Player Data Doesn't Lie | D&D vs Baldur's Gate 3

💥 My book, Delve, is LIVE on Kickstarter! www.kickstarter.com/projects/bobworldbuilder/delve…

As a data scientist, altering the vertical axis scale like that is a war crime.

Important considerations for BG3’s data: player choices exist within the context of party balance and which companions you decide to use. Paladin and Sorcerer have high representation because they don’t exist in the core 6 (or really at all) and cleric has low representation because your auto-assigned companion Shadowheart serves the role. My first character was a cleric until I realized I didn’t need him to be, and switched to paladin. Then my next was a sorcerer.

One thing worth noting about the BG3 data is that because you get characters of specific classes right at the start of the game. there is a major disincentive to play those classes. In particular, the first two classes you run into are a fighter and a cleric, so that likely affects their popularity. The D&D Beyond data is also skewed because human and fighter are the two defaults, meaning that a lot of basically blank characters are "human fighters" because they didn't actually get made beyond being "made".

For the player data on the dnd beyond app: I use it to play with dice when I'm bored, and create characters I'm not planning on using anytime soon bc I had an idea and wanted to see how it would work with the mechanics, i usually delete those pretty quickly too. So I've created probably dozens of characters and only actually played with two!

For the data on Cleric being the least popular class: It makes sense since the most popular companion is shadowhearth, which means you already have a cleric in your party in most cases.

I think another big reason Paladin, Sorcerer, and Warlock (and sort of bard) are so high in BG3, is because they are all Charisma based characters. When you play BG3 in single player, your character acts as the face of the party, so it makes sense to build a highly charismatic face.

The data about the number of characters created on the app (6 million) vs the number of players rolling dice (1.9 million) makes sense to me because while I love the DnD Beyond for character creation, tracking everything, and in every way simplifying the game, I also love to role my own dice. I play every week with 6 other people and all of us use real dice on the table. The only time I've rolled in the app was an errant key stroke.

Popularity of Paladin and Sorcerer for new characters in BG3 may have something to do with those classes not being represented in the canon companions you get, at least near the beginning of the game. The players may have wanted to avoid repeating classes in their party, or see how that class would work in the game (I know I played a Pally partly because of those reasons).

11:04 to this point, my group all shares one dndbeyond account so that only one of us has to buy everything, and then everything gets shared in every campaign any of us are in. So we’ve made 30 characters this year on just one account, as most of us are involved in multiple campaigns/oneshots. That sort of thing may account for those numbers, although this is obviously just my experience.

One interesting thing about characters and classes in Baldur's Gate is "the other characters." There is a whole party of other characters available, and people pick and choose which of those characters they want on their team, and then often build their own character to complement that team. They might be less likely to choose Cleric, because they intend to have Shadowheart on their team.

the class disparity is because - in actual D&D - vertical space and positioning is not usually considered by a lot of DMs. So something like Storm Sorcerer's 'Flight after a spell cast' bonus action doesn't see a lot of traction or value by most players. There's also all the extra dice and math that have to go into Sorcery points, and compounding damage, etc. In a video game, all that math gets done on the backend and you can see the value of your choices more easily visualized - even if limited by the imagination of the developers.

In several years playing DnD with several groups, I’ve met one person who uses dndbeyond

No coincidence that there are so many human fighters named Bob. They were inspired by the legendary human warrior of the same name that fought in the OGL wars.

Interesting. I think the source material makes a huge difference. Of my 5 ppl. 2 of us play BG3. One of those 2 has 3 characters. I have over 10 myself. Our DnD group however all play on paper sheets. You can (and many do) play DnD without Beyond. But no one can play BG3 without BG3. . .one has an off option the other does not. =)

In BG3 the default selection, if you just change nothing about class in the character creation menu, is a Dragonborn Sorceror if you pick the Dark Urge origin, so I guess a lot of people picking that origin (which is both meant to be geared toward an evil playthrough but also pitched as sort of a "Custom Character +" campaign since it adds more uniqueness to your create-a-character) may have felt that those were good choices (they do synergize well, to be fair, with the Dragonic Bloodline Sorceror). And Paladin is one of the few classes not represented by a Larian created companion (well, there's one, but they're hidden and basically a bonus character meant more for an evil playthrough, as you're led to kill them pretty early on if you're going traditional Chaotic Good style), so it makes a lot of sense that they'd be a popular player choice as it lets you fill in a role the others won't. The other one that doesn't have a companion character in the game is Monk, but I think most people shy away from Monks generally compared to Fighters/Paladins/Barbarians because they're more for fitting an Eastern aesthetic and more of the Forgotten Realms is definitely Western aesthetics.

The reveal of the corrected graph made me unreasonably happy. Thank you .

The 3:1 player to character ratio makes sense because I think I made in total like 50 DnDBeyond characters in 2023, whether it be running through different concepts to very short one-shot characters to making NPC concepts. Most people don't do this and might just make one or two but 3:1 is certainly normal.

Man, people are really uncreative naming so many NPCs Bob. I never reuse Bob. The second one is always Bob Bobkins.

No one can stand against the supreme might of the Bobs! 💪🏽