100,000 Spellbook Adds: A 5e Spell Popularity Breakdown

I hit a fun milestone recently: you've all added 100,000 spells to your spellbooks.

You've actually added a ton more, but I threw away the first 50,000 or so adds because that was back before I attempted to fingerprint the classes you're rolling with. Since then, I attempt to figure out what class your spellbook is whenever you add a spell, so I get a sense of how often the classes are chosen, to get a sense of how available spells are based by the classes that have access to it and its level. That data is then used to find out how appealing a spell is.

It's not a perfect process as there's a ton of ways players can get their hands on spells that aren't their class, but it still offers useful insight. You can read more about this done.

So how did I want to celebrate this milestone? I made some graphs!

Adds vs. Availabilty

This graph is spell adds vs. the spell's availability. In otherwords, the appeal of a spell.

Spells further to the upper left are the most appealing spell picks for players, to the lower right, the least appealing. Detect Magic is the most available spell in the game. It's Level 1, and all classes have access to it. But it's not the most popular, which is Cure Wounds, the most added spell in 5e.

Unfortunately as you can see, this graph isn't terribly useful.

The spells added the most in the game are also generally the most available, so the adds of lower level spells dominate the graph, and the majority of spells are tucked away in the lower left corner. The spell actually most appealing to players over the first 100,000 adds is Eldritch Blast, but because it's limited to just one class, is already a fraction of the availability of Detect Magic.

But I decided to show this graph any way, as it reflects the raw data of the game, and just how special it is when someone gets to cast Wish.

Appeal vs. Availability

Now this is the graph I wanted to make.

It compares each spell's relative appeal vs. how available it is in the game. I also use logarithmic scales, so that higher level spells that are exponentially rarer in the game aren't completely hidden away, but reflected more uniformly with each quadrant in the graph having similar density.

• The upper right corner is where the most available, most appealing spells are: these are iconic spells in the game, highly loved and frequently seen in play.

• The upper left feature similarly appealing spells, but they become substantially less available to characters. Either unique to a single class, and/or much higher in level where they're harder to access: these are the rarest and most sought after spells.

• The lower left corner is where spells are the least picked and the least available: the most unknown, unseen spells in 5e.

• Finally the lower right corner features the most available spells in the game that are seldom picked: these are the spells players frequently ignore and pass over when building their characters.

Type in some spells in the search and see how the community here uses that spell.

Thank you!

I'll always be a D&D player, but I also continue to have fun building out 5e Spellbook Builder. Analyzing spell popularity like this has been a neat and uniquely geeky D&D project to work on.

As always, I hope you enjoy, and please share it if you are!