D&D (2024) GenCon 2023 - D&D Rules Revision panel

[Incenjucar]

Wheres the third option, where you keep trying to kill the conversation?

In your head, and only there.

 

[MockingBird]

My pwrsonal experience is that only DMs ever buy any books, ever.

My experience as well. Back in college I was able to recruit some people who had interest in playing. Some had played previously, some brand new. They were all down to game, but if it was going to happen I needed to get the books.

 

[Incenjucar]

My experience as well. Back in college I was able to recruit some people who had interest in playing. Some had played previously, some brand new. They were all down to game, but if it was going to happen I needed to get the books.

I too have seen a huge jump in investment between DMs and players, though players at least typically get the basic books. I think it goes both ways to some degree, where the people the most fascinated by the books are also more likely to eventually want to DM with them.

 

[Parmandur]

My experience as well. Back in college I was able to recruit some people who had interest in playing. Some had played previously, some brand new. They were all down to game, but if it was going to happen I needed to get the books.

Even when a non-DM buys books (rarely), that's the first step towards that person becoming a DM among my friend circles. People who never get around to DMing (moat) will just borrow books from the DMs in the group.

 

[Nikosandros]

Even when a non-DM buys books (rarely), that's the first step towards that person becoming a DM among my friend circles. People who never get around to DMing (moat) will just borrow books from the DMs in the group.

In my group all the players bought the PHB. A couple bought Xanathar.

 

[Stalker0]

Yeah, I mean, I ultimately assume that they must know something that I don't know, but I don't really believe it on any deeper level. I've certainly seen too much about how the sausage is made when it comes to (most) companies to believe that anyone really knows what they're doing.

My issue is that in debates like these we all start arguing like we are experts, as if we all have degrees in data science and know the "real way" to generate survey data.

But we don't, and so we are just compounding bad facts with even more "bad facts".

 

[Ashrym]

I've had an employee ask me to "rate them" on a 1-10 scale, who've told me that if they don't get AT LEAST 8's, then they will get in trouble with their boss. SIX should me "did well". 10 should be "I can't imagine how anyone could possibly do better" (a scenario that I don't think even exists).

That sounds like a customer service survey. Employees aren't supposed to try and influence the rating in that way and depending on the industry they are likely to get into more trouble for that than they are to get a lower score because the results are sometimes used to determine reward incentives for that employee.

The way those surveys work is 2 questions are used to quantify satisfaction (with a formula beyond just high ratings) and loyalty then indexed against the industry standard and/or business history.

IME, the capability of management to cover employees who "get in trouble with the boss" is restricted to a history of actual low scores as a potential issue because management only has so much time in the day to manage employees. Response from the management side is going to vary depending on the industry, survey capture rate, and size of the business. That employee may have just been fishing for a good score or there may have been something else going on.

That was my first impression after you made the comment, anyway. This next part isn't you in particular or something I'm saying you're doing. It's a general comment.

My advice is to always fill out the surveys to the best of our knowledge. Trying to manipulate the data typically doesn't work because of the law of large numbers applying to the statistics and it's not likely that a small representation can skew the overall results, but if a person can convince a large enough representation to the same attempts as manipulating the results that skew would give incorrect data for the people interpreting the results. Skewed data to get what we want as individuals doesn't create a stronger product for everyone in general.

Filling out the numbers as we see them and writing constructive feedback with recommendations then allowing the process to complete on the designer's end is the best approach. It might not give us our individual wants but it does work for a better over-all product for the most people.

I too have seen a huge jump in investment between DMs and players, though players at least typically get the basic books. I think it goes both ways to some degree, where the people the most fascinated by the books are also more likely to eventually want to DM with them.

That's definitely my experience too. It's the DM's who spend the money on the products. In my games there's often 2 or 3 PHB's being shared around but it's the DM's and people who eventually become DM's who spend the money on more products.

 

[Parmandur]

In my group all the players bought the PHB. A couple bought Xanathar.

Yeah, I can believe that's possible. Just haven't seen it. Thr sales numbers we saw a couple weeks ago suggest a 2:1 ration of PHB to DMG sales, which suggests an aggregate median of 2 PHBs per table.

 

[Clint_L]

... I admit that I'm not trained in survey-design, but seeing as I don't feel like I can use their system to tell them what I think (and it seems likely to me that I'm not the only one) then I don't know how they can get any useful data out of it. In particular when you have examples like them wanting to know if we like Wildshaping Templates or not and the Wildshaping Template examples they gave were so terrible. How can they tell if any sort of majority doesn't like templates, or doesn't like THOSE templates? I simply can't imagine.

I can imagine. Because they are reading a lot of written feedback - this forum is not even a rounding error on the amount of written feedback they are getting, especially on contentious issues. And they are running focus groups, doing their own playtests, etc. This forum is mostly just a small group (including me) preaching to the choir. They are getting far more diverse perspectives.

I gave very specific feedback on templates: I hate them, and I explained why at length. I made it very clear that for me it wasn't those particular templates, it's the whole template approach, which I think homogenizes the key feature of being a druid and replaces fun with efficiency.

 

[Clint_L]

agreed


it is, but their track record for this is pretty poor


I go with ‘the past is present’ and my own experience, and that means it still is very poor

Keep in mind that they are not simply asking ‘how do you like this’, that would be trivial. They are trying to figure out ‘what do you like better and why? how do you want it to change so it is ‘good’? These are much harder to glean

How do you measure "poor," as far as WotC's track record of gauging customer satisfaction? 5e has been immensely successful, with outstanding sales growth, so this in itself suggests that they have done a good job of gauging consumer sentiment.

I agree that it is hard to glean how changes will be received. Immensely hard - people are incredibly varied and not always rational, as any economist will tell you. So you are going to have hits and misses, and at best can hope that the hits outweigh those misses. Unfortunately, as individuals we tend to remember failures more than successes and tend to overweigh our own emotional responses, but that is why you hire experts to analyze the data more objectively.

There is no objective right or wrong when it comes to measuring customer satisfaction, so you have to decide what success or failure means in context. One way of looking at the current proposals is that WotC is trying to minimize the number of folks who strongly dislike a particular proposal, and it seems like they see 30% disapproval as an acceptable starting place, and 20% disapproval as a strong result. Meaning that even their best ideas will leave 1 in 5 folks disappointed. I very much doubt that they invented these thresholds; they are no doubt working with industry professionals who have worked with many different companies and products and have a good benchmark for understanding how product appeal is reflected in consumer feedback.