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.

 

[BadEye]

I can prove you just blowing hot air.

Look at the Barbarian subclasses. His highest is 5.1%. Even if you took all his subclasses you would get nowhere near 100% of barbarians accounted for which is what would need to be able to happen if you were correct. Thus you are incorrect.

Again, very assertive for someone that does not have the complete picture of the data.

For instance, I have not mentioned anything about multiclassing, which impacts this greatly. Taking the barbarian class for a couple of levels is actually very popular for multiclass characters, and those would not end up having a barbarian subclass yet. When looking at subclasses only, those barbarians would be removed from the dataset.

We could absolutely remove any characters that are multi-class from these results, but there are pros and cons for doing so and we decided to keep them in for now.

So, having the actual data in hand, I will assert that it is correct, but as with any analysis uses some assumptions and parameters that you do not have access to for reverse engineering.

The goal of sharing these numbers is not to concretely establish camps out there in the community - it is an interesting exercise that could demonstrate player choices and trends.

I do appreciate your thirst for accuracy and ensuring that no one out there is being bamboozled!

 

[jerryrice4949]

I really like the swashbuckler

Well I should start off by saying I certainly appreciate other points of view. Not trying to throw shade or anything.

I can see how this could be a fun subclass just not a swashbuckler per say. When I think of the classic swashbucklers such as Zorro or the Musketeers they are more than panache and feet’s of dexterity. They are also incredible swordsmen bar none. Technical masters of light fighting. That is just not represented in the current swashbuckler.

I think part part of it is that the swashbuckler does not fit well in any class. To me it is really part fighter, part rogue and even a little bard minus the spells of course.

i don’t mind the subclass it just doesn’t ring true as a swashbuckler. Swashbucklers don’t backstab they defeat you in a duel with wit, acrobatics and superior swordsmanship.

 

[Ash Mantle]

Well I should start off by saying I certainly appreciate other points of view. Not trying to throw shade or anything.

I can see how this could be a fun subclass just not a swashbuckler per say. When I think of the classic swashbucklers such as Zorro or the Musketeers they are more than panache and feet’s of dexterity. They are also incredible swordsmen bar none. Technical masters of light fighting. That is just not represented in the current swashbuckler.

I think part part of it is that the swashbuckler does not fit well in any class. To me it is really part fighter, part rogue and even a little bard minus the spells of course.

i don’t mind the subclass it just doesn’t ring true as a swashbuckler. Swashbucklers don’t backstab they defeat you in a duel with wit, acrobatics and superior swordsmanship.

No worries, bro.
I feel their class features do lend credence to the fact that they are technical masters of light fighting, especially their fancy footwork and rakish audacity abilities. I would also argue that swashbucklers don't backstab, and that sneak attacking is not the same as backstabbing, backstabbing is not on brand for them. They just know how and where to find the most unguarded and most painful bits of the body to attack.
Their wit and superior acrobatics is covered with their panache and rogue abilities and elegant maneuver.

If you are also saying that they could benefit from an another attack action, that I'm inclined to agree with but there's also multiclassing.

 

[ad_hoc]

They are also incredible swordsmen bar none. Technical masters of light fighting. That is just not represented in the current swashbuckler.

I think this is represented by them getting sneak attack when only fighting one person. They don't need the target to be distracted or unawares. They are just so good that they can inflict terrible wounds by skill alone.

 

[FrogReaver]

Again, very assertive for someone that does not have the complete picture of the data.

For instance, I have not mentioned anything about multiclassing, which impacts this greatly. Taking the barbarian class for a couple of levels is actually very popular for multiclass characters, and those would not end up having a barbarian subclass yet. When looking at subclasses only, those barbarians would be removed from the dataset.

We could absolutely remove any characters that are multi-class from these results, but there are pros and cons for doing so and we decided to keep them in for now.

So, having the actual data in hand, I will assert that it is correct, but as with any analysis uses some assumptions and parameters that you do not have access to for reverse engineering.

The goal of sharing these numbers is not to concretely establish camps out there in the community - it is an interesting exercise that could demonstrate player choices and trends.

I do appreciate your thirst for accuracy and ensuring that no one out there is being bamboozled!

Yep multiclassing is an interesting issue. I already called out the difficulties with dealing with multiclassing in d&d data in general on another recent thread about D&D beyond data.

Remember my conclusion was already that they included only subclassed characters in their subclass data. That meant that about 20% of all their characters from their class data graphical breakdown didn't include subclasses. Leaving off the fact that nearly 20% of classes haven't chosen a subclass skews the subclass data quite drastically. How so?

It means you are including level 1 clerics, sorcerers and warlocks but leaving out level 1 fighters etc. Presumably there are a lot more level 1 characters than anything else. That highly skews subclass results towards those 3 classes.

 

[Azzy]

I'm doing calculations on the data they gave us to help fill in their huge gaps. I shouldn't have to do that. But I figure it's worth combating now before I hear on every thread for the next year how D&D Beyond says XYZ is more popular. Instead I'd rather nip that in the bud and have everyone know basing anything on these couple of D&D charts is bogus.

You're still working with incomplete data, so whatever conclusions you reach are meaningless.

 

[FrogReaver]

You're still working with incomplete data, so whatever conclusions you reach are meaningless.

Not at all, my assumptions were confirmed. My calculations were correct.

 

[bedir than]

Not at all, my assumptions were confirmed. My calculations were correct.

Did your assumptions include that players could be using homebrew subclasses?

 

[DQDesign]

Xanathar's sold quite well. It was featured in the window at the Amazon store on 34th Street by my office in Midtown Manhattan for quite a while!

could you please point where in my post (the exact words please) I said Xgte sold poorly?

 

[ccs]

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?

That 20% of the characters are below the lv where you'd pick a subclass?