By day I am a humble database consultant, but by (Wednesday) night I am Van Steelstring: bard, swordsman, spell slinger.
Yes, I am one of large and growing number of nerds playing the fifth edition of Dungeons and Dragons (D&D).
For the uninitiated, D&D is table-top role-playing game:
Table-top meaning it is played in person with pen, paper and (optionally) miniatures, typically round a table, and role-playing meaning that the game involves assuming a role i.e. pretending to be a character.
The game is essentially an act of collective storytelling, with dice & game mechanics to add challenges and random elements. It is played with several players acting as a group of fantasy heroes (wizards, knights, ninjas etc) and one acting as a referee/ storyteller, referred to as the Dungeon Master or DM.
At its core the game is quite simple, you have a character sheet that details the kind of skills your character has, and gameplay typically proceeds like this:
- The DM describes a situation you find yourself in e.g. trapped in a prison, investigating a murder, fighting some goblins etc.
- You decide how your character would act in this situation, and which of their abilities they might use to try and resolve the situation or move the story forward. e.g. ‘I try to scale the wall’, ‘I cast sleep on the guards’, ‘I tell the witness I think he’s lying’.
- A 20 sided die is rolled to determine how lucky you have been in attempting to enact your plan, and you add any relevant bonuses to your roll depending on how skilled your character is at that kind of activity.
- The DM tells you whether you were successful, and describes what happens as a consequence of your actions.
- Rinse and repeat.
So, now we are all familiar with the game, let’s talk numbers.
As I take pains to point out: I’m not weird FOR playing D&D: it’s a massively popular hobby right now (in part because of the influence of the show Stranger Things and also popular D&D podcasts), and is played by more people from more diverse backgrounds than you would expect: what do you think Moby from REM, Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Jonson and Dame Judi Dench have in common? That’s right, they roll dice.
But am I weird because of the WAY I play D&D?
It’s possible. Let’s look at the data. Good old GitHub has my back here: user oganm has gathered data from over 800 player-made character sheets, which I can use to compare my character to others.
Van Steelstring is a half-elf, having one elf parent and one human. I can see that of this sample, 54 out of 887 adventurers are also half-elfs (half-elves? Half-elven?): already I only have this in common with 6.1% of other players. However there are many playable races in D&D, and the most popular (boring old human) makes up only 22.4% of players. Half-elf is the third most popular choice (after elves in 2nd), making me hardly unusual in my choice to have pointy ears.
Next comes class, and (for once) I’m not talking about socio-economic divisions propagated by ownership of the means of production here. Your class in D&D describes your character in terms of their role as an adventurer, and the source of their power. For example a barbarian draws their power from their physical strength and their berserker fury, a monk (think shaolin, not Cadfael) from their agility and martial prowess, and a wizard from their willpower and knowledge of spells. My character is a bard: a traveling performer who augments his skill with a rapier with the latent magic contained in speech and music.
In this regard, it appears I am quite unusual: of the twelve official D&D classes, bard comes in dead last, with only 6.4% of players choosing it, even being beaten by the druid (a.k.a. magical hippy) on 6.8%! That stings. No love for music, fellow nerds? I suppose in a world of danger and barbarism it is a rare thing to be a patron of the arts and a person of culture. I hope Moby picked bard at least.
My weapon of choice, the rapier, is a relatively popular choice, being well suited to those who prefer to fight with finesse and precision as opposed to brute strength. 114 or 12.8% of our sample picked the rapier out of the wide array of sharp, blunt or pointy instruments of death available in D&D, proving I’m not the only fan of The Princess Bride among the player base.
I could go on, breaking down my choice of spells, skills and attributes, but I have realised something whilst looking at this data set. Even if another players character turned up here who was also a rapier-wielding half-elf bard with the same skills and spells, Van is still unique. I have imagined an entire backstory for my character (he was thrown out of court for performing a rude song with his band The Sex Crossbows), taken him on adventures, got to know his companions, even worried for his safety. None of that can be recorded as discrete data points and compared to others. This is more than just something that makes D&D special, it is something worth remembering about the real and digital worlds as well as fantasy ones: we are more than the sum of our data.
Written By: Laurence Glover