D&D Sage Advice

we’ll move on into looking into some updates on data for races and classes so again it was April when we looked at this last hopefully this is going to be something that you can see I try to get as many of the names as I could in here so I know that that’s probably gonna be a little bit tiny you might need a full screen for just a second if you can’t see what’s going on here I’ll talk through this so I did this by sub race because people have really had a lot of questions about that part of it so we went ahead and went down to the lowest common denominator that we could there and so we’ve got humans and variant humans are very very popular and surprisingly the normal human amongst active characters is still the most chosen barely so there have to be some games out there I imagine that do not allow feats for instance or whatever but humans either way you slice it are taking up 22% of the distribution going on with races themselves so people like to play humans this is always and forever been the case and the 40 plus years of Dungeons and Dragons it is something that people can relate to and you know it makes sense to me that you might want to minimize the variables as you’re doing a game like Dungeons & Dragons so maybe it’s already fantastical enough that you can be a paladin that can smite her enemies with divine might maybe that’s fantastical enough and you don’t also have to be a bugbear on top of that so humans always the most played all of that so um let’s see half-elf is next highest tiefling Dragonborn and then we start getting into a couple of the elves so we have wood elves and high elf so what elves are played more than High Elves half-orc there’s one of my favorites right there representing goliaths mountain dwarves are in their lightfoot halflings squeeze in between the other hill dwarf we’ve got awesome are in here the variant awesome are that could be somewhat based on availability because the Dungeon Master’s guide of course has made that available since the beginning are a Kokura the Lateran variant that’s also available in the Dungeon Master’s guide and then Rock gnome changeling here is the first of the ever on races representing here so changelings have become very popular a lot of these other races are you know hovering around like that point eight percentage so we’re cutting off a deep gnome here but a lot of the other races start to flatten out at that point time so this is where we find ourselves currently with active played characters and again the way that we try to figure that out is you know have hit points been adjusted have they had level up after the initial creation so somebody might go create a level 15 character and then they might level that up to 16 and 17 at some point in the future but we anticipate and hypothesize the amount of people that do that are relatively small it is more likely that someone that is just theory crafting is going to go you know and just make a level 20 character or whatever so this is not going to ever be foolproof it’s a lot better than we’ve had you know in the indie game in previous editions but it’s not gonna be foolproof so I know that we’ve got a lot of statisticians out there that are raising their glasses and are gonna want to dig in on this we’re never going to be able to get it to we can make you know 100% firm conclusions but this is you know quite a bit better than we’ve been able to have in the past and a peek into what is popular what are people playing so this is sub-races class distribution so as always the fighter is there interestingly enough the last time that we looked at this I was very surprised that the warlock had crept up into the fourth place role here above the wizard so and that would be the first time that that had ever really happened because in the game if you guys know any of your D&D history we have always they might have been called something slightly different but we’ve always had a fighter rogue claret and wizard and so those are typically going to be the highest distribution we see that at this point in time with millions and millions of characters that has started to kind of you know return to normal here a little bit I think those warlocks got really really popular when Zanna thar’s guide to everything came out maybe because of a certain subclass so phyto rogue cleric wizard is what I would expect to see here Ranger is more has more popularity than I feel like a lot of people in the community feel like it should so draw your own conclusions from that barbarian warlock all these are very very close by the way the Ranger and the barbarian more or less at the same place Ranger barely edging it out warlock is barely behind those two so warlock you know in another couple of months some kind of new thing happens with warlocks might be back into a third or fourth spot but at this point time this is what we’re seeing with a very large sample size paladin bard sorcerer month druid so that’s what we see for classes so there’s a question kind of how many characters total in existence we’re somewhere like me look real quick actually we’ve hit nine million or not let’s see yeah eight point eight million is where we are right now so yeah eight point eight million characters lots and lots of characters