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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pauper" data-source="post: 7736012" data-attributes="member: 17607">I'm curious about exactly what sources this data that Crawford refers to could be.- The 5th edition data is almost certainly mainly D&D Beyond data (used by fivethirtyeight to create <a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/is-your-dd-character-rare/" target="_blank">this fairly content-free story</a>). Note that the data only really covers base race and base class options -- it doesn't break out dwarf by mountain and hill dwarf, for example, nor does it break out wizard by school. It also contains nothing about feats (but I suppose it's possible that some other D&D Beyond data related to campaigns rather than characters might indicate how often feats are used in games), so there's no real way to justify the idea that most people are playing non-variant humans without the bonus feat (and Crawford's comment on the original article recognizes this). They could conceivably supplement this with data from the playtest on how frequently particular race/class pre-gens were selected, but I don't recall any particular drive to survey or record the race/class combinations that people chose when creating their own characters during the playtest, so I'd be surprised if there was much data from that -- rather, they'd have data about specific race/class combinations that people felt obliged to comment on rather than bulk data about preferences as in the D&D Beyond data.- WotC probably also has some 4th Edition data deriving from their D&D Insider Character Builder -- it would not have been at all challenging for someone knowledgeable about databases to come up with some reporting queries to answer questions like 'how many characters of each race do we have? how many of each class?' And given that feats were a much more integral part of the game in 4E (for example, feats unlocked multiclassing options), it wouldn't surprise me that humans were also a popular option in 4E. However, I also suspect that if you took a closer look at that data, you'd find that, by class, players tended to take races that gave bonuses to the class's prime requisites, which isn't really a trend that suggests people are prioritizing story over mechanics in that edition. (And given that <a href="http://dnd4.wikia.com/wiki/Human" target="_blank">humans in 4E</a> got their stat bump in a stat of the player's choice, again taking human doesn't preclude doing so for mechanical rather than other reasons.)Given the popularity of Critical Role, Dice, Camera, Action, and similar streamed/recorded D&D games, I wouldn't be surprised to see players wishing to see the kind of game materials that would help them play the kinds of games they're watching online, and in that sense the trend in player preference might be moving more toward story-based or at least non-mechanical based decision-making in character creation -- making characters that give players more ways to be involved in the story rather than more effective in specific play situations like combat or skill checks. (And I'm not at all disappointed in that trend, if it exists.) But it's a far cry to say that we're at that point right now, given the data we have.--Pauper</blockquote>

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