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

so DND D beyond the proprietary online platform SL toolkit for playing and running Dungeons and Dragons digitally just released a ton of interesting data about every character created on their platform in the year of 2023 and very interestingly we got a similar data set from laran Studios makers of balers Gate 3 and it is shocking to see the disparity in the numbers from the balers Gate 3 data to the D and D Beyond data like I knew Boulders Gate 3 was insanely popular but I didn't realize how insanely more popular it is than D and D Beyond and I want to share this weird but interesting data with you because I'm Bob this is where we learn how to have more fun playing RPGs together and we're going to jump right in to these staggering and seemingly misleading numbers from the D and D Beyond 2D map virtual tabletop tool that just launched launched this year they say 180 million characters or NPCs were played and 88 million monsters were fought or befriended now at first glance 180 million characters sounds insane it's really this or NPC's part that I think is the operative uh part of this phrase because as you'll see in a moment as we get to the class and species data that 180 million is a couple orders of magnitude off of the entire number of characters created in 2023 so for NBCS and monsters sure this sounds reasonable but basically I really think this just means tokens dragged onto a map but moving on to point number two which is much more positive and cool over 37,000 players contributed to charity through D and D Beyond that's awesome now some balers Gate 3 adjacent data Gail was the most popular balers Gate 3 character so there was a set of character sheets created in D and beyond for each of the main characters of balers Gate 3 they say down here in the text how they also did this for the Dungeons and Dragons movie and aside from those movie characters which were actually apparently more popular than the balers Gate 3 ones much to my surprise your boy Gail was the most popular of the balers Gate 3 characters and this is also interesting because a wizard being popular really clashes with uh all the other data we're about to see about the classes and then some other quick points before we get into that class and species data average age of characters 28 sounds reasonable I feel like most of the characters I've made are around that point I've had a couple really old guys couple really young people but uh yeah that sounds about right and the average current level of characters created 4.77 this one feels right I do wish we had more data on like how many characters at each level and again for the whole data set not just 2023 because that kind of stuff really interests me but moving on another one I wish we had more specific data for the most popular name on D and D Beyond Bob now I'm not saying do anything to do with uh no obviously it doesn't Bob is just like a default name there have been a number of times in my life where I've introduced myself and people have been like really thinking I'm making up my own name because uh of how generic it is but we don't know how many Bobs are out there we just know it's the most popular so is it 50% of characters are all named Bob I highly doubt it is it just like 2% of characters are named Bob but it still happens to be the single most popular name more likely but now getting into the real fun part here the species so we have what looks like a relatively even distribution right human the most popular elf second most popular followed by dragon born tling half elf dwarf halfling half orc gasi wao that's interesting because all those ones before it were from the player's handbook and then gnome right after it is from the player's handbook but gasi is not and similarly right after gnome we got Goliath asamar eraka and then lineages and custom lineages so first some conjecture about why I think these are where they are human just kind of feels like the default option and elf is like how you know you're playing a fantasy game so playing an elf or half elf for that matter makes a lot of sense but yeah all these characters here are either free because they're in the basic rules or they were once free because the ganasi Goliath and eraka were all originally in The Elemental Evil players companion so it makes me think that those are all just really popular races because they've been around for so long and many people have them in their DNA beond account because they had them free at some point they didn't have to pay for them similarly the Asmar is actually published in the dungeon Masters Guide if I'm not mistaken I guess I'd have to double check that to be absolutely sure so I just found it funny that out of over 50 options for your character species slra the most popular ones on D Beyond are just the free ones or the ones where you get to make it up yourself it's just Homebrew I think that's pretty cool and now to rag on whoever made this graph for a second yes it looks pretty I think what they were trying to do was get all the names in the bars and it looks good but as someone with a background in The Sciences my jaw dropped when I saw The Butchery of this scale and maybe no one else will care about this but check it out we increased by 20,000 20,000 20,000 20,000 20,000 jump up to increasing by 100,000 from 100 to 200k and then our scale changes again going up 300,000 from 2 to 500k and then we Inc change our scale a third time increasing by 200,000 to go from 5 to 700k so like probably no one cares about that but here's what the data actually looks like okay with a linear scale we can really get the sense that wow people