D&D General Data from a million DnDBeyond character sheets?

[ECMO3]

Rapier isn't even the most popular sword!

It is actually not that often I play with a Rapier. I definitely use shortswords, daggers and longswords as a primary weapon more often (daggers because magic daggers are ubiquitous). I probably use scimitars about as often.

If I am playing a finesse weapon character, I find Shortswords to be more flexible, allowing you to go from one-handed to TWF pretty easily and being usable underwater without penalty. I find that to be worth the 1 point difference in damage most of the time.

Oddly enough I rarely fight with 2 shortswords. It is usually 1 shortsword and a dagger if I am doing TWF.

 

[ECMO3]

And is this based on anything besides your personal intuition?

Observation from numerous groups I've played with both P&P and online, both as a DM and a player.

In 5E I am talking about my personal observations from around 30 different campaigns with a different mix of players in each one and another 20 or so one-shots, including players from at least 9 different countries.

 

[xaosseed]

I'm going to briefly stop in to say glad people find this interesting - most folk are approaching this with what I think is the right amount of 'this is a better one of the not-great data sets we typically see'.

I'm much more skeptical of their "forums" data than the DNDBeyond data.
[...]
Their methodology for "forums" seems to be absolute trash to the point of having no value. They make all these wild claims about how forum opinions are changing, but it looks like total and utter bollocks to me, because they've got trash-tier surveys (likely highly biased and selective and error-filled) from a dozens of different places, rather than a whole bunch of consistent surveys from one place.

The entirety of what I said about the forum data is "Compare this with the choppiness and changeability in forum respondents where we see more variability in favourite character classes" - I am not sure what "wild claims" are being read out of that. I was trying to get across the data is noisy (as expected for small samples) where the bigger surveys are surprisingly stable over time. Happy to take suggestions on how to convey that in a more easily understood way.

Also, I fully agree that any single one of these surveys is deeply questionable on its own, even if you pile enough of them together like this all that can be said is that there are these hints of patterns - nothing more. After all, we are never going to see a good, detailed survey with all the questions we might want asked.

 

[Yora]

It's a nice analysis. I don't think there's anything really shocking or new here. New (or casual) players gravitate towards options that don't require them to select between a lot of bespoke, text-dense options.

It just supports something I've said for years; the game needs a simple pew-pew "mage" that doesn't use bespoke spells for new players who like the wizardly image but not the complex gameplay, and a complex warrior type (doesn't have to be fighter) for the complexity-loving players who also enjoy martial tropes.

They tried that in 3rd edition. It was called warlock.

 

[darjr]

Does anyone see the code for getting the characters?

I wanted to check to see if these are explicitly shared.

I dint think characters are available unless explicitly made public which, if correct, means these were. Likely to be used in a shared game.

Or are the free tier characters public?

 

[nevin]

It's a nice analysis. I don't think there's anything really shocking or new here. New (or casual) players gravitate towards options that don't require them to select between a lot of bespoke, text-dense options.

It just supports something I've said for years; the game needs a simple pew-pew "mage" that doesn't use bespoke spells for new players who like the wizardly image but not the complex gameplay, and a complex warrior type (doesn't have to be fighter) for the complexity-loving players who also enjoy martial tropes.

that's called the sorcerer.

 

[Sorcerers Apprentice]

I'd expect any default-build things the program does to be overrepresented.

I suspect the default options are so over represented that it's going to be hard to draw any real conclusions about player preferences from much of this data.

It would be interesting if it was possible to narrow the characters down to ones that have been actively played.

 

[TwoSix]

They tried that in 3rd edition. It was called warlock.

And which proved popular enough that it became a core class, although it lost some of its uniqueness along the way. But yes, something closer to the 3.5 warlock in mechanics, if not necessarily in flavor, is what I'm talking about.

that's called the sorcerer.

That's never been particularly close to what I was talking about, as it still leverages the bespoke spell list.

 

[Clint_L]

And which proved popular enough that it became a core class, although it lost some of its uniqueness along the way. But yes, something closer to the 3.5 warlock in mechanics, if not necessarily in flavor, is what I'm talking about.

That's never been particularly close to what I was talking about, as it still leverages the bespoke spell list.

I have also thought that a very simple spellcaster option might be good for new players. The Warlock is kind of halfway there, except choosing invocations actually requires a pretty good knowledge of game mechanics, and even though they don't have many spell slots, they still have a large spell list.

In practice, when a completely new player wants to play a spellcaster they usually ask me or an experienced player for help choosing. If I am helping, I just go for the standards (guidance, fire bolt, sleep, magic missile, bless, healing word, etc.) and encourage them to spend some time reading though the list and seeing what they might want to swap to make the list feel more like their character.

 

[Moonmover]

In my games it's probably plate, leather, none, then whatever else.

How in all the hells did Bag of Holding get so popular/common? Are they dime-a-dozen in 5e?

My experience has been that many players just want to not deal with hitting their encumbrance limits, and many DM's are more then happy to give them an excuse not to.