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.

 

[Maxperson]

Do they? Do you have a source for this, any evidence at all?

Yeah. I'm not convinced that the entire community wants big change or even change, but I do believe that a significant portion do. He and are absolutely correct that they cannot enact any kind of major change, though, because of their efforts to make the system fully backwards compatible, despite the futility of the attempt.

 

[Maxperson]

Druid spells that are the way to Wild Shape! Sometimes it's a small change (level 1) and sometimes it's a big one (level 5).
So the pick-your-shape is that you are casting spell Y,Z,A on yourself.

A mix of spells to wildshape and the current system would be good I think. You can spontaneously cast the wildshape spell by using an appropriate slot, X number of times per day as listed in the class. So druids aren't forced to prepare wildshape in order to do so, but it still takes the slot when they do.

 

[Hussar]

Do they? Do you have a source for this, any evidence at all?

Surprisingly I’m with @Oofta here. The community has made it perfectly crystal clear that there is very little interest in larger changes.

 

[Hussar]

On the point about why it matters what races appear in the phb.

Supplements. In a word.

Anything in the phb will appear and be supplemented in every subsequent book. There will be additional material, lore, gods, feats, etc. for those phb races in every subsequent book.

So much support for something so few people actually play. I’d rather see support for stuff that’s actually useful at the table rather than propping up a couple of ideas because of nostalgia.

 

[Minigiant]

It's easy to get excited about generic concepts when everyone can fill in the gaps and imagine what could be. It's tougher when you have to actually implement something. I've done a lot of development (of software) over the years and worked with some top notch development teams. Frequently things that you think can be done simply don't work the way you want when final design comes down. It's part and parcel of development, the devil is in the details and the devil likes to f*** you over.

But again, you're just giving vague answers. For example I disliked the consolidated spell lists, the different classes lost a lot of their unique flavor for minimal benefit. So all I'm hearing is that they had what they thought was a cool idea and when they showed the details of how it would actually work it was rejected. If I'm hearing that wrong feel free to provide a link or any solid evidence other than assertions.

I'm agreeing with you.

Like with consolidated spell lists. The idea wasn't bad. The premise was well liked.

WOTC just handled it so poorly, dealing with none of the obvious flavor and balance issues at first and making it incompatible with the past. This soured the idea. Just slapped all the spells together. Other companies had and are making combined spelllists balanced and flavorful. Time, bad ideas, and backwards compatibility issues ruined their plan.

They couldn't just slap the lists together and preserve the balance and power so it was reverted.

It was like the monk. People like the monk. It's still played. But it's last because it was a slapped together convert from another edition where it was also bad. So monk was not played a lot. The implementation was bad.

Surprisingly I’m with @Oofta here. The community has made it perfectly crystal clear that there is very little interest in larger changes.

Yours and @Oofta's idea of larger change might be different from mine.

I am not saying writing HP calculation or changing core math.

Simply stating popular changes which would break backwards comparability. Like Ranger's relationship with Hunter's Mark. Or the library of spells for Sorcerer. Or implementation of new sub-species.

 

[Oofta]

I'm agreeing with you.

Like with consolidated spell lists. The idea wasn't bad. The premise was well liked.

WOTC just handled it so poorly, dealing with none of the obvious flavor and balance issues at first and making it incompatible with the past. This soured the idea. Just slapped all the spells together. Other companies had and are making combined spelllists balanced and flavorful. Time, bad ideas, and backwards compatibility issues ruined their plan.

They couldn't just slap the lists together and preserve the balance and power so it was reverted.

It was like the monk. People like the monk. It's still played. But it's last because it was a slapped together convert from another edition where it was also bad. So monk was not played a lot. The implementation was bad.


Yours and @Oofta's idea of larger change might be different from mine.

I am not saying writing HP calculation or changing core math.

Simply stating popular changes which would break backwards comparability. Like Ranger's relationship with Hunter's Mark. Or the library of spells for Sorcerer. Or implementation of new sub-species.

What I'm saying is that when you leave things up to people's imaginations and they fill in the blanks, it will frequently be more promising than anything that could possibly be delivered. A buddy of mine bought a Ford Mustang that had a bunch of aftermarket add-ons to make it more track worthy because he always wanted that kind of car. He thought it would be amazing ... and it wasn't. Doesn't mean it was a bad car, it was just that it couldn't live up to his expectations. I'm sure we all have stories like this, whether it's some experience, purchase, person we dated.

It's the same with vague design ideas. Sometimes they work sometimes they don't. I don't blame the people doing the development for not being able to deliver something that was likely nigh on impossible.

They're damned if they do, damned if they don't. Try something and it doesn't pan out they're bad at design. Play it safe and they're unwilling to change.

 

[Autumnal]

Then the solution is to take away wild shape. You can't give druids the ability to change into animals, though, and not give them the abilities of those animals. You can enhance the animals with spells. That's fine, but it's not okay to let a druid change into a bear with 10 strength, 10 dex and 10 con and no ability to attack with claws like that bear would.

I wish I had the energy to write up a full-ish guide to the Circle of the Verklempt.

 

[Mistwell]

I know. I know.

1. Drop Halfling

You can go straight to hell!

 

[Hussar]

Simply stating popular changes which would break backwards comparability. Like Ranger's relationship with Hunter's Mark. Or the library of spells for Sorcerer. Or implementation of new sub-species.

I've simply become very jaded and disillusioned with the whole process. Every change seems to be met with vociferous condemnation and immediate rejection. Nothing was give any space to breathe.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I've simply become very jaded and disillusioned with the whole process. Every change seems to be met with vociferous condemnation and immediate rejection. Nothing was give any space to breathe.

I mean, that's literally what the D&D Next playtest was too.

They tried to give us a Sorcerer dripping with flavor, one that did care about both Charisma and Constitution, one that could express many different gameplay experiences by giving you different benefits as you burned through your spell points and thus physically manifested the power of your sorcerous soul. This was, apparently, so disliked that they never even attempted to adjust or fix it, they canned it instantly and never produced another public playtest of the class. Hence why Sorcerer came out half-baked.

Same thing happened with Warlock. Originally, you got boons by making various kinds of sacrifices, which would alter how your character looked or behaved. Mostly flavorful, not a whole lot of detriment, but again, it didn't clear the (IIRC) 70% popularity threshold, so it was canned so hard you could put a Campbell's label on it, and we never saw another Warlock playtest, leaving the resulting class half-baked when it launched.

5e, from first to last, has been all about giving "nothing...any space to breathe." Psionics? Every attempt they've made has been a one-off and then "welp, guess that didn't work, scrap the whole thing and try again." Repeatedly. "Win over the skeptics with polishing and refinement" has never been part of 5e's development, and the current playtest has simply continued that pattern.