are just playing humans and elves and to do the math it came out to right about 50% of all characters based on this data are either human Elf or dragon born so with around 50 plus raises available people are really sticking to human elf and then dragons which is cool for fantasy and then we can look at the similar data from laran Studios for balers G three where first of all great job on the scale guys increasing linearly by 100,000 our most popular options are half elf human and elf so pretty much the same right and then actually followed by dragon born and teling but the shocking part is that hey you know our our magnitude of uh characters here is actually pretty similar around you know several hundred thousand each but this data from balers Gate 3 is just from the opening weekend there were 1.7 million characters made and if we compare that to D and D beyond all year around 3.2 million characters made so just putting that in perspective in about 2 3 days I don't know how you measure an opening weekend let's say three days even Friday Saturday Sunday 1.7 million made versus 365 days for DND D Beyond 3.2 million made that's wild and it actually just gets even more blown through the roof when we look at all year in heavy air quotes there for balers Gate 3 being only about 4 months from August to December 31.3 million characters made what the heck so you got to wonder if we added together all of DnD Beyond 5e characters made all of R 20 5e characters made all of Foundry characters made Actually I don't even know does foundry have a character creator as well as a map I'm not sure and all of the analog D and D characters made and if say just 5e characters made in 2023 would there be 31 million I really don't know I imagine that there are like a vast silent majority of analog players out there and then like d and Beyond really represents kind of a small cohort of the DND like the modern D and D Community but this is just nuts 31 million definitely let me know what you think down in the comments but let's jump to the D andd Beyond classes uh and for this one you know we can actually look at the D andb on graph because even though the scale is still butchered increasing from like 20 20 20 and then up by 10 up by 10,000 again and then up by 100,000 and then up by 100,000 again pretty much all the data lies between and I guess 400,000 uh characters made the only reason I think that they included this finer scale at all was to show the artificer but if we look at like the real distribution here of course we see that it is still relatively level except the artificers really unpopular but again it's a character you got to pay for so it kind of makes sense and it's just interesting to see that the fighter is still the most popular option so the average character on D and D Beyond is a human fighter named Bob like who's spamming all these characters on DNA beond dude and these numbers are really different from the classes on uh balers Gate 3 so we'll take a quick look at this we got fighter Rogue Barbarian the cool fighter right wizard Paladin a fighter who could who's also a wizard jumping into balers Gate 3 opening weekend Paladin the most popular class and then sorcerer which was if we look the third least popular class in D and D Beyond is the second most popular one on balers Gate 3 and I don't think this moved much to the 4month data set yeah Paladin sorcerer okay fighter did become more popular for balers Gate 3 over the course of the year uh but in both cases cleric stayed at the very end I guess in the video gaming Community uh playing the healer is still the least popular option now jumping back to what I found to be the most interesting part of the D and Beyond data they have this whole section with numbers from the mobile app 13 million searches on the mobile app 7 million spells cast through the mobile app and here's the crazy part 1.9 million players rolled dice to me that means there are approximately 1.9 million active players using the D andb on mobile app but suspiciously there were 6 million new characters created on the D and dbond mobile app when we only had about 3 million characters created on D and D Beyond but we can see down in the text here finally 6 million new characters were brought to life from the app whether by creating a custom character that's what all that other data was or rolling up a pre-made character but we know that there's only around 2 million players actively using the app so like they each made three characters I'm like over the course of the Year this is just where it gets really muddy and like I said we don't have like a number of players using D and D Beyond as a whole and actually I wonder if I can find how many players how many people bought balers Gate 3 so according to do esports.com which has like the most ads I've ever seen on a website approximately 21 million copies of balers Gate 3 have been sold just on Steam versus 1.9 million people rolling dice on the DND Beyond app so yeah I'd love to hear what you think about this in the comments but it seems like even far more than I thought balers Gate 3 has truly outshined at least the digital player base of DnD so if you found this interesting please remember to give the video a thumbs up consider subscribing to see more and consider joining 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Channel: Bob World Builder

Views: 245,455

Keywords: d&d, d&d 5e, how to play d&d, d&d player guide, dungeons and dragons, bob world builder, dungeon master guide, dnd 5e, bob the world builder, baldurs gate, dnd beyond, d&d beyond

Id: 74pmKymKHhA

Length: 12min 13sec (733 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 14 2024