TidyTuesday Week 21: Dungeons and Dragons Monsters (2024)

This week we’re exploring monsters from the Dungeons & Dragons System Reference Document! After the popularity of our Dungeons and Dragons Spells (2024), we thought it might be fun to explore the freely available monsters from the 2024 update.

1. Python code

import pandas as pd
import plotly.express as px
import numpy as np
import pyarrow as pa

# Load dataset
monsters = pd.read_csv('https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rfordatascience/tidytuesday/main/data/2025/2025-05-27/monsters.csv')

monsters["Intelligence"] = monsters["int"] + monsters["cha"] + monsters["wis"]

# Convert to Pandas DataFrame for Plotly
top10 = monsters.sort_values(by="Intelligence", ascending=False).head(10)
top10 = top10[["name", "category", "str", "int", "hp_number", "Intelligence"]]

top10["label"] = top10["name"]

# Create bar chart with dark theme
fig = px.bar(
    top10,
    x="Intelligence",
    y="category",
    color="category",
    orientation="h",
    text="Intelligence",
    title="Top D&D Monsters by Intelligence Score",
    subtitle="Intelligence Score is a summation of Charisma, Intelligence, and Wisdom",  # Note the comma at the end
    labels={"Intelligence": "Intelligence Score", "label": "Monster (Type)"},
    template="plotly_dark"
)

# Remove legend and update trace details
fig.update_layout(
    showlegend=False,
    font=dict(
        family="Noto Mono",
        size=14,
        color="black"  # switched to black to contrast with a light background
    ),
    paper_bgcolor="#FFFBF0",  # overall page background
    plot_bgcolor="#FFFBF0"    # plotting area background
)
fig.update_traces(textposition="outside", textfont_size=14)
fig.update_xaxes(showgrid=False)
fig.update_yaxes(showgrid=False)

fig.show()