysis I'll give you a call. Just have to buy a ticket first!

 

[Lanefan]

When I win the lottery and can afford to throw a $100k at market research and analysis I'll give you a call. Just have to buy a ticket first!

Cool.

I'll wait here.

 

[Kyvin]

Personally, I would like to see WotC publish more high level material beyond Mad Mage.

I prefer to use the published modules and then modify them to meet my needs. I have run PotA and SKT, each of those went to level 11. Another person took over and DMed Tomb of Annihilation for our group, again to level 11. I will now be DMing Ghosts of Saltmarsh with heavy modifications and plan to take that to level 12. Each campaign took about 2 years: we meet about twice a month. None of us use D&D Beyond.

We would like to take these characters to a higher level but we are all working adults and more options besides just Mad Mage would be nice!

 

[Quickleaf]

Yes to this. One campaign I'm running at the local game cafe has gone for over 3 years, meeting once every two weeks or so. I am aware of only one player (of the 16 who have played at least 3 sessions) who actively uses D&D Beyond for his character. The current party of 7 now spans levels 13 to 16. I have roughly mapped out an end-game that occurs when most/all of the party are at level 20. Likely will happen as we approach the 4 year anniversary. Maybe our group is an outlier... but maybe not.

Anyway, I guess my question is: what is the estimated proportion of D&D 5e players that utilize D&D Beyond for their character(s)? Any data out there that someone can cite?

According to an April 2019 Washington Post article, there are 40 million D&D players worldwide. I don't know how many are playing 5e, though a safe bet would be the majority are playing 5e.

I haven't seen any public data from D&D Beyond about number of users/subscribers, but in the December 19, 2019 D&D Beyond Dev Update – where that image @Morrus posted about campaign level spread in the OP comes from – Adam Bradford mentions that their recent data accounts for 30 million characters on D&D Beyond. EDIT: Around the 10:00 mark.

 

[BadEye]

I believe that it was in one of the Happy Fun Hour videos that Mearls talks about how some aspects of DndBeyond are different to their own internal data. For example, he says that there are a lot more Warlocks on Dndbeyond than their own data indicates are usually played. He speculates that this is because there a lot of decisions to be made when creating warlocks and therefore people just like making warlock characters (they are also a favourite component of many optimised builds, although he doesn't explicitly point this out).

Not specifically picking out your post, but a 30 million character sample size is pretty significant, considering there are roughly 40 million D&D players globally at this point. It would be far more representative, for example, than a survey with less than a few thousand responses.

The very established at this point in the life cycle of the entire Dungeons & Dragons franchise fact is that most groups do not engage in high-level play regularly. You will see that in our data on D&D Beyond as well as any other research conducted formally.

As a fellow fan, it's hard to think this fact doesn't impact decisions about the game.