D&D 5E Halflings are the 7th most popular 5e race

[Xamnam]

My second character ever was a halfling barbarian, and so I'll always have a very soft spot for that combo.

 

[ECMO3]

Halfling barbarians can have some cool concepts:

I have in mind a Fox (wolf) Totem barbarian, with Second Chance, Bountiful Luck and Lucky.

Grant Advantage and Rerolls like there's no tomorrow!

I have found second chance to be really good on characters with a very high AC and without the shield spell.

A sword and board Paladin with defense fighting style for example. Never tried it on a Barbarian.

 

[Blue]

The least popular of the core races isn't a surprise, and it's probably not a surprise that they are behind Tieflings and Dragonborn.

You may be surprised to learn that they are ahead of goliaths, gnomes, half-orcs and well, everything else.

Well, since Gnomes are a core race, they are the least popular at #12. Please correct that Halflings are the least popular core race, since at #7 they are far in front of gnomes.

 

[Blue]

Yes....and this person didn't do that. They scraped free, publically-available data for characters posted. Basically "all characters still available for viewing." The official info DOES filter these things. This person's unofficial stuff does not. That's going to skew things, rather a lot.

I agree this is a change in methodology in this unofficial presentation using characters created and the official using characters used.

However, you posit that "That's going to skew things, rather a lot". Can you provide evidence of this? Specifically that there there is a large skew between all characters and all played characters in terms of race/class? It seems sort of truthy when looking at things like levels most commonly played, which we have seen official statements on, but I haven't seen and evidence that the set of all created characters deviates dramatically (or does not) from it's subset of played characters.

 

[AnotherGuy]

We have a halfling in each of our campaigns (sorcerer and a ranger)...so pretty popular at our table. No one uses D&D Beyond.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I agree this is a change in methodology in this unofficial presentation using characters created and the official using characters used.

However, you posit that "That's going to skew things, rather a lot". Can you provide evidence of this? Specifically that there there is a large skew between all characters and all played characters in terms of race/class? It seems sort of truthy when looking at things like levels most commonly played, which we have seen official statements on, but I haven't seen and evidence that the set of all created characters deviates dramatically (or does not) from it's subset of played characters.

Well, I highlighted dwarves for a reason. Even if you lump together subraces, dwarves have been losing proverbial "market share" consistently across the various official reports from DDB, while tiefling and dragonborn have grown (the latter, IIRC, has almoat exclusively grown across the official reports. I remember being pleased that they overtook tiefling.) We even had a thread about it here on ENWorld asking why dwarves were not more popular, I can go dig it up if you like. To have that trend suddenly and completely reverse here is evidence (but far from a smoking gun) that the data is skewed compared to the official data.

 

[bedir than]

Well, since Gnomes are a core race, they are the least popular at #12. Please correct that Halflings are the least popular core race, since at #7 they are far in front of gnomes.

Gnomes are listed as an Uncommon race in 5th edition

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Gnomes are listed as an Uncommon race in 5th edition

"Core," I believe, is taken to mean "PHB." The "uncommon races"/"True Exotics" ghetto is a separate matter.

 

[bedir than]

"Core," I believe, is taken to mean "PHB." The "uncommon races"/"True Exotics" ghetto is a separate matter.

Did I default to using the word core as a synonym for common, noting only those races available in WotC's free products, probably

 

[Senior_WotC_Janitor]

Can I bum a smoke from someone here