D&D: What’s Your Dump Stat – Barbarian Edition
Barbarians are brawny, not brainy–or are they? Where are people *really* putting their stats? Come and find out in this edition of Dungeons & Data.
Stats are one of the corest of the core mechanics for D&D. They have been since the early days before first edition, where if you had a high enough score, you’d get some sort of ongoing benefit for being smarter or stronger than anyone else. Especially strength–this was the time when having an 18 was not enough. You’d have to roll a percentile dice and see if you could get the coveted 18/00 with its swanky bonuses to bend bards and/or lift gates. But equally as core, is the idea of a “dump stat”, a catchall term for whatever stat people assign their lowest score.
In 5th Edition, figuring out your stats is especially important, as players are softly encouraged to boost their primary stat (or two, or three, depending on what you’re playing) to the maximum allowed. In a game where every addition plus matters, getting to add +5 vs +3 can make a huge difference. But, when so many people play with the pre-generated array of 15, 14, 13, 12, 10, 08, there’s just gotta be a spot where most people put that 8. The folks at D&D Beyond have taken a look at just where players are putting their stats, high and low, and boy oh boy does that chart answer a lot of questions.
via D&D Beyond
Looking at this information is intriguing. You can get a sense for so many different kinds of characters–from the weights on particular scores (no stat lower than 8 or higher than 15 is the most popular stat for any class) we can tell that most people are playing with the standard stat array out there. So more people are playing with point buy–and point by spread out–than anything else.
But then there’s also this amazing distribution of stats. Obviously, strength is the most important stat, and it’s the one that’s singlehandedly maxed out more than any other stat–again confirming that most players will pick whichever stat is relevant to them, max it out, and move on, rather than the whimsical conversations of “what if I played a barbarian with a high intelligence,” for instance.
But once you get past strength it’s a little more interesting in how it’s distributed. Wisdom and dexterity are next on the list, which I suppose makes sense if you’re playing a combat focused character–like the barbarian, who aren’t known for their rousing speechcraft, but by the humble way they swing around d12s for damage. As a result, the physical stats are the highest…and that intelligence is the score getting the shortest end of the stick here.
Dexterity and constitution are pretty much next in line, while the mental stats bring up the rear. Though it seems like more and more people have realized that charisma is a popular dump stat, judging by how many players put their Barbarians at 10 or 8. Either way, that’s how Barbarians are made.
How do you build your barbarian? What stat is your highest? Your lowest? Tell us in the comments!
