Delving into the Data Dungeons: An Adventure in Dungeons & Dragons Character Data
The fantasy world has always intrigued us. Books like Lord of the Rings, Shows like Game of Thrones, and even real-world events like Renaissance fairs. The idea of dungeon delving, adventuring, going on quests, and fighting mythical creatures appeals to some people’s urge to be the hero in their own story.
This is why Dungeons & Dragons is a very popular game. As of 2024, which marks its 50th anniversary, Wizards of the Coast estimates that 50 million players have played Dungeons & Dragons worldwide.
The D&D franchise has popularized the tabletop role-playing genre to the point that players build on the rulesets of D&D. Just like some people might have “house rules” for Monopoly. D&D has many different “homebrew” rules, characters, classes, etc.
These rules are often compiled into their fanmade books. “Darker Dungeons” makes the D&D world more dangerous while reworking some classes and features to balance out gameplay. My absolute favorite is “The Delver’s Guide to Beast World,” which introduces a whole new world with different regions, subclasses for all base D&D classes, and many animal-based races with unique features.
D&D at this stage acts more as a guideline than an official tabletop game. With the wide and expansive world of the game, anyone can create their adventure.
Many interesting trends can be found in how players make their characters. Looking at the raw data shared by GitHub user “oganm,” which tracks D&D character data from a 3rd party website from 2018 to 2022, here is what I was able to decipher.
Note: This data is shortened to the top twenty races and official classes from Wizard of the Coast.
By far, the race players chose the most was Human. The website showed that 2137 characters were human.
Then was Elf in second place with 1297 and Half-Elf at third with 848. The most popular “non-humanoid” race was Dragonborn in seventh place with 530 characters.
There are many reasons why someone might choose a specific race over others. A person likes the stats/features that it provides, maybe they like the type of race, or it would fit their character well.
Although human is a pretty basic class. Only being able to speak, read, and write common and one other language of their choice.
They do get a plus-one bonus for all their stats. Which is a useful trait that other races do not have.
But I hypothesize that many people choose humans because it might be the thing they can easily envision themselves in the universe of D&D. To understand this, there would have to be a survey conducted to see why players with human characters choose that race.
People selected two other popular choices, and it encompasses most of the players with human characters.
Out of the thirteen official D&D classes and 3 official homebrew ones, the most popular by far are Fighter and Rogue.
The most interesting thing is that out of 1291 Fighter characters, 479 are humans. They represent around 37.10% of the total fighters.
The next popular race for fighters is elves at 128. This is a sharp decrease from the first to the second. There has to be something to tell us why so many people made their characters as human Fighter.
Rogue has a more even split between first and second place. With human Rogues numbering at 237, and elf Rogues totaling 226.
One hypothesis I have is that people have this image of a “hero.” Someone who wields a sword and shield wears armor and is more melee-focused. Which does fit what a fighter is.
Another very interesting detail is that Canada has a lot of D&D characters. With a majority of those characters being humans.
They followed roughly the same ranking that was shown in the race ranking graph. With the top 5 being human, elf, half-elf, tiefling, and dragonborn.
I think this is more of a way the data was collected. I’m assuming that Canadian D&D fans use this third-party website more than American or British.
Dungeons & Dragons has grown out of the American market to a global sensation. With everyone enjoying the tabletop roleplaying game. The rulesets make it so anyone can easily pick up a pencil, a character sheet, and some friends, and get to adventuring!
