Player Stats for AideDD Character Builder 2020-2021

AideDD published their Character Builder stats and there are some really interesting trends in those 27k users. I recorded the same data reported in 2020 so let us look at what happened in the past year.

Overall it looks broadly similar to what they had in 2020, consistency in classes choice is coherent with what we have seen elsewhere - general player population is not bouncing around between classes. We have more artificers since that was added later.

Checking against the patterns for apps or forums, we see it maps solidly onto the Apps archetype - favouring fighters and rogues. This is the same pattern seen on D&D Beyond and the OGANM character builder tool. It repeats the pattern we see of character building tools with large user bases showing a different preference for classes than forum surveys. I read this as another point confirming that the general player base (as seen on this tool) has different preferences to those who frequent online forums.

Taking this to mean we can class those respondents with other tools we can look at the levels of characters in the tool. This is interesting because it gives us another look at the D&D Beyond levels trend from a peer perspective. Other level trends we have to hand are all from forums, a slightly different crowd. We see the same 1-3-5 bumps as elsewhere corresponding to the common starting points.

Aggregating that with other apps (D&D Beyond, Oganm) and comparing with various forum surveys we see a distinct difference. There are more low tier characters appearing in the tools with play concentrating in Tier I.

I have yet to pull the race survey data apart but Human, Elf, Dwarf, Half-elf as the top 4 is consistent with what we have seen elsewhere as the top choices.

Very interesting is the huge variation in alignment choices - a massive swing to True Neutral compared to any other source. Is this a default that people are not adjusting? Is this an indicator of a very different take on alignment in francophone gaming?

In any case, it is always great to see data from actively used tools within the hobby to try and understand how people are playing and give some facts to underpin the mountains of anecdotes. Kudos to AideDND!