For more than four decades, I have played and organized games of Dungeons & Dragons, the famous fantasy role-playing game invented in 1974 near my southeastern Wisconsin birthplace. I began as a 12-year-old “Dungeon Master” for my neighborhood friends, and just two years later, I was writing and running adventures at Gen Con, the biggest D&D convention in North America. Since it was originally published, there have been more than 13 editions of various basic and advanced rules, but for the most part the way players decide what their characters can and cannot do in their shared storytelling has remained fundamentally similar.
During the game, one player in the role of Dungeon Master (DM) describes a scene. Other players take turns describing their characters’ responses. When the outcome of any decision needs to be measured for success or failure, dice are rolled and specific numbers from each character’s dataset are added. The higher the total, the better the result.
Like most role-playing games, Dungeons & Dragons is closely tied to the idea of the quantified self. Every character in the shared world of fantasy is literally a statistical proxy for a real world player. Some creative players prioritize dramatic backstories for their characters’ pasts, while more tactical players focus on getting the ideal combinations of factors needed to be most effective in a specific task.
Are you the realm’s deadliest archer? A most cunning burglar? Craftiest spellcaster? Even before the first dice are rolled, these decisions reflect how a player wants to play the game and who they want to pretend to be.
In the current most popular version of D&D, now simply called 5th edition, character data is mainly based on two sets of base numbers:
- Ability Scores: A rating from 1 (low) to 20 (high) measuring Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma. In earlier versions of D&D, a character’s racial heritage could impact these ability numbers – dwarves were tougher, elves were quicker and smarter – but such essentialist stereotypes have fallen out of fashion in recent years.
- Class Levels: A rating from 1 (novice) to 20 (epic hero) measuring skills related to specific character classes, familiar genre archetypes such as sword-swinging warriors, magic-shaping wizards, sneaky rogues, and so forth.
There are many more modifiers and numbers used throughout the game, but almost all of them are derived from the combination of ability scores and character levels.
GETTING TO PLAY FASTER
After moving to New York City in the mid-2000s, I began to organize open games of D&D at venues across Manhattan and Brooklyn: game stores, bars, cafes, and more. People could drop by, play the famed fantasy role-playing game for a few hours, and get a chance to meet new people. However, with the 5th edition “core game” rules totalling more than 980 pages, getting started could be daunting to newcomers and experienced players alike.
To help facilitate set-up for such events, in 2015 I created FastCharacter.com, a website allowing game organizers and players to quickly create dozens or even hundreds of pre-generated character sheets used during the course of each game session. Since then more than 2.3 million people have generated 9 million character sheets from the website, growing increasingly diverse as more D&D rulebooks were published.
I know what kinds of characters I like to create (see below), but capturing this user data could answer an interesting question: What are the most popular types of characters being created from FastCharacter.com?
Using a dataset of the top 50,000 most generated combinations of character race, class, and level, the following visualizations illustrate some of the most popular choices. Selection options below a specific frequency – typically less than 5,000 – have been excluded as outliers. Also, the website has been designed to limit players to choosing one option per category, even through the official rules allow characters to earn levels in more than class at once.
Who Uses The Website?
Based on samples drawn from all FastCharacter.com data, the majority of site users fall in the 18-24 age range, and roughly 1 in 5 identifies as female via Google Analytics.
What Are The Most Popular Classes?
More than any other factor, a character’s class determines what decisions a player is going to be making during a game. Class sets the complexity and diversity of powers and features available to a character, including what spells may be cast, what weapons and armors may be used, and how much damage can be suffered before death.
So what does character class choice tell us about D&D players?
THE ARCANE (Artificers, Sorcerers, Warlocks, Wizards): These characters rely heavily on either Intelligence or Charisma to command the widest range of the most powerful spells. The rules for these classes range from medium to high complexity, often requiring players to carefully note different ranges, areas of effect, durations, and uses per day for various magical powers. Only the artificer, a crafter of magical machines, relies on armor and weapons directly. Such characters tend to be easier to hit and take less damage before falling in combat, meaning players will need to pair up with other player’s more protective characters to keep them out of harm’s way. Play an arcane character if you enjoy flashy moments of big impact.
THE DIVINE (Clerics and Druids): These characters rely on Wisdom to use magic, turn away undead, and transform into beasts. Their spellcasting options make them medium to highly complex to play, and certain types of divine classes excel at healing other players’ characters to keep them going on adventures. Play a divine character if you want a variety of options but plan to spend time supporting your teammates.
