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.

 

[ProfessorDetective]

So, the Human Champion Fighter with +X Gear and a Bag of Holding still winning out? Nice.

Honestly, while I love the Monk, I can see why it's so low (often incongruous theming, poor damage scaling, scattershot identity).

Really, If I could take the Barb's Unarmored Defense and the Monk's Unarmored Movement and put them on the Champion Fighter, I'd be happy. Oh, and make the Unarmed Fighting Style die scale like the Martial Arts die.

You know, I think that renders character progression almost completely automatic, outside of maybe feats. Though, the pool of obvious feat choices ends up pretty small, too (Alert, Athlete, Crusher, Durable, Grappler, Mobile, Resilient, Tough, Lucky, etc.).

Maybe I'm just... very boring...? Huh...

 

[Ancalagon]

They used a log scale? That's hilarious

Anyway, I wonder... how do they know if it's a test character, vs something actually played?

For example. On my D&D beyond account, I have 28 created characters. But only 7 of them have been in campaigns, and another 7 were used for one-shots and the like. So 50% of these are just me messing around essentially. Now a few of those might see play, but most wont

 

[Hussar]

They used a log scale? That's hilarious

Anyway, I wonder... how do they know if it's a test character, vs something actually played?

For example. On my D&D beyond account, I have 28 created characters. But only 7 of them have been in campaigns, and another 7 were used for one-shots and the like. So 50% of these are just me messing around essentially. Now a few of those might see play, but most wont

Thing is, whenever these stats get posted, it gets batted around a few times and the numbers always seem to shake out the same whether you account for things like number of times accessed, number of times leveled up, that sort of thing. It doesn't seem to make a huge amount of difference. While the raw numbers might be wonky, the relative ratios are probably close enough.

 

[ECMO3]

For example. On my D&D beyond account, I have 28 created characters. But only 7 of them have been in campaigns, and another 7 were used for one-shots and the like. So 50% of these are just me messing around essentially. Now a few of those might see play, but most wont

This probably is not relevant. It would only matter if there was a bais in what classes you played and what classes you "messed around with" and there is no evidence such a bias exists.

For example if you only play Wizards, but you like to mess around only with fighters then your account would bias the numbers for fighters higher. If a lot of people were doing this it would skew the results and we would need to get into a nuanced discussion of what metric we are really concerned with.

As long as your "class preferences" for characters you play are consistent with your "class preferences" for characters you mess around with then this would not be relevant in the statistics.

There are many other concerns as well though if you want to look deeper into the data. I never made a character on DND Beyond I did not play at all. However here is a few observations:

1. I played 3 characters from 1 to 20th level using DND Beyond character sheets a Monk, a Fighter and a Wizard (all had multiclass dips, but these were the primary classes). So in terms of game sessions, I have a lot of sessions with these three classes.

2. The most common classes I play are Rangers and Rogues in that order. I have played many more of these characters than Fighters and Monks in particular, many in one-shots but in terms of number of sessions they are probably close to Fighters and Monks and well behind Wizards.

3. How do you count dips. A ton of my characters have a Rogue or Sorcerer dip, while "identifying" as another class.

So if you are looking at what my favorite class what is it? Is it Wizard (primary class for most sessions) or Ranger (largest number of characters with this primary class) or Rogue (class appearing most often somewhere on the character sheet)?

 

[darjr]

WotC put this in video form.

 

[OB1]

I'm of the mind that popularity of classes and species is a far less useful metric than player satisfaction. With 13 Classes and a billion species to choose from, of course some are going to be far more popular than others, but the point is, do the less popular choices satisfy those that choose those options more than the popular choices, which increases the number of people who are satisfied with the game in general? And to go one step further, the most important measure of satisfaction is with those who already play and enjoy a class, not those who don't. The martial/caster debate, for example, often ignores the reality that a lot of people who play martial characters enjoy them and keep choosing them.

I think this balancing act is one of the critical reasons for 5e's success. We've seen it with the Druid in the playtest, for example, where people who play and love Druids shut down the attempt to make them more broadly popular to non-druid players with changes to Wild Shape. Monks, on the other hand, clearly needed changes to increase the satisfaction of Monk players.

 

[Mirrorrorrim]

Also Half Race Appreciation Society recognizes Half Elf greatness.

They are indeed popular, even with me and I don't like the term half-elf. I just call them Elfkin in my home campaign setting.

 

[Minigiant]

They are indeed popular, even with me and I don't like the term half-elf. I just call them Elfkin in my home campaign setting.

I use City Elf for human-elf and Village Elf for Halfling elf.

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

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.

Spellcasters are ultimately more popular than non-casters though. There are simply fewer options for non-spellcasters, so anyone wanting a non-caster is funneled into four options rather than nine, which results in them being split more.

 

[Minigiant]

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.

Well there are only 3 of them total so..