Humans, Fighters, and Life Domain Most Popular On D&D Beyond

Yet more stats published by D&D Beyond, the official licensed Dungeons & Dragons electronic tool. Recently they revealed the most commonly viewed adventures, and the most common classes by tier on their platform. This time they're looking at how often people create characters of each race, class and subclass!

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Humans are by far the most common choice, with a total of 22% of the character made on the platform. They're followd up by Half-Elves, Tieflings, and Dragonborn. Deep Gnomes are the least popular listed, with under 1%, although the developer confirms that a lot of other races hover around 0.8%, just below it.

This is followed up by a look at classes. Fighters come first, and druids last. The "traditional" core four - fighter, rogue, cleric, wizard - make up the top four. The developer mentions that warlocks got very popular just after Xanathar's Guide, but it has returned to normal now.

Next it's the turn of the subclasses. The lead of the cleric's Life Domain, sorcerer's Draconic Bloodline and The Fiend (despite being a less popular class) are fairly strong. They note that the Hexblade was the most popular last time they looked, but it's down to 2.8% now.

Of course, these are characters created on the platform, not necessarily played. Lots of people create multiple character builds for fun. According to the developer, that's 8.8 million characters in total.

 

[GlassJaw]

Is there a reason you said that?

Of course there's a reason!

A rather crass way to say that some of the things I find least interesting are the most popular. Normal Human Fighter Champion? Bah humbug!

I do find it interesting though the class distribution is fairly even (after Fighter and Rogue) but the races are much less so. Dwarves, gnomes, and halflings don't seem to be that popular and elves only slightly more so.

 

[gyor]

I wonder how skewed the subclass information is seeing as Basic D&D is free and the champion, thief, life and evocation subclasses are in Basic?

I do find it interesting that half elf and tiefling are more popular than elves.

Bingo

 

[FrogReaver]

The subclass numbers are useless.

8.4% of active characters are clerics and 10.2% of active characters are life clerics. Do you see the problem here?

The subclass data should only include PCs of level 3 or higher in at least one class so all PCs have at least one subclass.

It's possible there is multiclassing going on here, but the data is useless without knowing that.

Just seen this and yes. I would guess that what they did is take the total of all characters with a subclass as their divisor for the subclass chart. That would presumably be a smaller divisor than what they used for the class info since every character has a class. If that is correct we could fix their chart and calculate how many characters don't have a subclass.

8.8 million characters, 8.4% are clerics = 739,200 clerics. If we assume all clerics are life clerics that would mean 739,200 / 10.2% = 7,247,000 Total Characters with subclasses. That actually comes out to a minimum of maybe 17.6% of all characters made on d&d beyond don't have a subclass...

If we assume all the other cleric subclasses total maybe 5% of clerics then we get 702240 life clerics. That would come out to 21.8% of all characters not having a subclass...

They want to base anything on a character population where nearly 1/5 of them don't even have a subclass. WOW

 

[FrogReaver]

No, 10.2% of subclasses are life clerics.

They're are useful as much use you can make of them. Which I assume is zero. But they can be interesting for discussion's sake.



What use do you have for the data?

I just mathed it...

Nearly 20% of the classes in their total population of characters don't even have a subclass. What the heck is anyone supposed to make of a population of characters where that's the case?

 

[BadEye]

The charts make no sense - Only 8.4% of all characters are clerics but 10.2% of all characters are life domain clerics? Say what??? (It's not possible to have more life domain clerics than you have clerics).

No, but it is possible to have a higher percentage in a separate data sample that removes characters that have not reached a level appropriate to choose a subclass, which is what has happened here.

This data is intended to provide a broad view into relative popularity between all other individual subclasses.

 

[Morrus]

I just mathed it...

Nearly 20% of the classes in their total population of characters don't even have a subclass. What the heck is anyone supposed to make of a population of characters where that's the case?

(a) Not everybody uses subclasses.

(b) Lots of characters are low level.

(c) You're not supposed to make anything of it. It's just an interesting conversation.

 

[FrogReaver]

No, but it is possible to have a higher percentage in a separate data sample that removes characters that have not reached a level appropriate to choose a subclass, which is what has happened here.

This data is intended to provide a broad view into relative popularity between all other individual subclasses.

But when 20% of your character population don't have subclasses and when all clerics, warlocks, sorcerers by definition have subclasses it kind of significantly skews the results right?

 

[FrogReaver]

(a) Not everybody uses subclasses.

(b) Lots of characters are low level.

(c) You're not supposed to make anything of it. It's just an interesting conversation.

a) subclasses are not an optional rule for 5e
b) then they should have excluded characters below level 3 from the subclass breakdown
c) yes bad data makes interesting conversations, but it also makes pointless conversations

 

[jerryrice4949]

I must admit this information supports my belief that the Swashbuckler subclass was awful. I don’t know how they ever settled on that version but it really missed the mark.

 

[Azzy]

But when 20% of your character population don't have subclasses and when all clerics, warlocks, sorcerers by definition have subclasses it kind of significantly skews the results right?

You're doing calculations without all of the data. If we were presented with the whole picture, these snapshots would likely make more sense, but alas! We only have a couple of pie charts.