D&D 5E D&D Beyond Releases 2023 Character Creation Data

D&D Beyond released the 2023 Unrolled with data on the most popular character choices for D&D. The full article includes a wide variety of statistics for the beta test of Maps, charity donations, mobile app usage, and more. However, I’m just going to recap the big numbers.

The most common species chosen by players are Human, Elf, Dragonborn, Tiefling, and Half-Elf. This contrasts with the stats from Baldur’s Gate 3 released back in August 2023 where Half-Elves were the most popular with the rest of the top five also shuffling around.

Also, keep an eye on the scale of these charts as they’re not exactly even. It starts with just over 700,000 for Humans and 500,000 for Elf, but the next line down is 200,000 with the other three species taking up space in that range. This means the difference separating the highest line on the graph and the second highest is 200,000, then 300,000 between the next two, 100,000 between the next, and finally 10,000 separating all the others.

Top classes start off with the Fighter then move onto the Rogue, Barbarian, Wizard, and Paladin. The scale on this chart is just as uneven as the last, but the numbers are much closer with what appears to be about 350,000 Fighters at the top to just over 100,000 Monks in next-to-last with under 80,000 Artificers. This contrasts far more from the Baldur’s Gate 3 first weekend data as the top five classes for the game were Paladin, Sorcerer, Warlock, Rogue, and Bard.

And the most important choices for new characters, the names. Bob is still the top choice for names with Link, Saraphina, and Lyra seeing the most growth and Bruno, Eddie, and Rando seeing the biggest declines from last year.

Putting that together, it means the most commonly created character on D&D Beyond is Bob the Human Fighter. A joke going as far back as I can remember in RPGs is, in fact, reality proven by hard statistics.

 

[mamba]

Another conclusion we can draw, however, is that popularity is not a good indicator of how players like design. It is, instead, an indicator of how much players like the concept or theme of an option. Which, if true, poses a pretty significant problem for any design that predicates "this must be good" on "people are playing this a lot." I'm not well-convinced that WotC is correctly differentiating "X is picked by a lot of people" from "people actually do enjoy using X at the table."

that is pretty much a given, no one thoroughly looks at all classes and subclasses and then decides what to play based on that…

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I'm not sure how that works. Are you saying that people are choosing to play stuff they actually don't like?

I'm saying people choose things because they like the theme, concept, aesthetics, etc. but in some cases those things prove mechanically unsatisfactory. Again, as clearly demonstrated by the PHB dragonborn, a race WotC rebuilt not once but twice and which is getting significant reworks in 5.5e.

I mean, if many people are picking X, then it's generally not terribly unfair to say that people enjoy X. Most people can be depended on to choose the thing that they enjoy.

Except that that glosses over the key detail: they may enjoy only the theme/concept/aesthetic/etc., not the mechanical expression. This can, of course, also go the other way--the theme could be hated, but the mechanics too powerful/useful/versatile/etc. to ignore.

It is a mistake to assume that because someone uses something, they like every part of that thing. You have to know why they use it.

that is pretty much a given, no one thoroughly looks at all classes and subclasses and then decides what to play based on that…

I can assure you that some people do. Particularly if their favorite edition before 5e was 3e/3.5e/PF1e.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I'm saying people choose things because they like the theme, concept, aesthetics, etc. but in some cases those things prove mechanically unsatisfactory. Again, as clearly demonstrated by the PHB dragonborn, a race WotC rebuilt not once but twice and which is getting significant reworks in 5.5e.

There is no evidence that anything is unsatisfactory in this data. All it shows is one thing: Dragonborn are popular. That suggests they are not unsatisfactory.

 

[Oofta]

There is no evidence that anything is unsatisfactory in this data. All it shows is one thing: Dragonborn are popular. That suggests they are not unsatisfactory.

The people who play dragonborn obviously aren't concerned about white room analysis of which species is "best". They likely just want to play something that feels different and a bit unique.

 

[Oofta]

IMO, the martial/caster debate often ignores the main point of the issue. That the casters can bypass so much of the game, while the non-casters must always fall within tolerable limits of what a certain group insists is "believable". It isn't so much about popularity. It's about making options in the game for those who want them and the fact that there is a very, very strong theme of onetruewayism enforcing the notion that additional options are untenable.

This is quite the stretch. Like all of it. Casters are limited to certain D&D fantasy tropes they can't bypass the game because the game is in large part built around their abilities. I have no idea why you have an issue with martial characters being popular but there is nothing whatsoever to reinforce one true way. You're reading something into this that simply isn't there.

 

[mamba]

I can assure you that some people do. Particularly if their favorite edition before 5e was 3e/3.5e/PF1e.

some maybe, but not enough to not completely dilute the pool of characters enough to make it impossible to deduct what mechanics the players prefer

 

[mamba]

There is no evidence that anything is unsatisfactory in this data. All it shows is one thing: Dragonborn are popular. That suggests they are not unsatisfactory.

the data does not really let you draw conclusions about things being unfavorable… for that we have the ratings, and some widely played options were rated rather unfavorable

 

[ECMO3]

Spellcasters are ultimately more popular than non-casters though. There are simply fewer options for non-spellcasters, so anyone wanting a non-caster is funneled into four options rather than nine, which results in them being split more.

IME there are not many people that want to play a complete non-caster. The majority of Rogues, Fighters and Monks I see have spells through a combination of race, subclass, multiclass or feats.

There are some, and they do exist, but I think it is a minority of the people who play complete "non-casters".

 

[ECMO3]

Depends on whether you count paladins and rangers as caster or not.

Anyone who casts spells is a caster. A lot of the PCs being played in the "non-caster classes" are in fact casters. You would need more granular metrics to really evaluate this.

I had a 6th level Drow Eldritch Knight Fighter that could cast Detect Magic at will, along with Faerie Fire, Dissonant Whispers, Levitate, Misty Step, Darkness and Dispel Magic once a day and had 4 more spells known, 3 more 1st level slots and two cantrips on top of all that.

In terms of leveled spells; that is 5 first level, 3 second level and 1 3rd level spell she could cast every day in addition to at will detect magic. That is 9 spells, which is the same number as a full caster and includes a 3rd level spell, which is the highest level spell a full caster can cast at that level.

So she was at that point a single-class fighter, but she was not a "non-caster" by any stretch

 

[Minigiant]

IME there are not many people that want to play a complete non-caster. The majority of Rogues, Fighters and Monks I see have spells through a combination of race, subclass, multiclass or feats.

There are some, and they do exist, but I think it is a minority of the people who play complete "non-casters".

Well there are less options, customization, and continued support for noncasters.

The top four races all are customizable with many subraces, spells, or feats (human, elf, dragonborn, tielfling). All of which are magicky.

Like I say often,5e attempted to make noncasters "grounded" to appeal to grognards who complained about magic warriors and "weeaboo fightin' magic". No BO9S. No Warlord. No Exploits. No High level feats. No Heroicaly skilled nonmagically subclasses.

But the grogs never bit and stuck to OS and 3.X games.

The 5e fans who stayed or later joined adapted. Lacking the grand heroic abilities of the past, they adapted with magic. They still played fighter and rogue but took magic in races, feats, and subclasses.