D&D 5E D&DN going down the wrong path for everyone.

[BriarMonkey]

For what it's worth, me and mine have almost always started all campaigns, regardless of edition, at 1st level. They run until they naturally concluded - which was almost always in the high teen levels, and on occasion even 20th or beyond.

 

[mudbunny]

I am lost here.

Could someone explain to me how this (seemingly pedantic) discussion on whether there were upper limits on play in early editions of D&D has anything remotely significant to do with the topic of the thread?

 

[Campbell]

The fact of the matter is, none of us have any accurate information that they can use to justify the argument so we are left looking straight at the book, which indicates that the game goes to 20 and beyond. This in turn makes my original statement stand because having access to 7th, 8th, and 9th level spells trump any bonus the elf is going to give.

We should not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Biased data is not completely useless. We need to be aware of the bias and avoid extrapolation to the greater population. We make due with the best data we have available. Sometimes the resources just are not available to conduct the simple random sample study we would prefer in a perfect world. That does not mean we should just throw our hands up and not try to collect the best data we can within our limited resources.

 

[Nemesis Destiny]

I am lost here.

Could someone explain to me how this (seemingly pedantic) discussion on whether there were upper limits on play in early editions of D&D has anything remotely significant to do with the topic of the thread?

The short answer is this: It doesn't have anything to do with the topic.

It's degenerated into a tribal edition-war-by-proxy. It looks to me like the same people taking sides against "the enemy" and what they represent. I think it's largely been precipitated, as is usual, by a few (of the same) posters nitpicking petty arguments apart on technicalities for no real purpose, other than the occasional cathartic, "I'm right and you're wrong. So, ha!" That I can only assume provides them with some kind of personal validation of their point of view on everything else.

Calls for a ceasefire and a return to the thread's topic have gone unheeded (as have "other" methods).

 

[billd91]

I am lost here.

Could someone explain to me how this (seemingly pedantic) discussion on whether there were upper limits on play in early editions of D&D has anything remotely significant to do with the topic of the thread?

It serves as an example of how far apart disparate fans of D&D really are. There are times on these board that I don't feel we're even speaking the same language.

 

[Mournblade94]

Here is the presentation of the data by Dancey. He describes the methodology:

Wizards of the Coast regularly surveys various aspects of the adventure gaming channel; distributors, retailers and consumers to better understand their preferences, concerns, and needs. . . The contents of this file are excerpts from those sources . . . The primary source is a market segmentation study conducted in the summer of 1999.​

I do not think that this data is simply relying on people filling in cards in boxes and mailing them in.

Thank you for posting the study.

There is nothing in this report except speculation that can be used to determine the level of campaigns. That is not even addressed. It can be vaguely extropolated from the session lengths, but there is no where near enough information with that to come up with any claim that would support campaigns did not go past level 12 with any reliability. It can't be used as reliable evidence in the question of levels of campaigns.

The survey had a purpose, determining the level of play was not it.

 

[Mishihari Lord]

We should not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Biased data is not completely useless. We need to be aware of the bias and avoid extrapolation to the greater population. We make due with the best data we have available. Sometimes the resources just are not available to conduct the simple random sample study we would prefer in a perfect world. That does not mean we should just throw our hands up and not try to collect the best data we can within our limited resources.

THANK YOU! This should be stickied in a locked thread at the top of the forums. It's impossible to have a reasonable discussion about gamer preferences when folks insist on throwing out data they don't agree with because the research methodology isn't perfect. No market research is perfect, everything has bias. Be aware of the biases and imperfections, but even with these you can still learn a lot from imperfect data. As a business manager, I have to make decisions all of the time based on imperfect data - you just have to do the best you can. Decisions involving quite a lot of money are made every day with less certain data than some cited in this thread.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The fact of the matter is, none of us have any accurate information that they can use to justify the argument so we are left looking straight at the book, which indicates that the game goes to 20 and beyond. This in turn makes my original statement stand because having access to 7th, 8th, and 9th level spells trump any bonus the elf is going to give.

