Soliciting feedback from your players.

[MadScientist]

Hey all. I've recently started a new campaign and just finished the second session. IMO the sessions so far have been okay, but certainly not great. I would like to send out a little questionaire to my players to find out, how they have veiwed the sessions so far and find out what they liked most, disliked most, how they think the adventures could be improved etc.

Since there are alot of experienced DMs on the board I wanted to hear from some that have tried this type of thing before. Was the feedback generally useful? Did you find that certian types of questions were better at generating valuable feedback than others? Any advice in general on getting good player feedback?

I know that this type of thing has been discussed before the boards before (it is why I thought to ask ) So if you have links to older threads that would be cool too. Thanx.

 

[Piratecat]

All the information you'll need is in this thread!

 

[MadScientist]

Thanx a bunch PC! A reply at an ungodly hour and everything.

 

[Piratecat]

My pleasure; glad to help!

 

[Drawmack]

I do two very simple things that help immensly.

1) At the end of the session I get high points/low points while I'm calculating experience (don't tell my players that xp is already calculated as I use an excel spreadsheet to keep a running total while we play. and I'm actually taking notes on what they say.)

2) The do the recap of the previous session at the begining of the next session. If they remembered it for a week it was probably really cool or totally bogus and they'll let you know which.

 

[Rune]

At the end of every session, I have the players each write a couple of sentences (or even just phrases) telling me what I did right during the games and what could have been better and how. The good. The bad. The ugly.

The only problem I run into is a tendency for the players to be too soft on me and try not to hurt my feelings.

Although there was that one session my brother wrote (and I'm censoring it, here) "OH MY [frikkin] GOD, YOU CRACKHEAD!"

It was...uh...an interesting session.