Is your D&D character rare? II: Off-brand edition

[Worden]

It's been some time since I released this article into the wild but thought this forum could also be interested in it. I am hosting a couple of web applications that collects character sheets of their users as a side effect.

Inspired by the fivethirtyeight article (https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/is-your-dd-character-rare/) of almost the same name, I wanted to take a look at the sheets I have collected to see which choices are popular. I tried to include most aspects of character building into the analysis. The sample size is smaller than what D&DBeyond has for obvious reasons but it's been enough to reveal some interesting patterns

Anything I haven't done, you can do it yourself as I also released the data (I can also answer quick questions). You can find it all in the link below.

https://oganm.github.io/dndstats/

PS: Most plots give some extra info on mouse-over.

[vostyg]

Great work! Thanks for the insights.

[PeteNutButter]

Very nice work. The charts especially make me quite giddy.

It's interesting to see how it's almost a guide on what to do. Are people in general optimizing well? Is there a problem with sample space? (The most casual of players won't be putting their characters into an app or even touching their sheets outside of play.)

If people are optimizing, is it because the options are relatively limited and obvious in 5e or is it because of the ready access to online guides.

The prevalence of certain options in your data to me suggests the latter. There are a few options that always are valued higher than they perform. When people are exposed to a community that overvalues an option, they'll tend to continue to value that option. In a game with mutually exclusive choices, the less popular option might never even see play.

[Worden]

Very nice work. The charts especially make me quite giddy.

It's interesting to see how it's almost a guide on what to do. Are people in general optimizing well? Is there a problem with sample space? (The most casual of players won't be putting their characters into an app or even touching their sheets outside of play.)

If people are optimizing, is it because the options are relatively limited and obvious in 5e or is it because of the ready access to online guides.

The prevalence of certain options in your data to me suggests the latter. There are a few options that always are valued higher than they perform. When people are exposed to a community that overvalues an option, they'll tend to continue to value that option. In a game with mutually exclusive choices, the less popular option might never even see play.


Hard to tell if optimisation is over-represented. It does make sense for me to have access to sheets of players with a little know how as my applications aren't particularly famous. To know about them you need to be a regular of the dnd subreddits and you need to be using the fifth edition character sheet mobile app. Could be selecting for experienced folk.

[Blacky the Blackball]

Hard to tell if optimisation is over-represented. It does make sense for me to have access to sheets of players with a little know how as my applications aren't particularly famous. To know about them you need to be a regular of the dnd subreddits and you need to be using the fifth edition character sheet mobile app. Could be selecting for experienced folk.

I'd suggest that it's not selecting for experience/know-how so much as inclination/interest. It's the self-selecting group of people who go online to discuss builds and the like that are exposed to your app. There's therefore obviously going to be a strong correlation between people with that interest and people who prefer a build/optimisation approach to characters.

My own offline experiences tell me that it's the people with the most D&D experience (those who have been playing since the AD&D game or earlier) who are least likely to be discussing things online and using apps for their characters. There are always exceptions, of course, but the most experienced players tend to use pen and paper like they've always done and consequently won't show up in your data.