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.

 

[bedir than]

Anyone who thinks that Xanathar's is the only book with player expansion in it probably should review the entire catalog. Over 50% of the books have player options in them.

 

[DQDesign]

Anyone who thinks that Xanathar's is the only book with player expansion in it probably should review the entire catalog. Over 50% of the books have player options in them.

yeah, it is clear, the vast majority of people obviously bought CoS because of the new PC background.

anyway, I think most of us see a clear difference between a product like Xgta and SCAG, for example. the first is a 'major mechanical expansion' (quote Mearls), the second a campaign guide clearly aimed at DMs in which some bonus UA rules for players are refined and printed, occupying a vastly negligible percentage of the book. and, assuming a linear model, justifying only a negligible percentage of the sales.

 

[BadEye]

Also, the subclass graph doesn't even add up to 100%. Circle Charts always should add up to 100%. Even if the last category is "other".

The chart adds up to 100% (of course all circle charts do) - there just isn't labeling for the remaining percentages because there was no room for them to exist and still be legible.

 

[BadEye]

tl;dr: If all these data are being used for is to confuse and/or amuse some posters on EnWorld, no harm. If decisions are actually being made from them, for instance to guide future product development, I'm not sure that would be a good analysis, at least as presented.

This data is presented as a high-level look at distribution of race, class, and subclass selection for active characters on D&D Beyond. It serves that purpose just fine.

It could certainly "confuse" or "amuse" those who want to read too much into it or think it is trying to achieve a different purpose than it is.

Actual decisions could be (and are) made from this data. For instance, when looking at future subclass design, maybe the bar would be set at Life Domain and not at the least selected domain. It's a safe bet to say that draconic sorcerers "do well" in the community and other design should target that, or that perhaps people would want to know more about half-elf culture since they are so often chosen. The data never pretends to dig any deeper than that.

 

[BadEye]

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.

This is my point that no one here (except me) knows the actual dataset and many assumptions are being made. Multiclassing and homebrew subclasses are going to throw off any napkin math you all can do.

If we entirely removed multiclass characters, for instance, does this actually still give us the most accurate look at class popularity? Is a class still popular if it is chosen, even if for only a level or two?

We can absolutely remove multiclass characters (and we have before), but I can tell you the distribution doesn't actually change that much.

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

Anyone who thinks that Xanathar's is the only book with player expansion in it probably should review the entire catalog. Over 50% of the books have player options in them.

They do, but WotC's propensity to put lots of DM information in means that those books are largely or mostly for DMs, with only fairly minimal player info, often not enough to drive sales to players. Just considering my own group, only one person bought Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes. While it does have player content in it, it's not really comparable to the amount in Xanathar's, which is useful for most players. Volo's has quite a bit, but mostly the monster races, which have never been that popular.

 

[BadEye]

@BadEye

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

No worries - I appreciate passion.

 

[5ekyu]

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.

I have been using homebrew a lot for my current game and so far DDB makes it pretty easy. Classes are not there, as was stated, but it's well put together so far.

 

[CleverNickName]

These statistics are interesting, but I wonder how representative they are to the hobby as a whole. I'm active in three different 5e gaming groups, and only one person uses D&D Beyond. He's the one who plays a human warlock of The Fiend.

The rest of our stats don't match this at all: we're all about elves and half-elves mostly, nobody is playing a fighter or wizard, the one rogue is a Swashbuckler, and the lone sorcerer is wild magic. So I have to take these graphs with a grain of salt.

 

[Zardnaar]

These statistics are interesting, but I wonder how representative they are to the hobby as a whole. I'm active in three different 5e gaming groups, and only one person uses D&D Beyond. He's the one who plays a human warlock of The Fiend.

The rest of our stats don't match this at all: we're all about elves and half-elves mostly, nobody is playing a fighter or wizard, the one rogue is a Swashbuckler, and the lone sorcerer is wild magic. So I have to take these graphs with a grain of salt.

Its called a bubble, you might not be that representive of casual players (none of us here are).

Early in 5E our group would not have been to far form this. Recently we have branched out more into the advanced option and MCing concepts more than the classic 4 classes or even the specific subclasses. It has been a while since I have seen a life cleirc but its definitely one of the better PHB clerics/cleric in general.