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.

 

[TwoSix]

Maybe I should rephrase. I didn't think you could use homebrew classes and subclasses.

Homebrew subclasses are now possible to add in D&D Beyond. They have been since ...August, I think?

 

[TwoSix]

No being the answer, the reason is such a high percentage of clerics choose Life Domain that the total of that subset is higher than all the other individual subclasses for all the other classes. I can confirm that over 60% of clerics on DDB are Life Domain, and clerics have the most subclasses of any class. Only sorcerers exhibit more single-subclass dominance with Draconic comprising 65% of all sorcerers (sorcerers just have a good bit fewer total number of characters).

Wow. Could we get more data like this? The popularity of intra-class choices is a lot more interesting than popularity across classes, since there are a lot less confounding factors.

I'd love to see a chart on popular feat choices as well. How many people take feats as opposed to ASIs, especially at tiers 1 and 2. (People run out of good feats by Tier 3 and 4, generally.) What feats are the most popular at Tier 1 and 2?

Good data sets are like crack to the nerdiest among us, I swear.

 

[FrogReaver]

...Class is a bit easier than subclass due to the fact that one could summarize it with some fairly simple rule, such as giving the percentages for single classed characters and then giving some kind of easy summary breakdown for multis, who often have a fairly obvious mix, such as Cleric 10/Fighter 2 or Cleric 1/Wizard 9; Cleric seems reasonable for the first character while Wizard seems reasonable for the second. Or, conditioning on being a multi, what's the breakdown? That might get messy due to the relatively large number of possible combinations but it's unambiguous as to what's being compared, particularly if broken down by tiers or by common level dips...

I agree with most everything you said in this post.

About this specific part, I want to add that based on other posters comments about how they handled multiclassing and "mistakes" made in the subclass breakdown, it seems to me the most obvious way they handled multiclassing in their class breakdown chart was to simply count all the characters that had some level of cleric etc. Then take the sum of all those counts for the denominator. If this is truly the case then it also presents a big problem for their class breakdowns as well.

 

[FrogReaver]

Homebrew subclasses are now possible to add in D&D Beyond. They have been since ...August, I think?

Ah, that's what I get for not following along. But just to confirm, classes cannot be added in correct?

 

[TwoSix]

Ah, that's what I get for not following along. But just to confirm, classes cannot be added in correct?

Sadly no. As someone who primarily plays homebrew content, that would be the killer app that gets me to subscribe.

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

Ah, that's what I get for not following along. But just to confirm, classes cannot be added in correct?

They did add a good bit to DND Beyond recently, so, for instance you can now add extra feats, skills, etc., without too much pain, say to accommodate a campaign that gave all PCs a bonus feat at first level. It's still fairly rough to integrate a home built race or class. It can be done by people way more patient than me through some workarounds like making a magic item that provides the abilities. I won't count myself an expert at database programming but from what I know of it, that would be very challenging to do so I get why it's not there.

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

I agree with most everything you said in this post.

About this specific part, I want to add that based on other posters comments about how they handled multiclassing and "mistakes" made in the subclass breakdown, it seems to me the most obvious way they handled multiclassing in their class breakdown chart was to simply count all the characters that had some level of cleric etc. Then take the sum of all those counts for the denominator. If this is truly the case then it also presents a big problem for their class breakdowns as well.

If you could multis in the simple way there's going to be a lot of double counting and thus, you're right it would mess up the class breakdowns. Cleric and fighter are both very common level dips, just as an example.

 

[DQDesign]

But you're right, it's tough to see a clear logic---I think they got lucky with 5E in many ways, which makes figuring out how this happened tough.

I'm totally moved! Someone shares my opinion about this! Please believe me, I swear no irony here, I would never expect that. thanks, really.

I find the logic less clear ever when I consider adventure paths. the most popular according to dndB data is the only non-FR, i.e. Curse of Strahd, which is also the best scoring in the reviews section of this site.

and wotc sticks publishing FR-based adventure paths only.

 

[FrogReaver]

[MENTION=6871835]BadEye[/MENTION]

I do want to apologize for being rude to you. I get quite passionate about things like this.

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

I'm totally moved! Someone shares my opinion about this! Please believe me, I swear no irony here, I would never expect that. thanks, really.

You're welcome. I'm a firm believer that one needs to acknowledge the presence of luck in many situations. It's way too easy to analyze situations in hindsight.

I find the logic less clear ever when I consider adventure paths. the most popular according to dndB data is the only non-FR, i.e. Curse of Strahd, which is also the best scoring in the reviews section of this site.

and wotc sticks publishing FR-based adventure paths only.

Yeah, I don't quite get that either. From knowing someone in the publishing world, one thing that is a fairly hard constraint they have is the release schedule, so that often does put pressure on things.

It is the case that not everyone playing a game is running it via Beyond or, more broadly, electronically. Even electronic D&D games may not be buying WotC content. I've played in several games on Roll20 and none of them have been WotC APs, though occasionally we've used bits and pieces of them. Of course, that's just me. The fact that there are multiple VTTs competing also makes things more confusing.