D&D 5E Nobody Is Playing High Level Characters

According to stats from D&D Beyond, above 5th level characters start to drop off sharply, and above 10th level, the figures are very low. The exception is level 20, which looks like it's probably people creating experimental 20th-level builds.

Some of them say 0%; this isn't strictly accurate, but levels 16-19 are used by an insignificant number of players. Interestingly, there are more 3rd-5th level characters than there are 1st-2nd level.

D&D Beyond has said before that under 10% of games make it past 10th level, but these figures show the break point as being bit lower than that. DDB used over 30 million characters to compile these stats.

 

[Anoth]

It doesn’t. At all.

Boy. This is probably the easiest edition ever to play high level characters for DM’s that never bothered to learn how to transition to writing high level adventures for earlier editions. Mainly because the style of writing does not have to change too much because there are not as many spells above 5th level as in prior editions. There are some changes to take into account. But it’s really pretty simple.

 

[Lanefan]

@Morrus

Found it. This page is someone's dissection of the survey, but includes some of the actual survey write-up. Scroll down until you hit Section 1: The Segmentation Study and you'll see it there.

Market Research: Big Business Does Not Necessarily Mean Being Right | Steven Trustrum @ Trustrum dot COM

 

[Morrus]

@Morrus

Found it. This page is someone's dissection of the survey, but includes some of the actual survey write-up. Scroll down until you hit Section 1: The Segmentation Study and you'll see it there.

Market Research: Big Business Does Not Necessarily Mean Being Right | Steven Trustrum @ Trustrum dot COM

Thanks! I’ve somehow spent 20 years not seeing that!

 

[Seramus]

I found that people who play a high level games usually don't like D&D Beyond.

This is incredibly anecdotal, but I started to notice that D&D Beyond is more popular with players who make many characters than with players who stick with 1-2 characters.

 

[Morrus]

I found that people who play a high level games usually don't like D&D Beyond.

This is incredibly anecdotal, but I started to notice that D&D Beyond is more popular with players who make many characters than with players who stick with 1-2 characters.

That’s just begging the question. One of DDB’s main functions is characters. If you make more characters, you use the character tool. If you don’t make many characters, you use less. It’s like saying the LEGO store is more popular with those who build a lot of Lego.

 

[Don Durito]

There really needs to be a way to seperate out whether:

1) people don't play high level games because the games don't get that far.
2) people don't play high level games because they don't like high level game-play.

Of course both are probably true to an extent, but it would be interesting to know to what extent.

 

[Darrius_Adler]

I am curious to see how things go with the new AL for Eberron which is supposed to go to level 20. Been considering using the milestone method to do something similar for my group.

 

[Tony Vargas]

1) people don't play high level games because the games don't get that far.
2) people don't play high level games because they don't like high level game-play.

...or, I suppose...
3) people don't play high level games because they don't like being part of the fiction they represent?

1) Acknowledges the challenges of getting and keeping a group together in spite of real life.

2) Acknowledges that the game works better at some levels - the sweet spot of conventional wisdom - and less well at high levels, in particular

3) Supposes that the ideas/themes/scope/etc of fiction modeled by higher levels fundamentally lack appeal.

 

[Don Durito]

I found that people who play a high level games usually don't like D&D Beyond.

This is incredibly anecdotal, but I started to notice that D&D Beyond is more popular with players who make many characters than with players who stick with 1-2 characters.

Well that makes sense. It's not hard to make a 5E charactter. I've forgotten my character sheet a few times to sessions and just remade the character from scratch in a few minutes while everyone else was getting ready. So there's not all that big an advantage to having Dndbeyond unless you do it a lot.

I imagine that D&D Beyond is going to be skewed towards people who are likely to enjoy making characters (and if so you're probably going to be wanting to change the character you are playing fairly regularly). It's also probably skewed towards optimisers.

But all the same I'm pretty sure, that Mearls has said (while saying that we can't really trust DndBeyond's data as representative) that their own internal research shows the same thing in this case.

 

[Don Durito]

That’s just begging the question. One of DDB’s main functions is characters. If you make more characters, you use the character tool. If you don’t make many characters, you use less. It’s like saying the LEGO store is more popular with those who build a lot of Lego.

I believe that it was in one of the Happy Fun Hour videos that Mearls talks about how some aspects of DndBeyond are different to their own internal data. For example, he says that there are a lot more Warlocks on Dndbeyond than their own data indicates are usually played. He speculates that this is because there a lot of decisions to be made when creating warlocks and therefore people just like making warlock characters (they are also a favourite component of many optimised builds, although he doesn't explicitly point this out).