Class / Race choices from 4 months of Baldurs Gate 3 vs tabletop 5e

Larian Studios, makers of Baldurs Gate 3, released an update to their player stats after four months of play including class and race choices of the players. They let us see these immediately after launch and they looked different to the typical tabletop choices despite being a pretty faithful implementation of the 5e ruleset. There were a bunch of theories kicked around at the time, in the comments here and elsewhere that boiled down to a strong hypothesis that people were running charisma-focussed characters since mechanically driven social interaction is much more important in a computer game than at the tabletop.

So here is the rerun of that number crunching - with the launch weekend and 4 month stats.

On class the broad patterns stay the same - way off what the tabletop surveys show but with fighter, rogue and barbarian climbing the leaderboard as paladin, warlock, monk and ranger drop. Clerics also became more popular though still standing last.

The classes that rise seem to match to the pre-gen characters in the game - fighter, rogue, barbarian, warlock, wizard and cleric - but existing as pre-gen still does not overcome the preference for Paladins apparently. Clerics being so unpopular is interesting - is it driven mechanically (easier access to potions based healing in BG3, since potion drinking is a bonus action?) or from a party dynamics perspective (at tabletop, if you want a cleric someone has to play it, but really noone would prefer to?).

Response on Race also shows some shifts - elves, tieflings and githyanki getting more popular, dragonborn dropping off significantly, half-orcs by a bit. Humans, dwarfs, gnomes and halflings remain way down compared to tabletop.

As noted before Githyanki and Drow are unusual options in BG3 that are otherwise very rare / not available in the base 5e rules, boosted here I guess by being included in the relatively limited options.

The fact that githyanki became less popular is counter to the thought that people just played more of the pre-gens since those are githyanki fighter, elf rogue, tiefling barbarian, human warlock, human wizard and elf cleric. If it was just 'play more pre-gens we would expect humans, elves, tieflings and githyanki to have risen in line with the class bumps - but we do not see this. Elf and tiefling rises a little but not human or githyanki. No idea why people took against dragonborn.

As before, take any reading into this with a big pinch of salt, different medium, almost certainly different target audience, etc. etc. We can have a bit more confidence in these numbers as they now reflect millions of generated characters over four months of intense play - Baldurs Gate 3 remaining a top played game on Steam - so this clear preference for classes that is very different to what we have seen for tabletop looks like a real thing.

See Class/Race archetypes in 1.2 million D&DBeyond characters and Player Class Stability from 1M D&D Beyond Sheets for more detail on the tabletop sets and sources.