Recently I asked my players to fill out a survey in order to better understand their likes and plan my future game(s). After some consideration I felt it fair to provide my own thoughts which I will attempt to keep brief. My survey is is based in part on the article “Getting Feedback from your Players“

1. General Refresher
   1. On a scale of 1-5, please rate your level of enjoyment for the following Pillars of D&D.
   2. On a scale of 1-5, please rate your level of enjoyment for the following common elements of a D&D Session.
   3. I enjoy the following styles of adventure (check all that apply).
   4. I enjoy the following styles of play (check all that apply).
   5. Side quests are…
   6. When it comes to character-driven quests for other player characters and their backstories, I…
   7. Please rate campaign lengths from 1 to 5
   8. Please rate geographic focus from 1-5
2. Setting
   1. Rate the following types of setting 1-5
   2. Rate the following published D&D settings (skip the ones you don’t know)
   3. When starting a new campaign in a new setting you may receive a setting guide. If you received such a document…
   4. A setting guide should contain the following information
3. Character Creation and Motivation
   1. Character Creation
   2. Starting Level
   3. If you answered “I’d prefer to continue the adventures of a previous character,” name the character(s).
   4. Ability Score Generation
   5. I select race because…
   6. New characters sometimes have backstories
   7. New characters may start with connections to the setting
   8. As my character develops I like to
   9. As a player I like to
4. Final Thoughts

General Refresher

On a scale of 1-5, please rate your level of enjoyment for the following Pillars of D&D.

Combat: I strongly prefer the faster combat of TSR era D&D to the more involved combat of WOTC era D&D.

Exploration: I like this but I’m dissatisfied with the the various digital map sharing options we’ve used so far.

Role-Play: I really enjoy this but often wonder if I’m creating compelling enough NPCs.

On a scale of 1-5, please rate your level of enjoyment for the following common elements of a D&D Session.

Travel: Typically this comes down to narration and rolls for random encounters which I don’t think is great. I’m working toward making this either narration or an adventure as the story requires.

Puzzles: I consider myself horrible at designing puzzles but there are resources to help me.

Dialogue: I do nearly all NPC dialog extemporaneously since I never know what the players will ask. This may or may not be effective.

Villainous Monologues: I don’t do much of this but I think I’m missing an opportunity to reveal more about each villain’s nature.

Humor: It seems to me this emerges naturally in games so I don’t feel much of a need to focus on it.

Seriousness: I would like to see more serious moments in my games.

Music: I don’t do this at all but time permitting I’d love to.

Props & Deliverables: The digital game is lacking handouts partially due to the increased difficulty of producing them and partially because no one knows how to find them in Fantasy Grounds after they’re closed. I have dreams of mailing you all packets with sealed envelopes to be opened when certain conditions are met. Don’t hold your collective breath.

I enjoy the following styles of adventure (check all that apply).

Dungeon Crawl: I’ve seen this style of game devolve into room-by-room murder-hoboing so often that I tend to strongly dislike dungeon crawls. I acknowledge with the correct set of conditions they can be quite good adventures.

High Fantasy: I have some real feelings about this one so strap in.

These are my concerns in no particular order:

1. If the game world is filled with people roughly analogous to medieval people then the mere sight of a monstrous PC (i.e. Tiefling) should cause the torches to be lit and the pitchforks to be gathered.
2. The players want magic shops so they can trade in the magic items they found for the magic items they want.
   1. This removes the need for players to use found items creatively.
   2. This defeats the DM seeding loot with items that will be useful in the future.
3. The players like being powerful but they’re less than thrilled that the world around them is commensurately more powerful.
4. The players like being powerful but the world around them stays constrained removing the challenge and therefore fun from the game.
5. The players want some other rules restriction lifted (i.e. class and level limits) in order to realize a personal concept without care for its impact on setting which the DM may hold as precious.

It may also be that some set of rules does high-fantasy better than some other set of rules. For instance TSR era D&D places restictions on elves and dwarves because they start with special “powers” like infravsion where WOTC era D&D removes those restrictions and gives humans special starting “powers” as well. While I think the “anyone can be anything” philosophy contributes to the utter blandness of WOTC era D&D I can’t deny that it makes for better “high-fantasy.”

Ultimately I don’t dislike high-fantasy, but I’d want to run it in setting in which I think it would work well (Spelljammer or Planescape) and with the understanding that some amount of unconstrained monster customization would be necessary.

Heist: I’m not sure how to pull this off well but I’m very interested in trying. I’m concerned there’s a diminishing return on heist adventures since high level magic may make a heist impossible to foil or make the players so immune to the consequences of just blowing things up that all pretense of stealth would fall by the wayside.

Horror: I don’t think D&D does horror well since everything has a sack of hit points that can be depleted. Additionally players tend to dislike dealing with with monsters before they have the right tools (magic weapons) to deplete said hit points. There are good and bad options for adding sanity/fear to the game but in my experience players also tend to highly dislike the loss of control these systems imply. A game system built around horror would probably be superior.

Intrigue: I have much the same feelings here as in heist. I’d love to try but at some point magic may make the motives of rivals and enemies too apparent.

Low Magic: Love it.

Mystery & Investigation: Same really as Intrigue and Heist.