Not really. Again, just because you SAY some people played very high level play doesn't make it so. No doubt SOME people did, but the VAST majority of all characters ever run are low level PCs for which level caps would never ever matter. That seems quite in keeping with my experience. I'm relatively sure that I've run on the order of 300 different characters at least once. I'd estimate 75% of them probably got abandoned after a couple sessions, maybe 20% got played into mid levels, maybe 5% got to name level, AFAIK only 3 characters ever exceeded 12th level out of all of those. The other say 70 PCs that really got played a significant amount, more than say 5 times, died somewhere at lower levels or campaigns ended between 7th and 9th level in a huge number of cases. To be perfectly honest Dancy's stats make great sense to me. 20 sessions is barely enough to get to name level, if that. Heck, its probably about enough to get to 7th level maybe, and pre-3e advancement slowed down a LOT after that. It was the few campaigns, really just a handful that went 1 or 2 years or more that produced those few high level PCs.

I know when I created a character the level limits never really entered my mind as an issue. I knew about them, but I also knew they probably wouldn't matter and in any case even if I got to 9th and topped out so what? Beyond that the progression is much flatter anyway, and you can still get loot, which TBH is the most important think at higher levels anyway. A good staff or a kick assed sword is worth more than several levels of post-name-level advancement.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

THANK YOU! This should be stickied in a locked thread at the top of the forums. It's impossible to have a reasonable discussion about gamer preferences when folks insist on throwing out data they don't agree with because the research methodology isn't perfect. No market research is perfect, everything has bias. Be aware of the biases and imperfections, but even with these you can still learn a lot from imperfect data. As a business manager, I have to make decisions all of the time based on imperfect data - you just have to do the best you can. Decisions involving issues quite a lot of money are made every day with less certain data than some cited in this thread.

Honestly though: I had a job number-crunching for a fairly sophisticated market research firm, and I hold a math degree. Mostly people oversell this "you can't tell anything from the data, its all just lying statistics/bad sampling/etc" meme. The fact is that the sample sigma will approach the population sigma for a sample size N of 10 (assuming that the population size is MUCH larger than N). Surveying a representative handful of gamers (several hundred) should, with reasonably competent study implementation, give you a quite good idea of what the population is like. Exactly HOW good? That depends to some extent on the nature of the population and how heterogeneous it is, how carefully the sample's biases are understood and corrected for, etc. I'd note that there are perfectly reasonable ways to TEST how well a sample matches a population as well, internal sub-sampling analysis, additional test samples, etc. The truth is marketing organizations largely can't exist if they can't analyze their effectiveness. While its a wonderful theory to just call any marketing study you don't like 'incompetent' the truth is that's not usually the case. The techniques are quite well-understood at this point, and these groups will almost certainly have a statistician on staff who can do the required analysis and design studies properly.

 

[pemerton]

No market research is perfect, everything has bias. Be aware of the biases and imperfections, but even with these you can still learn a lot from imperfect data. As a business manager, I have to make decisions all of the time based on imperfect data - you just have to do the best you can. Decisions involving issues quite a lot of money are made every day with less certain data than some cited in this thread.

The truth is marketing organizations largely can't exist if they can't analyze their effectiveness. While its a wonderful theory to just call any marketing study you don't like 'incompetent' the truth is that's not usually the case. The techniques are quite well-understood at this point, and these groups will almost certainly have a statistician on staff who can do the required analysis and design studies properly.

Thank you both.

I am not a business manager, nor an academic, but the idea that WotC's survey data is worthless is one I can't take seriously. The idea that the gaming practices might be radically different from what their data suggest I find pretty unlikely. The idea that any significant number of those 20-session campaigns started at a level much above 3rd I also find pretty doubtful, but that last point is my own intuition and not itself inherent in the example.