alright so let’s look at subclass distribution so the top subclasses are the life domain lots of life domain clerics out there the draconic bloodline and the fiend and those are actually pretty strongly in the lead there so again you could infer a lot of things about this none of these inferences are going to be a hundred percent but you could say that life domain is a pretty strong build for a clarity it is really really strong you could say that it is freely available as per the SRD that absolutely could have something to do with this it you know it’s a little bit of a chicken and an egg thing maybe it’s available via the SRD or the basic rules because it’s so good so either way you can start to dig into a little bit of this and form some opinions draconic bloodline sorcerers even them being one of the least popular over all this bloodline is this ancestry is the second most popular subclass and so I might infer from that that you know if you’re going to play a sorcerer you should be Adric owned ik a brass draconic bloodline because they’re the best but the draconian bloodline is is a very strong subclass for sorceress as is the fiend you you can have your fancy hex blades but the fiend is still really really strong it’s got excellent spell selection and it’s got this whole Dark One’s blessing thing and then is there any other fourteenth level ability out there that is you know hurl through hell I don’t think anybody has anything like that so the fiend is a very strong subclass and so you see it well represented here as well the champion fighter a lot of people just really disagree with that but the champion fighter is very popular people find the passivity of that subclass very appealing and and those passives are pretty strong hunter thief college of lore it’s the only way to bard college of Lord path of the Berserker school of evocation so again here’s the hex blade so the hex blade when we looked at this I guess back in April I can’t remember if it was April or a little bit later than that for the subclasses but the last time we looked hex blade was the top played subclass that is no longer the case so we could potentially infer a little bit of flavor of the month or maybe people just really really wanted to try it out and then they resumed to their normal activities with their other characters so you know maybe deleted their hex blades so this is the data that we’re seeing for subclass distribution again not foolproof but it is fascinating to look at because this is a little bit more information than we’ve really ever had on this I hope you guys enjoyed that update on classes and races let’s see do we have any other questions Solo Gauss works would it ever be possible to see this same chart but with each segment being colored to see users with paid content for example of the 10% live clerics X percent of them are free users we could look at that I can tell you that we have internally looked at that and it doesn’t alter this dramatically really at all so for instance even if we put paid versus unpaid here life domain is still going to be hugely represented so but it is a very good question and it is something that we could potentially look at in the future doing just you know the paid thing we certainly would want to do that as a comparison because if we didn’t do it as a comparison I don’t think it would be giving the full picture enough but we could potentially show that as a comparison again either way life domains gonna be really really strong even for people that are paying for content murari 15 will we ever see charts like these with homebrew or with new books once they come out I’m not sure what you mean by the second part of the question you know new books once they come out because we do incorporate that and we do sometimes we have looked at for instance a few weeks ago we looked at which races were most popular

Hi @TheEdVerse. Is there any lore on Rymdyl you can share? Or is it NDA? #realmslore

— Artie Pavlov is vaccinating, and so should you! (@Artie_Pavlov) October 17, 2021

1)
See p84 of THE BORDER KINGDOMS, a canon-official hardcover Realms sourcebook by Alex Kammer and yours truly, available at the DM’s Guild.
Update: rival adventuring bands have recently settled there, and are digging everywhere for Rymdyl’s never-found treasure. 2)
One of the bands, Belard's Banners, say they read in an old tome in Derlusk that Rymdyl devised a magical means to hide her spellbooks INSIDE wands; they hope to find some of these.
When asked, Elminster said, "I was WONDERING when someone would remember that."#Realmslore

— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) October 17, 2021

Nice! was that particular piece of lore leftover from the old magazines era? Not "leftover" in terms of cutting-room-floor, no. Never put forward for publication. It's part of my ongoing "unfolding lore for NPCs because they're not static, they get up to as much as the PCs" DMing lore notes.
The Realms is ALIVE.#Realmslore

— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) October 17, 2021

D&D Sage Advice

Questions on Dungeons & Dragons answered by game designers

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Is there any lore on Rymdyl?

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