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.

 

[Oofta]

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.

Depends on whether you count paladins and rangers as caster or not. Full casters vs martial and half casters is about even.

I also don't see that it matters much, there are only so many options for non-casters given the design decisions made for 5E.

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

Depends on whether you count paladins and rangers as caster or not. Full casters vs martial and half casters is about even.

I also don't see that it matters much, there are only so many options for non-casters given the design decisions made for 5E.

My metric is if your a half caster, then casting is a significant chunk of what you do, so you're a spellcaster (I wouldnt count monk of 5 elements though). There are gradients of course. As to why it matters, /shrug. I was just offering a counterpoint to the notion that non-casters were more popular than casters. The majority of characters made have a significant amount of casting. That said, I would like more non-caster options, including a mythic warrior/book of 9 swords type. Also something like the incarnate, or, dare I dream, the binder. There simply isn't enough space in a subclass to do certain things on the fighter/rogue/monk/barb chassis.

 

[Mirrorrorrim]

I use City Elf for human-elf and Village Elf for Halfling elf.

That works. The thing is "Half-elf" doesn't need to be human specific. The species rules has elven qualities, as it should, but Skill Versatility is generic/non-specific enough that the skills chosen can reflect the other parent's origin if you want. Otherwise it's just a cosmetic choice. I can see your "Village Elves" being Small if you so chose, to reflect their halfling parentage.

On that note, regarding the new playtest species rules (in the Character Origins UA), where humans and tieflings can now be Small or Medium, I for one will be allowing players to choose Small or Medium for other traditionally Medium species too, like elves, elf-kin, dwarves, and aasimar (to match tiefling, like ardling did), etc.

Probably not Powerful Build species like goliaths or orcs though. Some folk are just bigguns.

 

[Minigiant]

That works. The thing is "Half-elf" doesn't need to be human specific. The species rules has elven qualities, as it should, but Skill Versatility is generic/non-specific enough that the skills chosen can reflect the other parent's origin if you want. Otherwise it's just a cosmetic choice. I can see your "Village Elves" being Small if you so chose, to reflect their halfling parentage.

On that note, regarding the new playtest species rules (in the Character Origins UA), where humans and tieflings can now be Small or Medium, I for one will be allowing players to choose Small or Medium for other traditionally Medium species too, like elves, elf-kin, dwarves, and aasimar (to match tiefling, like ardling did), etc.

Probably not Powerful Build species like goliaths or orcs though. Some folk are just bigguns.

I dream of D&D doing serious Mixed, Templated, and Custom species rules. A human-elf, a lycanthropic elf, and a custom desert elf would have working rules

For example I offered a rule for scaly races to pick a type of Scale and Face to mix and match their Dragonborn, Kobolds, Lizardfolk, Tortle, Malison, or "Rexus". One player opped for the Lizardfolk Scale (body) with Dragonborn Face (breath weapon).

Dragonborn is just popular.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Haven't had much time to look, but DDB has released a new set of statistics. Not sure there's too much difference from numbers we've seen before. Species (races) are still human, elf, tiefling, half-elf, dwarf, halflings, etc. Fighters are still the most popular by quite a bit followed by rogues and barbarians.

In any case, if you're curious DDB look back at 2023 statistics

View attachment 343577
View attachment 343578

EDIT:
For those that are bothered by the weird scaling, I redid it using the same scale for the entire chart. Puts things in a little better perspective for me.
View attachment 343648
View attachment 343649

These are cool but I wish we could get them qualified by what options the person had access to, because I suspect they'd change pretty dramatically if we just separated out all the characters created by people who only have access to the Basic rules.

The most interesting/unexpected thing is actually the position of Barbarian and kinda Warlock, both much higher than I'd have guessed.

 

[Hussar]

The martial/caster debate, for example, often ignores the reality that a lot of people who play martial characters enjoy them and keep choosing them

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.

 

[Clint_L]

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".

No, I understand that argument. I totally disagree with it. I don't think that "casters can bypass so much of the game;" nor do I think "believability" is the issue.

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.

Disagree, I think it's about maintaining class balance and identity.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I'm of the mind that popularity of classes and species is a far less useful metric than player satisfaction. With 13 Classes and a billion species to choose from, of course some are going to be far more popular than others, but the point is, do the less popular choices satisfy those that choose those options more than the popular choices, which increases the number of people who are satisfied with the game in general? And to go one step further, the most important measure of satisfaction is with those who already play and enjoy a class, not those who don't. The martial/caster debate, for example, often ignores the reality that a lot of people who play martial characters enjoy them and keep choosing them.

I think this balancing act is one of the critical reasons for 5e's success. We've seen it with the Druid in the playtest, for example, where people who play and love Druids shut down the attempt to make them more broadly popular to non-druid players with changes to Wild Shape. Monks, on the other hand, clearly needed changes to increase the satisfaction of Monk players.

Sure, but we can still get something out of the popularity angle.

PHB dragonborn are--objectively--one of the weakest races in 5e. They get fewer features, their ribbons are incredibly specific in application (a bonus to dealing with dragons of the right kind?) and yet incredibly vague in benefit, and literally the only mechanics they have are resistance to one element and (for the PHB version, at least) a mediocre breath weapon. Compared to the laundry list of powerful features on elves and dwarves, or the clear ability score superiority of half-elves, or the flexibility and power of variant humans, dragonborn should be ignored--no optimizer would willingly choose them, except maybe for Paladin characters, but even then a half-elf would probably be better.

Yet they have done nothing but grow in popularity in these stats things--IIRC, they have never lost place in any of the official ones released by DDB. (Part of why I was so skeptical about the unofficial one we saw a while back was that it did deviate so wildly from all the official ones.) They have, in fact, grown so much as to eclipse half-elf, which is objectively one of the strongest races in 5e, and certainly one of the strongest in the PHB.

So, what can we conclude from that?

One option is that power is totally irrelevant to players. I think this conclusion is well-meaning but mistaken. That is, I don't believe players don't care about power and balance etc. Instead, I think it's that they make their choices based around other things, and then become frustrated if those choices end up being inferior for no reason other than because they're just inherently weaker than other, seemingly-equivalent options. Moving away from fixed ability score bonuses is one part of reducing that issue. As the Fizban's options show, there's also appetite for improving the base dragonborn package so it frankly sucks less. We'll see how the 5.5e version shakes out; as of the last public playtest, I'm frankly not particularly enthusiastic.

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." A community that makes choices primarily based on theme, but which still cares about design, is one that can give very confusing signals if one conflates pick-rate with player contentment.

 

[Hussar]

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." A community that makes choices primarily based on theme, but which still cares about design, is one that can give very confusing signals if one conflates pick-rate with player contentment.

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

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.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

They used a log scale?

An army of angry treants are... discussing what to do about it.