D&D 5E D&D Beyond Releases 2023 Character Creation Data

D&D Beyond released the 2023 Unrolled with data on the most popular character choices for D&D. The full article includes a wide variety of statistics for the beta test of Maps, charity donations, mobile app usage, and more. However, I’m just going to recap the big numbers.

The most common species chosen by players are Human, Elf, Dragonborn, Tiefling, and Half-Elf. This contrasts with the stats from Baldur’s Gate 3 released back in August 2023 where Half-Elves were the most popular with the rest of the top five also shuffling around.

Also, keep an eye on the scale of these charts as they’re not exactly even. It starts with just over 700,000 for Humans and 500,000 for Elf, but the next line down is 200,000 with the other three species taking up space in that range. This means the difference separating the highest line on the graph and the second highest is 200,000, then 300,000 between the next two, 100,000 between the next, and finally 10,000 separating all the others.

Top classes start off with the Fighter then move onto the Rogue, Barbarian, Wizard, and Paladin. The scale on this chart is just as uneven as the last, but the numbers are much closer with what appears to be about 350,000 Fighters at the top to just over 100,000 Monks in next-to-last with under 80,000 Artificers. This contrasts far more from the Baldur’s Gate 3 first weekend data as the top five classes for the game were Paladin, Sorcerer, Warlock, Rogue, and Bard.

And the most important choices for new characters, the names. Bob is still the top choice for names with Link, Saraphina, and Lyra seeing the most growth and Bruno, Eddie, and Rando seeing the biggest declines from last year.

Putting that together, it means the most commonly created character on D&D Beyond is Bob the Human Fighter. A joke going as far back as I can remember in RPGs is, in fact, reality proven by hard statistics.

 

[Clint_L]

It could be that monks are partially less popular because they don't fit the "traditional" (for D&D) paradigm of a medieval, European themed adventuring party. But it's hard to know, because D&D has never really had a well-designed monk class that made sense and was effective right from level 1.

Well, now it will, so I guess we'll find out.

Having currently played one from levels 1-9, before switching to the play test rules, I can say that it took until about level 7 for me to start feeling comfortable with ki use. And I chose Way of Mercy because it is easily the best of the current sub-classes, with ways to compensate for the 2014 monk's weaknesses.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

I was procrastinating a bit and redid the chart a bit and did some approximate measurements and redid the chart using a single scale if anyone cares. View attachment 343642

I think that this visualization shows something obvious that most of observe at our tables.

Fighters are the most popular.
Then the next tier is rogues and barbarians.
Then it's everyone else.

Which means that the most popular class, easily, along with the next two ... are the non-spellcasting classes.

To give context (and I don't have the actual numbers, just looking grokking the gist from the graph), the difference between Fighter (#1) and Wizard (#4) is about the same as the difference between Wizard (#4) and Monk (#12).

Again, you can't make absolute statements based on a single data set, but this just continues to show that despite the various theoretical debates people have regarding classes in D&D, it remains the fact that in terms of revealed preferences, people still prefer to hit things.

(I would also add that as a mark against all the old school traditionalists, while a person can point out that the races could be summed up as "Human, then Elf, then everyone else ... the fact that Dragonborns and Tieflings are the third and fourth most popular, and notably more popular than any other race ... although half-elf doesn't do too bad ... shows that people have really taken to these options).

 

[Gammadoodler]

That is a weird way to scale a graph, and takes a bit of work to accomplish since most data visualization applications are going to default to consistent axes and hash marks.

Frequently, this kind of scaling would be indicative of shenanigans on the part of whomever prepared the graph (because it takes that extra work to make something that is visually misleading).

Just can't for the life of me think what the purpose would be for this one.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

That is a weird way to scale a graph, and takes a bit of work to accomplish since most data visualization applications are going to default to consistent axes and hash marks.

Frequently, this kind of scaling would be indicative of shenanigans on the part of whomever prepared the graph (because it takes that extra work to make something that is visually misleading).

Maybe they just didn't have their TEA before posting the graph?

 

[hgjertsen]

View attachment 343682

Maybe they just didn't have their TEA before posting the graph?

This is so corporate-cute!

 

[Gammadoodler]

View attachment 343682

Maybe they just didn't have their TEA before posting the graph?

Lol. I assume whomever prepared the tea chart was similarly lacking. But at least that one has some pizzazz to it.

And to be clear, it's not that I actually believe DDB is being nefarious. It's just kind of a head-scratcher since it takes extra work to make a scale weird.

 

[Oofta]

That is a weird way to scale a graph, and takes a bit of work to accomplish since most data visualization applications are going to default to consistent axes and hash marks.

Frequently, this kind of scaling would be indicative of shenanigans on the part of whomever prepared the graph (because it takes that extra work to make something that is visually misleading).

Just can't for the life of me think what the purpose would be for this one.

I assume it's a stylistic choice to be able to put the names in the graph bar unlike what I did with putting them below. At least, that's the only logical conclusion I can draw.

 

[bedir than]

They literally had data about the demand for DADHAT D&D content ...

That data is well after the movie left the theaters though.

It does bode well if you think there will be a second film and they'll actually produce tie-in content

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

That data is well after the movie left the theaters though.

If only they had thought to have the write-ups that took them an hour to write, at most, online when the movies premiered.

I think we also overestimate how long it takes to produce a digital product, especially in cases where there's tons of concept art already created, waiting to be repurposed.

And even a new starter set is 50% reused material, as the rules booklet will be the same. The amount of man hours needed to write a new short adventure, like Stormwreck Isle, is not enormous. They could definitely have had the boxed set out by the end of the year -- or even for the otherwise empty first quarter of 2024.

 

[Gammadoodler]

I assume it's a stylistic choice to be able to put the names in the graph bar unlike what I did with putting them below. At least, that's the only logical conclusion I can draw.

Makes as much sense as anything I guess, at least in a "the bars need to have a minimum height to fit the data label" kind of way.

Still would be pretty weird to me, crafting a misleading but well-labeled graph.. but...
Is what it is I guess.

Edit: To your point, there could be reasons for why they set things up the way that they did..there just aren't any good ones.