Yesterday there was an interesting YouTube video by the Roll for Crit folks looking at a recent post on the interweb looking at D&D Beyond stats showing hardly anyone played the higher character levels (original D&D graphic below).

Note from D&D Beyond on above chart: “Campaign Character Level Spread – Lower level characters are most popular. Adam did note that there are 16th – 19th level characters in campaigns, but the percentage is so low that it rounds up to 0%.”

The Roll for Crit video was interesting in the discussion about the various reasons. However I felt they missed out a couple of points.

As pointed out in the video D&D Beyond is a small subset of those that actually play D&D. However it’s a smaller subset still if you consider that some of it’s user base will only be using it as a digital reference and not actually running their campaigns with it. I’m using it for instance to get access to the “free” D&D Essentials adventure resources.

I’d also love to see stats from similar online services like Roll20 to see if the trend continues on those platforms also. That would widen the sample size naturally. But still only be a subset of the total number of people that play D&D.

The big question for me is how representative is this data of the wider D&D audience? Something I’m not sure we will ever know. But from antidotal accounts, surveys and observations from cons etc we could draw an approximation to how representative this data is.

So for the time being, because there is no evidence to the contrary, that what we are seeing on D&D Beyond is a fair representation of the wider D&D playing audience.

With that assumption in mind. I’m going to make another assumption now. I have no data to back this up. I’m not even sure it exists either. But there will be a large number of people playing D&D on D&D Beyond and the wider community that the only adventures and campaigns that they play are the officially released ones. Like Ghosts of Saltmarsh, Tomb of Annihilation, Tyranny of Dragons etc. etc. Or even the Adventures League stuff.

Which brings me to my second point. These official campaign books finish around that level 10/11 mark if I remember correctly. Definitely at that lower end of tier 3. And that’s assuming that the gaming group make it that far. These official campaign books can (depending on the frequency of the groups sessions) be a year or more of playing. Which means that a lot of the points made by the Roll for Crit folks come in, like life events getting in the way.

Plus when a new campaign book gets released some players like to jump in and play the new stuff. Which means that the “old” campaign gets shoved to one side.

Each time a group starts one of these official campaigns they roll new characters to play. Which is natural because the campaigns start at tier 1. But also because the players will want to use any campaign specific class/race options that are introduced.

Unless WotC do some sort of survey about this and share the results (which on the MtG side they don’t usually do, we never see the results of the player surveys they do on a regular basis), we won’t know what the reasons are. I suspect it will be a combination of the points I’ve mentioned and those mentioned in the video. Plus others we haven’t even thought of.

Finally as part of the discussion on levelling up that was raised within the video they mentioned the classic XP and milestone methods that are in the players guide and DM guide. However they forgot about the checkpoint method as detailed in the appendix on shared campaigns in Xanathar’s Guide. Which is the system I prefer.

The Roll for Crit video can be viewed here.

EnWorld post that sparked this all off here.

D&D Beyond here.