THE EXPERTS (Bards, Rangers, Rogues): These characters rely on Dexterity and one other ability, typically Wisdom or Charisma. They each have core unique abilities – inspiration for bards, focused attacks for rangers, sneak attacks for rogues – but more than other classes, they also tend to offer their own styles of versatility. The range from low to medium complexity, good for players who want to stand out as leaders and specialists.
THE WARRIORS (Barbarians, Fighters, Monk, Paladins): These characters rely on either Strength or Dexterity to deal out continuous attacks over and over again. Generally considered low to medium complexity roles, players who choose these classes are happy to declare “I hit it with my weapon” every time their turn comes around during combat. They often serve as protectors to weaker characters in the group, such as those from the arcane classes.
What Are The Most Popular Levels?
Most characters created on FastCharacter.com are 3rd to 5th level – a popular starting point for new games. Higher level characters may be created for games that have been running for a long time, or to create powerful “non-player characters” Dungeon Masters may use as allies or adversaries.
What Are The Most Popular Races?
In the very first version of Dungeons & Dragons, players could only choose from humans, dwarves, elves, and halflings (little folk based on author J.R.R. Tolkien’s hobbits). In the nearly 50 years since then, players’ imaginations have demanded expanding characters to all manner of creatures from various mythologies, science-fiction, and pop culture. In recent D&D rule updates, the impact of race on ability scores has been reduced, making it more a matter of player taste than game tactics.
What Kinds of Characters Have I Played?
In four decades of playing Dungeons & Dragons, I have played dozens of different characters amid hundreds of games. The below list walks through 16 imaginary “quantified selves” enjoyed with friends and strangers in such shared fantasy games. (For consistency, any characters created before 2015 have been converted to the current 5th edition rules.)
1981: Denton the Cleric, a healer and middling warrior. Briefly explored wilderness surrounding the Keep on the Borderlands.
1982: Mad Aean, wizard treasure collector and advisor to a Norse dwarf in partnership to loot the infamous Dungeon of Doom.
1983: Captain of the Githyanki Knights, a dragon-riding commander from the timeless Astral Plane who came to the mortal realm to recover a sacred silver sword stolen from his people.
1986: Drynn the Kinslayer, a drow wizard-thief sent to sabortage and kill a party of heroic adventurers but who himself was quickly murdered by an assassin.
1991: Alexander Periot, vampire leader of The Sewerharps, a gang of wererat street performers who organized crimes around the City of Greyhawk.
1996: Faust, a mortal wizard slowly remembering his forgotten past eldritch crimes during the reading of a deceased sorcerer’s last will and testement.
1997: Eleanor, a tortured ghost whose release from haunting her husband’s mansion came by possessing a powerful vampire and forcing the undead monster to walk into sunlight.
2000: The Lieutenant, nameless leader of a doomed squad of U.S. soldiers who magically travelled from 1971’s central Vietnam into a timeless land of hobgoblins and orcs.
2003: Abigail, handmaiden of Deborah and a Nazarite cleric of the Tribe of Ephraim whose fellow Israelites amid the Age of Judges partnered with enemy Egyptians to hunt down and destroy a mutual threat, a rogue undead necromancer terrorizing the Levant.
2006: Ruhg Norwind, a former great dragon cursed into a human body and forced into a life of mercenary adventuring until discovering how to regain his true devastating form and his missing treasure horde.
2010: Little Orphan Aehi, a 9-year-old girl living as a thieving street urchin in hopes of joining the gang of a crimelord named Le Blanc.
2011: Proxraius, a minotaur wizard pledged to a planar sect which holds only money as sacred. He worked for a fiendish information broker and spymaster.
2013: Wretched Muelbreg, an orphaned dwarf raised as a pet by a frost dragon, known for his reckless use of arcane spells and general misanthropy toward anyone except children in need of protection and alms.
2015: Praetor-General Runnic Daern, once a famous military commander who suffered disgrace when his army fell victim to The Corruption, mutating into freakish hordes in lands far south of the surviving colony of humanity.
2019: Vyllax 818, a ruthless time-travelling entrepreneur from Earth 2054 A.D. Her interdimensional technology was supposed to boost her corporate position by turning arcane power drained from neighboring magical realities into commercially traded commodities.
2021: Olya, an overly-friendly mage-merchant who held the rank of Walker Of Somewheres within a teleportation magic guild monopoly. His constant pursuit of “get rich quick” schemes and dubious magical innovations tended to get others in trouble on his behalf.
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