Urban: This is something I’d like to try, but I’m concerned with the possible constant need for consequences. Considering the risk a fireball poses to the continued existence of a city built mostly of timber and the fondness of players for launching them there may just be an insurmountable conflict.

Planar: I’m not really thrilled with the great wheel cosmology and I think most planes should be baseline hostile to mortal existence. I think forays here should be rare, high-risk and only available to high-level characters.

I enjoy the following styles of play (check all that apply).

Comedic: I like laughter and silly NPCs.

Gritty Realism: I think in small doses this is good.

Hack and Slash: Small doses. Sometimes I get bored running combats.

Heavy Social Interaction: Love it.

Resource Management: This is rules dependent to me. If you want to delve into dungeons then you need to manage your light and food. If you want to gain XP for treasure then you need to manage the weight you carry.

Side quests are…

I like providing side-quests as both a temptation and break from the main quest line.

When it comes to character-driven quests for other player characters and their backstories, I…

I’d love to run character driven quests, but I feel these fit far better in a long term campaign where there’s time for each interested player to have their moment.

Please rate campaign lengths from 1 to 5

A long term campaign 100+ sessions: I have ideas here and would love to run one but perhaps not the next game.

A series of episodic adventures… This would also be a lot of fun. There’s a stack of TSR adventures and some third party that I’d love to run.

A series of short games … I’d prefer to save this style of game for testing other game systems.

Please rate geographic focus from 1-5

For me this comes down on campaign length. If running a long term campaign it would start in a small to large geographic area and at some point grow beyond that. If running a series of episodic adventures it would tend to be globe-spanning due simply to the fact that the first adventure might be a heist in the city followed by an adventure where the players are pirates which in turn could be followed by an adventure in a tropical forest and so on.

Setting

Rate the following types of setting 1-5

Standard Fantasy: One of these might be my forever setting.

Fairy tale, Apocalyptic, Fantastic: I’d run a game here, but it probably wouldn’t be my “forever” setting.

Honestly I’d probably prefer a home brew setting based in Standard Fantasy with influences from the other types.

Rate the following published D&D settings (skip the ones you don’t know)

Greyhawk: Classic D&D. It has a lot of published adventures from TSR and Living Greyhawk plus other great fan resources.

Dragonlance: The published adventures are infamously a rail-road, I’ve got no interest in listening to players complain about the phase of the moon and I dislike minotours as a playable race.

Forgotten Realms: I like the Realms circa the gray box/Forgotten Realms Adventures.

Birthright: I’ve yet to meet a party full of people that want that much domain level play but there’s large potential to enhance other games with its ideas.

Council of Wyrms: I just really don’t like monster races.

Dark Sun: I want to love it but I’ve always considered it a bit of a one-trick pony. I wouldn’t mind running it for a medium length campaign or incorporating ideas from it into another campaign.

Planescape: Generally speaking I think the planes should be far more distant and dangerous than they are in standard D&D. This setting makes them far too familiar.

SpellJammer: Strongly mixed feelings. I don’t love the mixing of sci-fi and fantasy, but there are elements of this setting I’d love to re-use.

Kara-Tur: I’ve just always loved this possibly because I was denied by my players for so long.

Ravenloft: See above comments about horror.

When starting a new campaign in a new setting you may receive a setting guide. If you received such a document…

This tied to campaign length. For a long term campaign it’s likely I’d provide a pretty long document of perhaps 10+ pages. For any other game I’d think a single page to set the tone would be proper.

A setting guide should contain the following information

I asked this question merely to help me tailor setting docs to my players.

Character Creation and Motivation

Character Creation

As DM, I’m a bit indifferent here this question is more about serving my people.

Starting Level

Also somewhat indifferent but I’d be more inclined to start a group at level 1 for a long term campaign and less so in other situations.

If you answered “I’d prefer to continue the adventures of a previous character,” name the character(s).

This question was merely to gauge whether I should write a part 2 to a previous game or plan a new one.

Ability Score Generation

I tend to prefer some level of randomization for the players. We used Method 6 in Jeff’s game and I liked that result.

I select race because…

I’ve come to dislike non-human D&D races over the years because they represent a package of mechanical advantages but play like pointy-eared humans. Alas, I will likely be forever outvoted on this one.

New characters sometimes have backstories

I think DM provided hooks are a good idea since it enables the characters to start with some connection to the setting.

New characters may start with connections to the setting

I didn’t like how “active quest giving patrons” turned out in our Nentir Vale campaign because they became too heavily relied upon which is in part why I started killing them off. I think in the future a pool of sometimes helpful patrons or organizations that provide more open-ended goals could work better.

As my character develops I like to

Another question asked merely to help me tailor games to my players.

As a player I like to

Another question asked merely to help me tailor games to my players.

Final Thoughts

When I run in-person games I have the ability to observe the full-range of body language of my players and the luxury of hanging out afterward to discuss the session. I underestimated the amount of helpful indirect feedback I gathered from that until I started running games completely online. When your faces are tiny, and I can observe a secondary source of distraction (football, baseball and etc.) going on in the background that feedback is harder to come by.

My primary satisfaction comes from engaging the players. Feedback that lets me know what’s working is very helpful.