D&D: Everyone’s Into Leather – Most Popular Weapons, Armor, And Items
Apparently the playerbase of D&D is wearing enough fantasy leather goods for four different renaissance festivals, or costume one modern “historic drama.”
If you ever find yourself magically transported to one of the myriad worlds of Dungeons & Dragons, possibly because you fell into a magical vortex behind a Burger King, or you rolled a natural 20 while getting struck by lightning, or you’re the protagonist in an Isekai series and you’re only just now beginning to suspect that thanks to your lack of attachments or meaningful contribution to society–then forget adventuring. If you want to be rich, all you have to do is get into the leather business.
And if you really want to make a fortune, corner the market on low-level weapons too. Because according to data gathered by D&D beyond, taken from more than 25,000,000 characters, if you can supply leather armor and shields you’ll be selling the most popular items, by a long shot. And if you think about it, this tracks with the fan art.
Whether it’s long, impressive-but-implausible coats or revealing but tastefully sexy suits of “armor” leather is one of the more common themes you’ll see. And as we’ll see today looking at the numbers, Leather Armor is top of the list of equipped armor.
And then a close-ish second is a shield. Then it’s Chain Mail, Studded Leather, Scale Mail and then everything else drops off. About a third of all characters wear leather armor though, and that’s staggering. That accounts for rogues, warlocks, bards, clerics who don’t have medium or heavy armor proficiency, druids, rangers who don’t go for heavy armor, and probably a fair number of Fighters–though they are probably propping up the Chain Mail market.
Of course all of this is because most characters are low-level and unlikely to afford more expensive armor like Plate or a Chain Shirt. The same goes for the most popular weapons:
Daggers blow everyone else out of the water. One in five people you meet in the fantasy world has a dagger hidden somewhere about their person at all times. The other four? They need to buy a dagger. So start raising fantasy cattle (aurochs or rothe maybe) and finding cheap sources of iron so you can forge your merchant kingdom.
Not far behind is the humble Shortsword, which is basically a longer dagger, but let’s talk about what’s in third. The Handaxe–this is an unusual one, and I’m betting has a lot to do with starting equipment. But you can throw it, it deals decent damage, it’s a great backup ranged weapon, as is the Light Crossbow. And a rapier–this trend seems to suggest a higher number of dexterity-focused characters than you’d think. The Longsword doesn’t even make the top 5, and for all that people love great weapon mastery you don’t see a single two-handed weapon until the Greataxe, which oustrips the Greatsword by a lot–and for folks who love polearm mastery–Glaives barely make the list.
Now let’s look at magic items.
It’s not surprising to me that a Bag of Holding tops the charts. This is the single most useful item in the game–it lets you do away with inventory and encumbrance, basically. I mean, sure, eventually you have to wonder about it, but it does go to show that everyone hates tracking weight carried or dealing with the busy work of looting a dungeon in multiple trips.
I am surprised to see Rings and Cloaks of Protection so high up–there’s a lot of +1 stuff up here, and especially considering that almost nobody has a longsword, there’s a surprising number of +1 swords. Hope everyone’s making them memorable.
I think a great takeaway from this is, if you want your adventure to stand out, hand out a magic item that isn’t on this list and you’ll find the players getting resourceful.
What does this data tell you? Does it track with how YOUR character is equipped? Let us know in the comments, and happy adventuring!
